This story sees the rulers of Peladon, a backward and unimportant planet, contemplating whether to join “the Galactic Federation”.

After much debate in Parliament and the media, Britain joined the EEC (which evolved into the European Union) when Ted Heath signed the Treaty of Accession on the 22nd of January 1972. Just seven days later, The Curse of Peladon began broadcasting. Given the sheer temporal proximity, the story must be seen as a meditation on this real-world issue.

Moreover, since a great percentage of the British public opposed joining the EEC, it is an attempt by educated liberals to persuade them. But, as is often the case with allegorical drama, the persuasion is done dishonestly. The fictional setting allows for key facts to be twisted, replaced or omitted altogether, and thus, a fallacious argument can be constructed.

Coming from the mind of a writer, any story is bound to have “a perspective”. That is fine. I have no objection to the storyteller’s concerns being apparent in the stories he tells; drama would be very dull if it had to be strictly impartial on everything. However, there are two caveats. I would prefer if the BBC employed storytellers with a range of perspectives, not just liberals! Doctor Who viewers never got a story which showed “the other side” of this issue.

The second caveat is that a story should make some attempt at even-handedness, especially when it is for the general public and even more so when large numbers of children will be watching. The Curse of Peladon is certainly not even-handed. While purportedly a meditation on cooperation and federation, it ends up being a full-throated defence.

It is also not honest or fair, since Peladon is nothing like Britain, differing from it in very relevant ways. Whatever the country, any fair treatment would take its peculiarities into account. Instead, Britain is distorted out of recognition in The Curse of Peladon. This makes the treatment of the issue completely invalid. Just as the barbarian has to be elevated so that colonising him seems bad, a great country has to be diminished so that federating it seems good.

Well within living memory in 1972, Britain had been the world superpower. Thus, when its avatar here is a “somewhat primitive planet” which is lucky to be offered a chance by more advanced planets, the narrative is wildly off-the-mark. Britain was not in any way primitive compared to the other countries in the EEC; indeed it was as advanced as any of them, merely facing economic problems.

Then there is the character of the EEC itself, separate from its “member states”. The Galactic Federation is described exactly as the EEC (and EU) describes itself: a force for good, rationality, progress, efficiency, and benign cooperation. But what if the EEC is actually willing to destroy its “member states” in pursuit of a technocratic dream? That isn’t mentioned.

However, opposition to joining the Federation is mentioned, and linked explicitly with superstition and fear.

Hepesh, the High Priest of Peladon, is the ultra conservative uncle of its youthful, progressive king. He is desperate to dissuade the king from taking Peladon into the Federation.

Hepesh worships an ancient god, Aggedor, which of course turns out to be a false god. Moreover, Hepesh is engineering murders (including of his own brother) in order to frighten the king into keeping Peladon independent.

I can imagine a defender of this story saying that it isn’t biased, because the idea of national independence is shown on-screen, embodied in the character of Hepesh. But that is exactly the problem. When you have made the only visible representative of an idea also a liar, a superstitious and fear-ridden fool, a corrupt schemer, a murderer and a fratricide… it is rather difficult for the audience to take his worldview seriously. You have primed them to dismiss any ideas he espouses. Indeed, the more vehemently he holds a belief, the more instinctively the audience will reject it.

As a side-note, this story also has the reappearance of a species from Doctor Who’s past.

When last seen, the Ice Warriors were a war-like and xenophobic species. Now, though, they have become enlightened. As emissaries of the Federation, they proclaim:

We were once [war-like], but now we reject violence - except in self-defence.

Ah yes, “muscular liberalism” like we would later see in Star Trek, when Picard fought the Borg.

When asked why their ambassador is defended by an armed guard, they explain:

Unfortunately, in order to maintain peace, it is necessary to survive.

It sounds like a CNN anchor: “Though we abhor imperialism, we must have the ability to defend our way of life, our rules-based order, our democracy.”

The implied argument is: if even a race as aggressive and jingoistic as the Ice Warriors can become enlightened, surely we Brits can, too? In this context, national pride is implicitly equated with being aggressive and jingoistic.

In a conversation with the Doctor during a desperate moment, Hepesh finally “opens up” about why he opposes Peladon joining the Federation:

Because I’m afraid.

The Doctor - standing in for the liberal writer and the (presumed) liberal viewer - attempts to persuade:

Afraid of what? The Federation is your safeguard.

This is the benign idea of globalism and federalism: it means that each country will have a “safety net”. But Hepesh believes that is a trick:

That is not true. I know the Federation’s real intent.

The Doctor is sure:

The Federation’s real intent is to help you!

But Hepesh knows:

No. They’ll exploit us for our minerals, enslave us with their machines, corrupt us with their technology. The face of Peladon will be changed, the past swept away, and everything that I know and value will have gone.

Peladon has the vulnerabilities of an African country (“exploit us for our minerals”), not a highly advanced First World nation, but let’s overlook that and consider the second half of his statement, which the story presents as reactionary and blinkered. I would say every word of it has been vindicated by Britain’s experience of EU membership and globalism in general. Of course, this relates not just to the EU but the WHO, the WEF, the UN, and so on. Even now, post-Brexit, these bodies have learned nothing and remain absolutely determined to destroy whatever they can of every ancient culture under their control.

The Doctor tries to reassure him:

The progress that they offer isn’t like that.

Oh, but it is. And Hepesh is brave, strengthened by his faith in his people and homeland:

I would rather be a cave-dweller and free.

You might say that, in 2016, after 45 years in the EU, the British public agreed with Hepesh. But of course, we were never going to be cave-dwellers, and the public knew that in 1972.

This possibility of impoverishment, like so much of the allegory in this story, depends on Britain being depicted as a primitive planet that could only gain by federating. It would be more accurate - and also more patriotic - if Peladon had been an advanced planet that could only lose by federating.

Instead, the desire to love and value and preserve your homeland, as Hepesh does, is presented as fearful, superstitious and backward-looking.

As Hepesh dies, he says:

I wanted to save our world, to preserve the old ways. Perhaps I was wrong. I hope so. The future you set so much store by, is yours now.

In the real world, that future didn’t last long, and in its short life it destroyed Europe. What we found was that the Federation did indeed exist to dominate, browbeat, threaten, weaken, homogenise, castrate and annihilate, to whatever extent it could, every “member state” that submitted to it. The very goal of the project, from the outset, was global homogeneity and centralised control, based on technocratic hubris, loathing of tradition and contempt for people in general.

It is exactly as Hepesh said. A liberal writer unwittingly gave his “superstitious fool” more wisdom than everyone else.

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We should be honest about the scope of what is ahead for Restore Britain. I will speak about three phases: expansion, electioneering and governing.

Expansion

This is a critical phase because the people in an organisation define what the organisation ends up being, how it will perform, what strengths and vulnerabilities it will have, and what daily life within it will be like.

Expansion means lots of new activists. Since this is politics, and politics of a certain pitch, some of those who volunteer their time will be misfits, malcontents, sociopaths, the types who love to fall out with people and actively look for ways to create conflict - just an all-round nightmare. Once they’re in, you can’t stop them doing damage because they always find ways around rules. You can only remove them. It is wise to do so promptly.

A separate category, ideological spergs, can be extremely useful but must be kept in a box. They are great at research, number crunching, strategising, etc. Don’t give them any social responsibilities or prominence.

Expansion will also mean bringing professional advisers onboard. That is a risk, especially because they will not be familiar with the sort of political party RB needs to be, since none has existed before. They should be chosen carefully. Not only should they be competent and trustworthy, they should have the imagination needed to understand the project.

Another risk is non-natives joining. Some will be well-meaning, some entirely self-interested, but all will weaken the resolve and ability of RB to do what needs to be done. Hold the line. Remember that the native people of Britain are with you, no matter how little diversity you have in the shop window.

Don’t accept Zionist funders. This is the death knell for any pro-European organisation. It has happened time after time, and RB would be no different. The same goes for figures, such as Douglas Murray, who would force RB down that path. Few things could be more devastating to a party that purports to be devoted to improving Britain and helping the British people. It is a key aspect of the farce of British politics that every party has a “Friends of Israel” organisation. If RB does this, people will see the party, rightly or not, as a sham owned and controlled by foreign interests and the organic support, the base, the energy, will dry up overnight.

Then you have to worry about infiltrators - spies from the media, Hope Not Hate, etc. - who will seek to get your people on tape saying something inadvisable. Everyone should bear this in mind and not say anything in private that they wouldn’t say on TV. State infiltration will likely come in the form of honeypots, because there is no surer way to corrupt young men than with young women. Insulate yourselves from scandal however you can. Finances, relationships, etc.

Then there are the drama merchants, the martyrs and exhibitionists who thrive on wild antics that get attention, creating fodder for their socials and for the progressive media, but generally bring down the tone and drive away sensible people.

What you need is straightforward, well-adjusted professional types, preferably with unblemished personal lives, the types of people who solve problems rather than create new ones.

Expansion is an extremely tricky business because basically every new person is a risk. Mistakes will be made. The whole organisation will need to be adept at recovering from these and continually moving forwards. However, vetting and monitoring new people will be essential to building a stable working environment.

I can’t emphasise enough that the organisation will need to be robust, because the opposition it is going to face will be historic. (Were the country’s situation not so drastic, I would even suggest delaying an electoral run until a solid base has been established.) I also can’t emphasise enough how being robust depends on the types of people brought onboard. An organisation is the people in it.

Loyalty (“he agrees with us”) should count for infinitely more than merit (“he’s clever/qualified”). But, obviously, you ideally want both in every person you bring onboard. The establishment parties will always be able to attract qualified people; RB’s appeal will be strength and conviction, not slickness.

Electioneering

I think this will actually be a lot easier than the first phase, because the message is one that the British people will naturally be very amenable to. Finally having a party that represents them, comes across as genuine and simply speaks the truth will be a breath of fresh air. If RB don’t win a majority in the next election, they will in the one after that. Yes, it might be necessary for Britain to endure a farcical Reform/Conservative or an appalling Green/Labour government, but if RB hold the line and don’t cuck, victory will be assured after that. I would strongly advise against accepting a minority role in a coalition government. It worked out badly for the Lib Dems in 2010, and the establishment would make sure it worked out badly for RB.

I suspect that, in time, RB will transcend the left/right paradigm to some extent, but clearly for now it is squarely a right-wing party. For that reason, courting Green, Labour and LibDem voters is largely a waste of time. You will have more luck pulling (some of) them towards your position than slyly adapting it to please them. The realities of Britain today - corruption, globalism, corporatism, cost of living crisis, the failures of multiculturalism - are visible to everyone who is willing to see them, and I think a lot of young men who currently feel that the Green Party sympathises with them could be brought over on the same basis. A lot of people are not stridently left-wing, they just hate the status quo. But Tolkien would have hated it for the same reasons. Be Tolkien, not Thatcher.

When it comes to Conservative and Reform voters, your task is at once easier and harder. It is easier because these parties are obviously corrupt and incapable of rescuing the country. It is harder because a) a lot of people have invested great hope in Reform and b) conservative people tend to be very staid. RB will seem to them like an unknown quantity, and maybe too extreme. Do not over-play any cartoonish memeable “basedness”, no matter how funny it might be. The party’s communications can be slick and “cheeky” and poke fun at its rivals, but should never veer into the sort of vulgarity that can be used against it.

RB’s top weapon against Reform is the fact that Farage, now admitted publicly by the man himself, lied about Rupert Lowe in the hopes of getting him imprisoned and destroying his reputation. No sensible person should want a man who behaves like that in charge of the country. There is a danger of over-playing this card, but only if you fail to supplement it with other things - tangible policy, capable figures, clear direction, a clean image, a proper constitution. If you have those things sorted out, you can safely go hell-for-leather against Farage on this crucial matter of personal integrity. The emphasis should be not on Lowe’s misfortune or suffering, but on Farage’s duplicity and malice.

Boomers, like left-wingers, should not be placated, but rather invited to come to your position. Don’t waste time and energy trying to adapt the message for them, because as far as I can see, the message really isn’t for them. It is for the young who will need to deal with the Britain that is on the way.

Don’t over-play the Christian angle. It needlessly alienates many people who would naturally be your allies. I say this as someone who is dismayed whenever a church is converted into a mosque or a callcentre. Of course our Christian heritage matters (even to those of us who are not Christian) and of course it should be protected. But we are not starting from a point at which a majority of the population are practising Christians, and it would be wise to proceed with that in mind.

Don’t over-play the stuff about welfare scroungers. While there is undoubtedly a huge problem with multi-generational welfare dependency, there is also the fact that a lot of jobs simply are disappearing due to automation, AI, off-shoring and low-wage immigration. This issue particularly affects young men, who would otherwise be drawn to RB, and have been systematically cut out of employment, training, promotion, bursaries, etc. and really left on the scrap heap. It’s also the case (I believe) that Thatcherite insistence that people “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” has led to dead-end communities up and down the country, when investment and sympathy would have been a more intelligent approach for families that, until then, wouldn’t have dreamt of going on welfare but found themselves with little option. All of these factors explain a large part of Zack Polanski’s appeal, and rather than refute or ignore this, I would suggest RB co-opt it. Make it positive; instead of demonising “the indolent”, speak of those who are “neglecting their potential”. You might even call them “the neglected”.

No token BAME candidates. This is a cheap tactic that insults everyone and demoralises the young who are “over” such things. They are worried about being strangers in their country; they don’t care whether you’re “down with the Sikhs” or not.

Having good people, who seem capable of doing the monumental work the party seeks to do in government, will be essential during the electioneering phase. People want to see that RB is a serious party, genuinely preparing to do what it has pledged.

Governing

Third will be actually being in government and saving the country. This might involve:

• gutting and re-staffing the civil service (otherwise it will thwart you at every turn and get you tied up with a million kinds of nonsense)

• reforming the judiciary to disbar activist judges. This is not just for criminal reform but to prevent them thwarting governmental action

• leaving the ECHR

• legally abolishing DEI

• reforming the entire governmental apparatus (including banning Hope Not Hate)

• prosecuting everyone involved in the Pakistani rape gangs and the facilitating thereof

• bringing industry and food production home to revitalise the economy

• reforming the tax system to incentivise native family formation and increase birth rates

• slashing the insane, suicidal wokery in education

• reinventing formal education for the 21st Century

• abolishing or drastically reforming the BBC. Personally I favour reforming it and consider promising to abolish it a cultural and electoral strategic mistake, but I will write about that separately

• remigration (eg. my 25-point blueprint)

Once in government, RB will be surrounded by traitors and “establishment creatures”. Get rid of them as quickly as possible so that the actual work can proceed unhindered. Clear them out.

General

Messaging should be simple and harmonised. Essays are for critics and academics. You are now in the role of political warriors. Politics masquerades as a debate club but is actually a gladiatorial battle. Do not think that reasoning with your enemies will ever placate them. Your job is to ensure that you don’t get stuck in the weeds and that they do.

Attack is the best form of defence. Always be on the attack. Do not justify to the enemy unless it is strategically useful for you.

Keep the weirdos and fatties out - optics matter. RB people should look good and sound good. The fewer Ts that are dropped, the better; leave the nihilism to the Greens.

Resist the temptation to disavow your radical supporters. Use Cato’s tactics. Radicals can be tactless but their energy is priceless. Disavow them only when absolutely necessary.

I realise there will be no shortage of people offering RB advice. White Papers Policy Institute have some ideas. So does Michael Reiners. WorldByWolf wrote a good tweet. Academic Agent has some ideas of the dangers you face and offers good advice. But advice can be suffocating. A lot of what you need to do will be simple common sense.

Sometimes there will be difficulties, both practical and psychological. Have confidantes you can trust completely, and use them when you need to.

In closing

Britain has been in need of revival for a hundred years now. We have watched our Victorian grandeur fade, sometimes we have watched governments actively destroy it, and today we watch as its remnants are mocked, or re-purposed for foreigners who wear our heritage as a skin-suit. Cold Thatcherite monetarism didn’t reverse any of this. Neither did Blairite globalism. Neither will autistic libertarianism.

What is needed is new thinking, the courage and imagination to restore a great country and revitalise a great people. We do not need a return to the 1980s or the 1990s or even the 1890s, but a spring forward to something new and innovative, something that respects our deep past and replenishes it, and which nourishes us as a people - because that is what we are.

A lot of the structures of the 20th Century, and the terrible first quarter of the 21st, will need to be dismantled. A lot of people will need to be re-homed where they belong so that we have our country again and can begin the long process of healing, of recovering our peoplehood.

These are uncharted waters. The state clearly needs rolled back, but at the same time, relying on the free market will not be enough, because its interests are most fully served by destroying peoples and countries.

Nothing - no principle, value, law or institution - is more important than our future.

What the British need now is a government that is not in hock to any ideology of the past, and which has the courage and imagination to conceive of a future for us - for only us.

The premise is typically outlandish for an Anderson show: a 9 year-old boy is sent off alone on extremely dangerous missions with his brain implanted with memories and skills from numerous experts using a machine invented by his adoptive father. Yes, his father literally brainwashes him at the start of each episode before sending him off to defeat gangsters, terrorists and dictators. It wouldn’t be made today.

I don’t like Anderson’s other shows, but I love Joe 90. The reason isn’t just that I was introduced to it at a young age (my grandparents bought us a video of it, quite randomly I think); having had that entrée I could easily have “got into” the other shows, but I never did. Nor is it because by this time they had worked out how to have the heads be in proportion to the bodies, though that certainly helps. Rather, it’s because Joe 90 has a very small cast of characters, and each one is distinct and has clear relationships with the others. This might seem a ridiculous thing to praise, but the fact is, Anderson dropped the ball on this with all of his previous shows. They tend to have many “duplicate” characters - all the Tracey brothers in Thunderbirds, all the agents and all the “angels” in Captain Scarlet - which I find dizzying and confusing.

In Joe 90, there are just four people: Joe, his adoptive father Professor McClaine, his friend Sam Loover, and his boss Shane Weston. Thus, the show has an intimacy and calmness to it, and there is a camaraderie between the four which really “chimes”.

The cosiness is aided by the main setting, the house where Joe and his father live. It is an archetypal English cottage, rendered in adorable miniature:

This is countered by the steely modernism of Weston’s office, where business is often discussed:

Weston and Loover are directors at WIN - the World Intelligence Organisation. Prof. McClaine is an associate of the same, and young Joe becomes its “most special agent”.

What we have here is White men being competent, brave and honest. Each man has a role to play in the world, and he does his duty. These men have emotions, but they keep them under control. They are upset only by things that happen, not by ideas or personal demons. In the course of growing up or professional training, demons have either been defeated or consigned to a locked box so that they cannot prevent the man from doing well in life and helping the people around him.

On occasion, such as in the episode Talkdown, we encounter a man who has not defeated his demons, but this is not seen as a terrible mark against him, just as a burden that he must be helped to overcome so that he can do good in the world.

This is an extremely wholesome show. The moral lessons are not hammered home, but they are present in the actions and attitudes of the characters.

In this future (around 2012) the Cold War is long over and Russia is an ally of the West. But outside the West there is barbarism and dictatorship, poverty and superstition. WIN’s job is to intervene in these foreign lands to keep them relatively peaceful and honest - and to prevent these dusky scoundrels from making nasty little attacks on the West, which is idyllic.

21st Century Britain is depicted as a haven of peace, civilisation, friendliness, and good taste. Its people (entirely White) are helpful, polite and civic-minded. Things are looked after. Things are done properly. Yes, in the far-flung corners of the world there is tyranny and dysfunction and corruption, but here in Europe and the Anglosphere, we have a good way of life.

It being Britain, class is part of this formula. Everyone knows his place and is comfortable with it. But also, you occasionally see an educated person with a broad regional accent, indicating that, in this perfect future Britain, a talented man is enabled to thrive no matter his origins. But also, he knows how to thrive: it means embodying high culture, not gorging on vulgar trinkets.

As for Britain geopolitically, its Empire has clearly dissolved and it is subservient to America (as indicated by WIN being led by Americans) but it remains important, influential and well-respected on the global stage. Internally, this future Britain is a hive of shopkeepers, farm workers, small businessmen, diligent scholars and inventive scientists.

This is Britain as a thoughtful 1960s conservative would hope it would become in the next 50 years: a hi-tech post-industrial country, proud of its past but looking to the future; a land where the rural idyll has been recovered, but without sacrificing the gifts of science. As Prof. McClaine says:

That’s the way we like it, Sam - a combination of the old and the new.

All of the music - theme tune and scoring - is by Anderson’s regular composer Barry Gray. What a talent! He contributes a key ingredient without which the show just wouldn’t be the same, setting the tone right from the Century 21 sting that opens each episode.

Shot gleamingly on 35mm film, the show was rescanned by Network for Blu-ray. I haven’t gone for that because I don’t really care for high-definition, and also… I’m still chuffed with the fact that I got the DVD boxset for the ridiculous price of £10 in an HMV sale, back in 2005.

The VHS my grandparents bought had the slogan:

Daredevil excitement every boy dreams about!

And it is. If you have a son, and he is young enough not to have been spoiled by modern CGI, show him Joe 90.

My recommendations

This is superfluous because there aren’t really any bad episodes. However, for the sake of it…

Most Special Agent
This is the opener, which establishes the premise and is thus “necessary viewing”. Aside from that, it has an impressive destruction sequence where a military base is levelled, and also an exciting sequence at the start demonstrating Prof. McClaine’s flying car (note the wonderful shot of the wheel touching down on tarmac).

Arctic Adventure

I absolutely love this evocation of the Arctic - some little piece of water, bounded by ice floes, with a vertical ice sheet as a backdrop. It is all so simple, but beautifully done. This is the kind of thing you get aplenty in the show. Of course it doesn’t look realistic, but why would you want it to?

Breakout
This is a lovely (but surprisingly violent) episode set in Canada. What’s interesting, viewing it today, is that Canada is depicted as having a distinct culture of its own, and it is recognisably Anglo. This unique culture, incidentally, allows for the appearance of a charming log cabin set:

Note the Canadian official, dressed in national garb. Being an educated Anglo man, he is stoical, helpful, efficient, well-informed, and not corrupt.

Project 90
This is an exceptional episode. Every aspect of it is better “than it needs to be”. It’s as if everyone involved is going the extra mile - not least Barry Gray whose score here is outstanding. On the visual side, I love the rendition of the Alps, especially at twilight. Things this beautiful don’t need to exist.

The Professional
This episode is very tense and culminates with an escape sequence that is absolutely thrilling, and very technically impressive. I remember the first time I watched it, the climactic shot amazed me.

Colonel McClaine
Another gripping episode, this sees Joe tasked with transporting highly explosive material across a rocky terrain. Very tense indeed! Also lovely model landscapes and cute chunky vehicles.

Episodes in strange locations

Child of the Sun God - the Amazon
Most Special Astronaut - space!

Touching episodes

Hi-Jacked
Relative Danger
Three’s A Crowd

Episodes with hilarious racial stereotypes

Using stereotypes for incidental characters is a thing done in all dramas, even today, for speed and convenience - but it’s notable here because of the national/racial aspect. This was a time when it was okay for Westerners to engage in “othering” - ie. to find something exotic. That was okay, because we were allowed to have our own perspective. In some episodes these stereotypes are especially prominent:

Big Fish (South Americans)
Child of the Sun God (Amazon tribes)
King for a Day (Arabs)

“Oddball” episodes

See You Down There
Lone-Handed 90
The Race

Episodes with female characters

Women cameo here and there, but only two episodes have a key female character, and there is only one recurring (Mrs Harris, the McClaines’ housekeeper).

Double Agent - Mrs Harris
Arctic Adventure - Mrs Harris
The Birthday - Mrs Harris
Three’s a Crowd - Angela Davies and Mrs Harris
Viva Cordova - Dorina Cordova

What I would have liked

More of it! The formula just works so well, it seems criminal that a second season wasn’t commissioned. I’m sure it would have been every bit as charming and adorable as the first. Unfortunately, by 1968 the spy/espionage genre was going out of fashion, and Joe 90 was too different from its Anderson predecessors to capitalise on their popularity, so one season is all that was ever made.

After this Gerry Anderson made only one more Supermarionation series (The Secret Service, which was axed halfway through production) and then he moved on to other things. Joe 90 was less popular than his earlier series but, for me, it represents the peak of his ingenious (and very British) experiment with the craft of storytelling. With Supermarionation, Anderson and his technicians created something both unique and charming, and I believe Joe 90 is the best of it.

See my other TV guides here.

Blacks defend black murderer Karmelo Anthony. Moderate Muslims defend hardcore Muslims. Moderate leftists defend extreme leftist professors, writers, journalists, bomb-throwers, vandals, rioters, murderers and even terrorists.

Groups defend their radical fringes because they understand that the radical fringe is a bulwark against the enemy as well as a snow-plough clearing ground so that moderates can seize it. In addition, protecting the radicals is beneficial for reasons of morale, solidarity, not showing weakness or kowtowing to the enemy, etc. Therefore, every group prizes and protects its radicals.

Every group, that is, except White conservatives. They have a completely different strategy: disavow their radicals in order to gain their enemy’s approval, endorsement and friendship. This is the “people pleaser” approach, and indeed it does please people, because it puts the conservative in the losing position and enables his enemy to walk all over him. (Whenever one hears about a conservative politician who behind closed doors really enjoys getting whipped or otherwise humiliated, it seems to just make sense. It makes sense that Tim Stanley, who condemns right-wing radicals as Nazis, calls Kemi Badenoch “mummy”.)

The general public don’t want to follow radicals, because they associate being radical with being unstable, weak and unreasonable. They associate being moderate with being stable, strong and reasonable. But the key thing for them is not moderation - which is arbitrary and changes with the times - but the other attributes which are seen to go with it. They follow a moderate not because his ideas are bland, but because he is stable, strong and reasonable - “a safe pair of hands”. What they want is not just stability, but direction that will not swerve, not err or falter, not lead them off a cliff.

If you, as a politician, have radical ideas but nevertheless seem stable, strong and reasonable, the public will take you seriously. Of course, your enemy will do everything they can to obstruct this. They will first emphasise how radical your ideas are. If that fails, because the public have an appetite for change, they will switch to emphasising the other traits, trying to get the public to see you as unstable, weak and unreasonable. Funnily enough, “unstable and weak” can be achieved by getting you to disavow people on your own side. This could be because the individuals are corrupt, sleazy, under-qualified… or because they are more radical than you. If you disavow them, you admit that you had bad judgement in associating with them in the first place, and you show yourself as a people-pleaser who lacks the strength to stand by his principles and his allies. Your enemy wants you to disavow your radicals because doing so makes you look bad.

Far from winning you some peace, it disrupts things on your side. Now you have to deal with tumult in the ranks - your supporters feeling demoralised because you have started disavowing people, your allies unsure which of them will be next, everyone wondering whether some other leader would be less of a push-over.

Meantime, having done what your enemy demanded, of course you have not won his approval. He moves straight on to the next demand. The point of holding you responsible for the radicals is to persuade you to kill your own cause. You end up literally doing your enemy’s work for him.

We on the Right have to start playing to win, not seeking our enemy’s approval. There is no placating people who want you extinct. And be in no doubt, that is absolutely what they want. So, invoking your attachment to morality and principles, and using your decency against you, they invite you to castrate your own side.

Now, of course there are objectionable ideas and people on the Right (as anywhere). But you don’t need to attack them or counter-signal them. I won’t say categorically that you should have “no enemies to the right” - good luck with that! - but that you should avoid cutting them loose. Most of the time, you can simply ignore them.

A high tide raises all ships. Instead of attacking someone you deem not good enough, elevate someone you deem better.

Social class comes into this. On the Left, radicals tend to be middle-class, university-educated, idealistic, and full of self-regard. But on the Right, radicals tend to be working-class. This is a vector of attack. The enemy will point out how uncouth the radical is, how lacking in finesse and nuance, how uneducated, boorish or unpleasant he might be. All of those accusations might hold, and yet what the radical is saying remains true. And even if not, to be cold about this, the radical remains strategically useful.

Often, the purpose of the radical is not that he identifies end goals, but that he maximises the ground the enemy has to fight to secure. When you as a moderate concede ground from the off by disavowing your radicals, you reduce your enemy’s workload and reduce your possible win before the fight has even started! Now, you might think this helps you because it makes you appear reasonable, moral, etc. Your enemy doesn’t care about those things. If he cared about morality, he wouldn’t be demonising you for objecting to the Great Replacement or trying to secure the existence of your ethnic group.

Of course we should be reasonable and humane - but by the standards of the public, not of our enemies. If someone on your side is too extreme, maybe privately suggest they calm down their rhetoric so as not to give the enemy an easy win. However, never publicly disavow them except as an absolute last resort. Not only does it inflame egos leading to reprisals and resentment all round, more importantly it demoralises your side (yes, because people are human) and hands a win to your enemy by showing there is division on your side, something he can stoke and exploit.

Perhaps most fundamentally, a man who continually disavows his own side is seen by the public as a man who is weak and/or has bad judgement.

When one of your radicals (let’s call him “Ronald”) is in the news for some controversial thing he has said or done, you might not need to say anything at all. Simply letting your enemy bluster impotently might be the winning move for you. However, we should not imagine that we too enjoy the privileged position of the Left, namely that the media is on our side and won’t hold our radicals against us. Sometimes things do need to be addressed. Should you be quizzed about Ronald, here is how to respond:

Let’s go through each of these.

• “That’s not my position.”
  This differentiates you from Ronald without disavowing him, and also makes your enemy look incompetent. You could even mock your enemy for stupidly equating you (a moderate) with a radical and ask why he is wasting your time with this misapprehension.

• “He’s clearly reacting to a problem.”
  With these words, you re-cast Ronald’s “radical” position as understandable, emerging not from evil intent but from real life, but you do not justify it and thus create burdens for yourself. You are showing sympathy with Ronald (which emboldens your side) without embracing his position. The word “clearly” makes this seem obvious, common sense, and thus makes your enemy look stupid.

• “What about my position?”
  This switches you from defensive to pro-active. You are controlling the discourse instead of letting your enemy do so. (And after all, why is your enemy talking to you if not to learn your position…? Surely it’s not just a sly vindictive effort to get you to disavow a friend…?)

• “Yes, Ronald is my friend.”
  This puts you on top, seizing dominance from your enemy. It demonstrates spine, courage and solidarity (which will energise your side) and shows there is not a schism that your enemy can exploit. You have differentiated yourself from Ronald but are not pathetically terrified of being associated with him. This deprives your enemy of all options but to listen to your “more reasonable” position.

In short: undermine your enemy, not your radicals.

And you should always do this, even when you disagree with the radicals or think their ideas impractical. Why? Because the radicals are on your side while your enemy is not. They have your back, your enemy doesn’t. This really is zero-sum, friend/enemy, power politics, black/white, etc. There is unlikely to be much “reasonable common ground” you can find with an enemy whose worldview is diametrically and implacably opposed to your own.

And even if there is some common ground, be careful about pursuing it. The nuances of morality and truth are much less important than attaining power. Without power, you cannot advance morality or truth anyway.

Conservatives don’t think about “winning” battles with the Left, just “getting through” them. On the rare occasions they do think about winning, it is by showing themselves more adherent to leftist ideals than the Left.

This apologetic strategy has brought conservatives defeat in all cultural battles (and most economic battles) for a century now, but still they cling to it, constantly sure that despite its record of total failure, it will get them through the next battle, or the next one, or definitely the one after that…

Underlying this defeatist approach are two factors: the inherent passivity of the conservative psyche, and the supplanting long ago of traditionalism by progressivism. Ever since, the conservative has recognised that the Left really believe in progressivism while he merely “accepts” it. His lack of fealty to the orthodoxy is felt by the conservative (who yearns to conform) as his secret sin, which he constantly has to hide and deny. He feels always on the brink of being unmasked as a pretender.

All of this results in him believing that the Left have the moral high ground. Even if they are naive, clumsy or over-zealous, they are righteous - and that means conservatives must be wretched. The Left have a purity of intent, a simplicity of vision and a total absence of self-doubt that the conservative claims to find amusing but actually finds intimidating.

As a result, he approaches battles with the Left convinced both that he will be defeated, and that he probably should be. All he can do is delude himself about his situation and the nature of the Left, and in the meantime try to limit the damage they inflict upon him.

The battered wife desperately assures her husband, turning to her with clenched fists, that she ironed his suit this morning. She would like the bathroom refitted, the lounge painted a different colour… she would like all kinds of things, but from day to day she can think only of placating her husband’s wrath. As a result, she will never get anything she wants.

But at least the battered wife knows that the situation is wrong. The conservative isn’t sure. His natural want is to be at one with his society, in tune with its orthodoxy. But progressivism repels him so he cannot be at one with it, only cowed by it. For this subterfuge, he sees himself as a fraud. Meantime, he knows that the Left actually are at one with the orthodoxy. So what right does he have, really, to oppose them?

But much worse than the conservative, in his eyes, are the right-wingers who go further than him, who actually openly defy progressivism. At least he has the decency to pretend! These nutters explicitly reject the orthodoxy of their own society! They threaten to upset everything! And worse still, the Left associate him with these people!

This is why, time after time after time, the conservative rushes to disavow right-wing radicals. It is to protect normalcy (a normalcy that he hates) and to prevent people realising that he hates it, because then he would be revealed for what he is: a traitor to his own society.

Having disavowed the radicals, cut ties with them, barred them from his organisations and warned colleagues never to help them, the conservative feels a glimmer of security and hope. The work he has done for the Left, castrating his own side, surely proves that he is “reasonable” and “moderate”. They will surely appreciate this and reward him with respectability and “a seat at the table”. He will enjoy some influence on how society develops, and be able to help the Left identify and disavow their own radicals.

This never happens. The Left never give him any power whatsoever. They rarely even give him the treat of calling him “respectable”. He remains, perpetually, under suspicion and having to prove himself to them, his enemy, day after day.

But he keeps hoping, and he keeps disavowing people on his own side, and hoping, and disavowing, hoping, disavowing... That is his lot, dictated by his nature.

The conservative is the perfect manager of decline, because he is comfortable with decline. He sort of “believes” in it as the lesser of two evils. Action - rejecting the orthodoxy, snubbing the Left, taking his own side, supplanting progressivism and actually saving his society - would be, in his eyes, the behaviour of a mad radical.

The conservative’s two fundamental problems are:

• he is naturally passive and sleepy

• he doesn’t like the idea of changing society

As a result, he always defers to the Left when they want to change society. Averse to doctrine and hysteria, he defaults to being “the adult in the room”, the “reasonable” person who can “bring some much-needed common sense” to the lefties and “make sure they don’t go too far”. To that end, he seeks their trust and admiration. To that end, he sells out his own radicals. This strategy results in him neutering his own side and facilitating the Left in achieving exactly what they want to achieve. He isn’t strong enough to thwart the radical Left, but he has thwarted the radical Right who are strong enough to do so - or rather, would have been.

After a century of this process, we are living in Woke World, Globohomo World, Rainbow World, the Yookay. It is a nightmare and we are heading for permanent extinction. While it would be unfair to blame this on the Left as such - most of them are just useful idiots - this is the world they approve of. Even if it isn’t perfect for them, they will defend it to the death.

In this dire context, it is time for the conservative to wise up, man up, and either grow a spine or get out of the way. He must either make peace with right-wing radicals or give way to them entirely. The very future of the European race is at stake now. Milquetoast conservatism - in policies and attitudes - didn’t prevent this and will never fix it.

Gorton & Denton is a good election to have at this juncture, because it demonstrates the futility of Reform UK’s approach and the efficacy of the Green Party’s approach (identity politics). Nigel Farage has betrayed and condemned his base, Zack Polanski has wholeheartedly embraced his and said everything necessary to please them. Just in the last few days, Farage has warned of White ethno-nationalism while Polanski has advocated giving non-whites universal basic income, the vote, NHS treatment, and a house from the moment they arrive. The difference could not be starker.

Thus the by-election shows what, without Restore Britain, will be the future of this country: the natives progressively betrayed by the political class in favour of ethnic minorities, who will increasingly get what they want, whatever they want.

Between 2011 and 2021, the Muslim contingent in Gorton & Denton grew by a staggering 64% and the “none” (Atheist, likely progressive, ie. Green-voting) contingent by 44%, while the Christian contingent shrank by 21%:

The result is an electoral map that looks like this:

In a sane country, this would be two separate constituencies. In ours, we have to mix together (even while we, demonstrably, want to segregate) so this is just one constituency, which must be fought over by diametrically-opposed ethnic camps - in Denton, white native Brits, and in Gorton, the newcomers. In such a polarised environment where people are aware of the stakes and have the confidence to seize them, there can be no common ground, no “meeting in the middle”, no centrist swindle. Whichever camp is more united will win the entire constituency, and politically dominate the other camp.

In fact, if we look at the overall demographics in the constituency, it is 44% BAME. How long before it is 51%? At that point, no matter how united the native voters are, they will be easily defeatable by the newcomers, forever thereafter. (This by-election might actually have been the final chance for Gorton & Denton to get a result decided by native Brits. Unfortunately, half of them didn’t bother to vote, so disgusted are they by the options.)

Into this mix come two newly-prominent parties: Reform UK and the Green Party. They are supplanting the old dichotomy of Conservative/Labour, respectively. One of these parties, the Greens, recognises the reality that all politics is (at least in a multi-ethnic society) identity politics. The other, Reform UK, is desperate to maintain the civic nationalist delusion that we can all unite around principles and ideas. Here is how those attitudes worked out for them:

A very comfortable win for the Greens.

I will now go through the main parties and discuss how I think this by-election bodes for each of them.

The Conservative Party

Demonstrating the redundancy of his party, Daniel Hannan lamented:

Back in 2020, Hannan had the standard Conservative Party line on immigration: it is nothing to worry about because, in modern Western countries, immigrants tend to integrate (!). As examples, he preposterously cited himself, since he happened to be born abroad like George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling, and is therefore comparable with millions of Pakistanis moving to Britain. He also said that, among Western countries, there is especially little cause for concern in Britain because Britain has always had a civil, not ethnic, conception of nationhood. Bear in mind he said this after Harry from TrUK had spent several minutes giving him copious evidence to the contrary, which he chose to completely ignore.

For years, Hannan poured scorn on anyone sounding the alarm bells. But now the consequence is clear to him: balkanisation of Britain. If only smug, arrogant traitors like him had respected the electorate all these decades, instead of scoffing at them, demonising them and colluding in legislation that would silence and punish them, maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation now, and he wouldn’t be having to lament the electoral death of his party.

It is a death that is richly deserved and I can only hope is permanent. However, such is the Conservative Party’s treachery and contempt for its own base, it is currently trying to trick them that it has listened to them and transformed into what they want. This is the gambit involving Reform UK popping up as a hardline anti-immigration party which, rumour has it, is destined to merge back into the Conservative Party, thus granting it new life like a starving Dracula eagerly sinking his fangs into the neck of some fresh young dupe.

Despite its historic failure in this particular constituency, it has to be acknowledged that the Conservative Party might fare better elsewhere. The same is true of the Liberal Democrats.

(As a side-note, I was nauseated by this conservative podcast’s coverage of the by-election. Not once did they mention what it means for native Brits. But they were very concerned about how it might affect Britain’s Jews, the rights of Muslim women, and the Left’s hypocrisy. The woman also said at one point that Muslims are natural conservatives, being family-oriented, faith-oriented and flag-oriented. Then she lambasted “the right” for not doing more to appeal to Muslims. I swear that conservatives are competing to be ever farther behind the curve. The sheer staidness of their thinking, the total lack of moral courage, the abject refusal to fashion a worldview not ratified by their enemy… It is often said that progressives have no self-preservation instinct, but I think conservatives might be even worse. They are like chickens voting for Kaporos.)

The Labour Party

In fact the biggest loser in this election is not the Conservative Party but the Labour Party. Being an urban constituency with a high percentage of ethnic minorities, Gorton & Denton is ideal ground for Labour, and this is bolstered by history: it has been a safe Labour seat for nearly a century and, just eighteen months ago, Labour won over 50% of the vote there. Therefore its defeat by the Green Party is very significant. The Greens got 1.6 times as many votes as Labour, pushing it to a shocking third place.

It is possible that Labour, after kowtowing to Muslims for many years, even to the point of letting them rape our young girls, assumed it could count on the Muslim vote. Maybe this is why one Labour politician took the lesson that they need to be even more accommodating to migrants and even less sympathetic to concerns about immigration.

If this constituency is prime Labour territory (regarded as the sixth-safest Labour seat in the country), yet Labour came third, I think we can safely assume that they will fare even worse in constituencies that are less favourable. Whether due to supplanting by the Green Party, or rising White self-awareness driving people to Reform and Restore, I think the Labour Party is becoming, if not extinct, much less of an electoral force.

The Green Party

The relentlessly grotesque Zack Polanski seems to be working like clockwork at manipulating young, idealistic and female voters. He is a sort of Pied Piper, leading them to their doom with jollity and promises that seem almost deliberately outlandish. He has talked about legalising all drugs and making them available on the NHS. He has talked about UBI for every migrant upon arrival. He has talked about creating a borderless world. Whatever some tedious blue-haired imbecilette on a Post-Colonial Studies degree would dream up, Polanski has already thought of it.

As an ugly gay Jew, he must seem to young women like a harmless but deformed teddy-bear: they want to protect him from all the bullies who have it in for him. I saw the same syndrome with Obama and Trudeau, but with Polanski it is much more pronounced given his various attributes.

On the other hand, alongside the crazy leftism, he also acknowledges some realities and appears to sympathise with the young voter of today who hasn’t a hope of getting on the property ladder or saving any money after paying the exorbitant rents and bills of modern Britain. (I would urge Restore Britain to examine this aspect of his appeal.)

With all that said, this by-election is the first proper test of the Polanski-era Greens. The party has long enjoyed strongholds in Brighton and Bristol, and in 2024 gained seats in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire. But those are all affluent areas. It was a real gamble for the Greens to attempt their wishy-washy New Left message in a place like Gorton & Denton.

But, as we can see, it paid off. The party will now be greatly energised, basking in victory and already planning how to capitalise.

I think their victory happened for two main reasons: the sheer unpopularity of the Labour Party, and the rising self-determination (due to demographic predominance in certain areas) of Britain’s Muslims. They don’t yet have a viable party of their own (despite George Galloway’s best efforts) but for now, the Green Party will suffice. It promises them more, seems to worship them even more, than Labour did. The Green put out their campaign literature in Urdu and Bangla, demonstrating that this is their client group and they are its “bitch”.

I can’t help suspecting this is all being orchestrated from above. Shortly before the election, Polanski mocked native Brits concerned about demographic replacement. It feels to me as if he has been told by higher powers to be this cocky, this insulting to the British people, and he is delighting in doing so, knowing that he will get away with it. The whole thing feels manufactured.

But we shouldn’t discount the gentile element within the Green Party, the moralistic types who are obsessed with equality and in love with foreignness. There are countless British people like that today, including male ones, and the Green Party is welcoming them more explicitly than even New Labour used to. New Labour at least pretended to be a pragmatic party, not ideological. The Polanski-era Green Party is joyfully ideological. For the rest of us, woke might have been a terrible time, a bad joke and a total practical failure, but for its adherents, it was a glimpse of a wonderful future that they are now determined to bring forth.

The Green Party has long been a hugely (and laughably) White organisation, but clearly, it is now co-opting the ethnic vote. And after all, why should Labour have all the benefit of our dusky friends’ support, when the Green Party loves them even more?

It all flows together. The Green Party supplants Labour. Wokery becomes unapologetic, unremarkable, default. White identitarianism rises, making BAME voters even more paranoid (yet also even more triumphalist) than before. The Green Party courts their vote.

Interestingly, at least some Green Party supporters seem to be aware of the game they are playing, namely that demographics is destiny. One of them used ethnic data along with opinion polling to construct a map of likely voting in this by-election. He stressed that his map should be taken with a pinch of salt, but such a project would be completely pointless if ethnicity were not a strong indicator of political behaviour - which of course it is, as demonstrated by the fact that his map turned out to be very prescient. Of course he is only one man, but his project seemed to be welcomed without surprise by his Green colleagues. I think it is significant, in a party that will claim the Great Replacement is nothing to worry about, that some of them know full well that it has direct political implications, because people vote along ethnic lines.

As a result of its brown-nosing, people have speculated whether the Green Party will eventually be taken over by BAME. I doubt the regime will allow this. I think it needs the Green Party as an attractor for the “crazed white woman” vote. Muslims will just create some new party of their own eventually, and then the white Green voters will be in the position Reform voters are currently in (“we sucked up to these people, yet they hate us”).

In the meantime, the rest of us have to watch these useful idiots gleefully doing their damnedest to ruin the country and set up oblivion for all of us. I don’t think there is much point trying to get through to them, especially the young women, for whom politics now seems to be a sort of gender war by proxy.

Reform UK

Reform, the uber civic nationalist party, have come up against the hardened limits of their creed. Once identity groups are mobilised, the centre has no appeal. And, in today’s Britain, identity groups are very decisively mobilised, and that isn’t going to change any time soon - if ever.

It is pointless and even self-abasing for Reform to complain about this problem, because they have committed to never solving it.

Moreover, they spent a lot of the campaign insulting their own base, so confident were they that their principles have universal appeal so there is no need for low-down “identity politics”.

Their candidate, the ridiculous Matt Goodwin, even gave an interview in which he criticised Restore Britain supporters and implied they are less patriotic than the Sikhs who helped him on the campaign trail:

According to polling, this cuckoldry won him 8% of the BAME vote:

One of Reform’s figures, Andrew Rosindell, when asked about demographic replacement of the native British, devolved into mumbling about principles at the expense of client groups. He hasn’t realised this is no longer the game and that approach has stopped working. (Actually, it never worked; it only got us to where we are now.)

Nigel Farage claimed the Greens won the by-election by cheating. Both he and Goodwin railed against sectarianism.

Last month, Reform MP Danny Kruger said that anyone born in Britain is an heir to the civilisation of this country. He made a Freudian slip, though, when he specified “newborn Afghans”. Aren’t they Brits, if they’re born here? But of course we all understand what he meant to say: the children of Afghans, if they’re born here, are as British as anyone else. Well, perhaps Reform will look at the Gorton & Denton result and realise how insane that notion is.

However, the signs are not good:

• Reform chairman David Bull, in the hours after the election result, seemed not to realise that the defeat was a call to rethink their civic nationalism. Instead, he doubled down on it, disowning some remarks Matt Goodwin had made about identity and distancing Reform from them.

• Goodwin himself tweeted that Britain “must reject sectarianism”. It is an impotent request that will be ignored by all BAME groups who have learned, yet again, that acting in their self-interest benefits them. How this could be a surprise to anyone, and how Goodwin can’t see it after what has happened, and how he can’t see that it would be in native Britons’ interests to adopt the same attitude, boggles the mind.

• Nigel Farage might now be recalling his own statement from last year, that if you lose the Muslim vote, you will lose elections. He might well see Gorton & Denton as proof of that. Like Labour, he might conclude that his party lost because it didn’t court the Muslims hard enough.

On the face of it, backtracking on all of this and embracing nativism would be pure common sense for Reform. But I suspect they are going to do the opposite. This leaves the field wide open for the genuine insurgent party…

Restore Britain

Restore didn’t have a candidate in this by-election since the party was only announced a fortnight before. However, it can certainly draw some lessons from the event.

It clarifies that Restore’s only rival is Reform UK. It is not only soaking up the right-wing vote (making the Conservative Party irrelevant) but also the general White vote (see the racial graph earlier). Restore should relentlessly attack and undermine Reform. I doubt there is much to be gained for it in attacking the other parties. Lefties, especially leftie women, will vote for them no matter what. One left-wing woman celebrated:

How ironic to say this, when the winning party relied for its victory on the racism of ethnic minorities!

Another lesson Restore should take is that, contra received wisdom among right-wing parties, brown and black people are emphatically not “natural conservatives”. Any attempt to appeal to them on those grounds will fail dismally while repelling Restore’s natural base, native Brits.

The third lesson is that “pandering” to an identity group works well for you. Matt Goodwin says it’s a road to defeat, but he is delusional. The Greens did it and beat him soundly. Before that, Labour did it for decades and secured numerous strongholds around the country. In 2026, with the Great Replacement well underway and the Boriswave having done its damage, the atmosphere in Britain is so febrile that it is utterly foolish for a party not to target particular groups in its campaigning. It is really a road to failure to do anything else.

Does this mean that the country will devolve into a set of competing groups, with little to bind them together, fighting over limited resources? Yes. But that has been the situation since June 1948 when the Empire Windrush arrived - native Brits just haven’t realised the fact. To continue refusing to recognise it is not to “win the day with principles”; it is to let native Brits be eaten alive by foreigners. That is what civic nationalism leads to, and that is why civic nationalism must be abandoned.

From Restore’s point of view, there is one identity group that is steadfastly ignored by every other party, and even actively disparaged by them. That group desperately needs representation - explicit, unashamed representation - and the party that has the courage to do this will be assured success. This is an open goal just waiting to be taken. Yes, the media will castigate you for it, but the British people will reward you.

I think there are two dead-end discussions which will be made of this by-election.

There is a lot of sound and fury about electoral fraud (euphemistically termed “family voting”) by Muslims. This is where a Muslim woman is told how to vote by her husband, or he even does the voting for her. Sky reporter Sam Coates claimed to have witnessed this, and it was reported by a democracy watchdog but denied by police and doubted by uber-progressive Owen Jones. (Of course, how ludicrous to think that clannish people might behave clannishly!)

Whining about this kind of thing, decades after letting these people into our country en masse, is futile. The Muslims don’t feel guilty about doing it and never will. Their enablers don’t care, in fact they think it’s funny. Once again, conservatives need to wake up and realise that their decency has been used against them for 100 years.

Furthermore, the truth is we have no idea how much of this “family voting” went on. But also… it doesn’t matter. Who seriously thinks that Muslim women need to be forced by their husbands to vote for the most pro-Muslim party? And without that, these Muslim women would be voting for… Reform? The Conservative Party? Laughable.

In addition, even if they are coerced by their husbands, I for one don’t care. Are we seriously meant to worry about the rights and dignity of Muslim women, when by their very presence in our country they are colluding to take it - our only homeland - away from us?

With that in mind, infinitely more important (from our point of view) than “family voting” is the broader phenomenon of ethnic bloc voting. There is no question that this is happening. It was mentioned briefly by conservatives in their coverage of the by-election. The claim was made that ethnic bloc voting undermines democracy. Technically it doesn’t, if by “democracy” you mean “people vote for what they want”. What it undermines is the British people’s ownership of their homeland. That is never said, because milquetoast conservatives refuse to acknowledge such ownership. (Often they even refuse to acknowledge the existence of the British people.)

The second dead-end discussion is that this is all about religion (ie. Islam), not race. This is the go-to argument for civic nationalists, because it enables them to “not be racist” while complaining about the problems of diversity. Unfortunately, I think the problems of diversity occur precisely because racial difference is baked in, genetic.

I have long said that Islam isn’t a race but might as well be. Barring a few exceptions, it is “a brown religion”, most of its adherents being of that hue. Moreover, from our point-of-view as Europeans, Muslims present as a racial group. They arrive in our countries together, and they socialise, live and work together - a big brown mass that frowns and scowls at us whenever we encounter it. Are there White Muslims, black ones, yellow ones? Yes, but then they are racially despised by the brown ones, and are in any case not numerous enough in Britain to matter. Then we must consider the chicken-and-egg process of a religion that is largely shaped by an ethnic group, which is subsequently shaped by its religion, and on and on.

In addition is the simple fact that race and ethnicity go hand in hand with religion; the two are virtually inseparable, especially for non-European peoples who don’t tend to have much time for abstractions or individualism. Presented with a foreigner, we cannot separate his race from his religion, because they are profoundly intertwined. This is why it is impossible for us to determine whether, for example, Pakistanis rape English girls because of their genes, their culture or their Islamic faith. Some will insist it is the latter, claiming that rape jihad is justified in the Hadiths, but what if it weren’t justified in the Hadiths? Do we seriously believe that, in that scenario, these men would not be doing this? The same could be said for taqiyya, halal slaughter… and ethnic bloc voting.

Yes, you can blame these things on religion, but that is futile and might in the first place be wrong-headed, and in any case, how are we to know? And what is the point of us trying to know, when, if it did turn out to be due to religion, these people would never relinquish or reform their religion anyway?

Ultimately, the only solution is for us to separate from them and their problems, which we can’t help them with and shouldn’t presume to be able to, or that they would be amenable to it even if we could. Because we don’t even know that! After all these decades, the stranger within our gate remains a stranger.

And he always will remain a stranger, as long as we remain sufficiently ourselves to see him as such.

So, it has happened. Rupert Lowe has announced that his organisation Restore Britain is now a political party and will stand in general elections around the country.

In a very well-judged publicity video, Lowe presents himself (truthfully) as a farmer: a man who thinks about the long term, understands the link between effort and reward, understands the need to cultivate and nurture, and accepts that there are no short cuts. He outright says that what needs to be done will be “incredibly painful”. This is no feel-good Faragist showmannery. This is a serious man being honest.

At another point in the video he goes farther than any other politician in opposing diversity by saying that a Restore government would outlaw “halal and kosher slaughter”. I wonder if he knows what he is taking on by saying those words.

Later, he explicitly contrasts himself not just with the culture of Britain’s mainstream political centre, but with that centre itself. No politicians from it will be involved with Restore. They will be barred, as the verminous traitors and destroyers that they are.

This is a fresh start, and it genuinely has a radically different mindset from the ossified edifice that has governed this country for a hundred years and driven it - and its people - into the ground.

Duncan Bannatyne and Elon Musk (who a year ago condemned Nigel Farage as weak and ineffectual) endorsed the party. John Cleese retweeted Musk.

Hours after the announcement, Twitter news outlet GB Politics ran a poll:

It’s encouraging, but we must remember that this is Twitter. The general public will be different. They will be much less aware of Farage’s crimes against Lowe, and indeed of Lowe himself. He’s a big hitter on social media but the MSM are very good at pretending he doesn’t exist. As Reform voters learn about him, many of them (being largely Boomers) find his talk of mass deportation troubling. Farage soothes their life-long civic-nationalist delusions, Lowe does not. So we have to accept that a lot of myopic normies will stick with Reform. The false consciousness they have been indoctrinated with is too strong.

But, to be brutal about it, Reform’s Boomer supporters will not be around forever. I am much more confident in the youthful Right. They know how bad things are and accept what must be done. They even yearn for it. They don’t have a yacht or a holiday home to lose. They don’t really have much at all. Most crucially, they don’t have the prospect of a comfortable future - and that lack is incendiary.

There is something mythical about Lowe’s rise. After a successful long career in big business, he entered politics by campaigning for Brexit, and was later in the Reform UK party under Nigel Farage. This is how he gained enough public prominence to get voted in as the MP for Great Yarmouth. This won him access to the House of Commons and the resources unique to politicians. Using these, he began holding our corrupt governmental system to account. In doing so he proved himself a genuine firebrand and maverick, and was soon out-performing his leader Nigel Farage, both in Parliament and on social media.

Farage did what he has done countless times with colleagues who threaten his position: he ousted Lowe from Reform. But he went much farther than that. He levelled false criminal charges against him, trying to get him imprisoned. He made many accusations (listed here). The overall goal, clearly, was to discredit Lowe to the maximum extent possible. I don’t think I have ever seen a character assassination so ruthless, or so obviously malicious. But Farage did it.

While Lowe dealt with the police investigation (including a disgusting night-time raid on his farm), the legal tit-for-tat and the stress of the whole crisis, he created an organisation, Restore Britain, which he envisaged as a campaign group. Meantime, he remained in Parliament, constantly building his reputation and credibility with the public with a relentless stream of good works. This culminated with the independent Rape Gang Inquiry, launched, funded, organised and chaired by Lowe after he concluded that the Labour government had no intention of running an honest inquiry into this most important matter.

Farage completely ignored Lowe’s inquiry. In the meantime, he had turned Reform UK into an absolute farce. It started with bringing in progressive David Bull, who said that immigration was and always has been “the lifeblood” of Britain. Then he brought in countless Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other non-whites. Most recently, he delivered what could have been calculated as the most insulting move possible against the British people: he brought in various Conservative politicians who had been at the helm of government during the Boriswave (a historic spike in mass immigration) and the Afghan asylum debacle (in which they not only invited in many thousands of Afghans, but sought to keep it secret from the British people). Farage even said it is inevitable that Reform will make an electoral pact with the Conservative Party or even merge into it. With this, and repeated assurances that mass deportation is “a political impossibility” and that English ethnicity doesn’t matter, Reform is clearly not the anti-establishment party Farage once claimed. In fact, it is a barely-disguised continuation of the Conservative Party, famed for betraying the British people time and time again. Farage did this.

At a time when the country is aching for renewal, and when the young are screaming to be heard, Farage chooses to dole out Boomer slop at his conferences and keep his supporters occupied with bingo nights and 2000s-esque lies that Britain has always been diverse. The situation has become so ridiculous that a Twitter account has been created solely to document it: ReformYookay_.

When Farage could give the British people hope, he instead wastes their time, good will, energy and money. The treachery is disgusting. The weakness is lamentable. The lack of imagination, the sheer refusal to grasp a historic opportunity, is unforgivable.

Thus the relief was huge when, the very day after completing his groundbreaking rape gang inquiry, Rupert Lowe announced he would convert Restore Britain into a political party. A national one. He would do what had been promised by Nigel Farage - his nemesis who had tried to destroy him.

The sheer contrasts of good and evil, integrity and dishonesty, seriousness and frivolity, courage and cowardice, benevolence and malice… As I say, it is mythical stuff.

For the first time in my life, a British political party exists that is led by someone I admire and trust, and someone I believe actually has the interests of the British people at heart. It seems incredible that this would be unusual in a British politician. Given the sheer corruption of our age, it is literally unique.

Lowe is not an aristocrat but he has the gravitas one associates with “officer class” - a natural leader. But it is not just an aura. He has a proven track record as a competent leader, a capable organiser, a good delegator. This is shown not just in his career in business or in his running of a farm, but more recently, and poignantly, in the rape gang inquiry which happened solely because of him and his relentless efforts. That alone must have been a Herculean undertaking.

There is also a straightforwardness to him which I think will be very appealing to the British people. One does not get a sense that this is a liar or an obfuscator, still less a frightened lackey of some unseen group, as one does with virtually every other politician. Neither does he peddle the trite catchphrases and euphemisms that have come to dominate our politics, our whole culture. He is a “no-nonsense” kind of man, and this is like fresh air streaming into a space that has become hideously dank.

Also, slightly contrasting with all of the above, there is a certain sadness about Lowe’s demeanour. I take it to be a sign of honesty - with wisdom comes sorrow. This man understands the world is fallen. He grew up in a Britain of affluence, pride, integrity and social cohesion but is growing old amid dysfunction, nihilism and corruption. At 68, I think he is old enough to know the difference, but still young enough to see the difference. (People over 70 seem not to realise that life has changed drastically since the 1990s.)

Let me put it another way. I am pretty sure that Rupert Lowe would have the same feeling as I do if he saw these two buildings, on the very same spot in Bromley:

Now, I am sure that Lowe is a pragmatist - far less of a hopeless romantic than me - but nevertheless I believe he has a soul. And frankly, that is more than I can say for any other British political leader in the last fifty years (with the possible exception of John Smith).

This should help Restore avoid the insane excesses of libertarianism. I think this is why they have, for example, a policy plan for restoring the British pub. I think it is why Lowe recently said he doesn’t want “Larry Fink buying up Britain”.

Finally, there is a perhaps equally important trait: Lowe is a reluctant politician. He doesn’t crave power for its own sake. As Academic Agent noted, there is a sense that he is motivated by a sense of grim duty. He understands his country is in a dire state, and he understands that apparently no other man of his means has the guts to do what is right - so he has to.

The mainstream media are unified. From the Telegraph to the Guardian, they (having uniformly ignored Lowe’s rape gang inquiry) are united in condemning his new party. Hope Not Hate, of course, lamented the development. The despicable Spiked published a hit piece. The supposedly right-wing GB News showed its true colours. Eventually the right-wing press settled on a line: Lowe is being egotistical and vain by setting up a new party that will split the right-wing vote, instead of keeping quiet and letting Reform win squarely. This line was reiterated by Tim Stanley, along with other jibes at Restore, even while he lamented that Reform has become a useless party. (As ever, the conservative advises to do nothing, especially if the alternative would upset Trotsky.)

What is already clear is that we are going to see the mother of all smear campaigns against Rupert Lowe. I doubt if the MSM will work harder in our lifetimes against anyone than they will against him. He is our era’s equivalent of Enoch Powell or even Oswald Mosley. The truth about those two men is unknown to most people, who have been told again and again that each was a cartoon character of pure evil. The same will be attempted with Lowe.

They are currently trying to frame him as egotistical and messianic. That is unconvincing. Obviously, their preference would be to frame him as “evil/hateful”, but that too will be a difficult sell, given his affable and straightforward manner. Instead, they will probably settle on framing him as a befuddled old man who has no idea what he is saying, how it comes across, what the implications of it are, and how distant it is from reality. A kook, in other words. The “evil/hateful” thing will be used on the young men around him - “see how naive Lowe is, enabling these young maniacs!” - whose social media connections will be catalogued and megaphoned by the MSM. Lowe will be grilled on interactions that his underlings have on X. I implore everyone to bear this in mind when interacting with them.

Pete North, sad to say, is correct about this danger. Restore face a historic challenge. The last thing people should do is make it even harder for them by using language that will be used - disingenuously, sure, but constantly - against them. Lowe will not want his project being linked in the public’s mind with Twitter anon KebabRemover1488 from Cleethorpes. Even Millennial Woes, the famed bestialist and all-round dark horse, would be too much. I am acutely aware that my positive comments about Restore enable Hope Not Hate to crow “it has been endorsed by the likes of failed racist YouTuber Millennial Woes”.

Restore are already adept at swiping such nonsense aside, but it will be necessary for them to “step over” a great deal, because the petty attacks are going to come thick and fast. It will often be tempting for them to disavow, but I would urge them to heed this advice.

I think most people already understand that this is not a time for purity spiralling. Nevertheless, the following bears stating.

Restore will never be explicitly ethno-nationalist. Even if its leading figures are of that persuasion (and I have no reason to believe they are), the party can’t afford to be; the electoral commission would refuse to register it.

Of course they will not deport all the people I would want deported. but I think they will deport far more than any other party would, and I think that, by doing so, they will both improve our chances and advance “the situation”. In other words, it is both progress and accelerationism.

Is it perfect? No, but we are never going to get something better than this. If this fails, then it’s civil unrest, violence, breakdown, police state, and ultimately racial war. I don’t want that. You don’t want that. If Restore fails, there will be other parties that come after it, more hard-line, but by then demographics might mean it is too late to avoid catastrophe. This is our one shot at that. Maybe it will fail, but we have to try.

Richard the Fourth thinks it is too early for restoration, that the country needs to suffer more, to hit “rock bottom” before it can begin to regenerate. Asmongold disagrees and is full of enthusiasm for Restore, and the vast majority of the British online Right seem to be similarly inspired. At last, a chance…

While Nigel Farage drivels about abolishing work-from-home (someone commented “my funders are big into commercial real estate”) and boasts of his efforts to combat “extreme right ethno-nationalism”, the promise of Restore Britain continues to stir.

In the polar opposite of his rival’s cheap showmanship, Lowe has surrounded himself with talented young people. He has sought out the best and the brightest, the ones who can point a way forward over the heads of a rotten media and a tired, frightened regime. And now the call has gone out for the capable and experienced to get onboard as well.

One has the feeling - the hope - that arrangements are being made behind closed doors, that a new machine is being pieced together, that something momentous is slouching towards Albion to be born.

At time of writing (August 2025) it seems inevitable that the next general election, whenever it happens, will be won by Reform UK and Nigel Farage will become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, taking over from the appalling Keir Starmer and casually brushing aside the (once mighty but now effectively defunct) Conservative Party. We are being encouraged by Farage acolytes to believe that his victory will sweep away not only those “legacy parties” but the whole rotten “establishment” in Britain.

Such ironic fantasies as the above have long seemed absurd. We live in a profoundly ailing Britain, and Farage surely knows this. Once in Downing Street he will have the power to rescue it, but we all know he won’t do so.

It seems worthwhile to ponder what his premiership will actually be like.

He will obviously be constrained by the civil service, media, lobby groups and global powers, and he seems to have little stamina for resisting these groups, but furthermore, he doesn’t seem to have any radical aspirations anyway. How radical does he want to go? We can judge by his public remarks, and they are not encouraging. On immigration and all related issues, he has for years sounded milquetoast - at first compared with the likes of myself but now even with the general public. Far from seeing this as a signal to radicalise, he has blithely acknowledged that he is to the left of them on this matter.

I see him as very much an analogue of Trump in America. The two men are similar in some ways, and each was granted “credibility” because the regime finally decided it would be so. It is debatable whether the regime “prepared” each man years in advance for his eventual role, or whether it was genuinely resisting him all that time and only “conceded” once circumstances compelled it. (My personal theory is that the resistance against Trump was genuine - from 2015, through his first presidency, and beyond - until very late in the day when, after October 7th, it was judged that he would be more reliable on Israel than the Democrats would be.)

The case of Farage might be more sinister. Most likely, it is identical to Trump in that the regime genuinely loathed him (and emphatically didn’t want Brexit) but eventually decided pragmatically that it could make use of this firebrand by bringing him “into the tent”. However, it is also possible that the regime deliberately built Farage up, for many years, all throughout the dramas of the 2010s, knowing that it would eventually utilise him. Maybe they always intended to crash the Conservative Party and slide him in its place? Occam’s Razor would dictate that it would be crazy to deliberately crash a party only to create an equally futile duplicate of it, in which case the Conservative Party destroyed itself through incompetence and the regime realised, late in the day, that it needed a substitute. But perhaps the crashing of the Conservative Party was done precisely to maintain the illusion of democracy, to keep the public thinking that all of this means something and they can “vote harder” and avert their demographic doom? Or, perhaps the regime has simply decided to boost Farage instead of rehabilitating the Conservative Party, because it judges he will be a better “release valve” given the tensions brewing in Britain?

All of that being as it may… we are now facing the virtual certainty that this man will be in charge, and it doesn’t really matter how it came to be. I think it is actually easier to predict what will happen next. Containment is the word.

Before we get to Farage’s performance as PM, here is a separate prediction. His “success” in office will be trumpeted not by “the legacy media” (since no section of it could plausibly be his cheerleader) but by astroturfed elements in the online right. I mean the Andrew Golds, Konstantin Kisins, Winston Marshalls and Matt Goodwins, united by the glue of TalkTV, GB News and (sad to say) the New Culture Forum. Even Thomas Skinner is being pushed in the mainstream while being lauded by these elements as a stinging rebuke to it.

In coming years, these “alternative” organisations and figures will be massively boosted - by the regime they ostensibly oppose - and fomented into a “maverick” “nationalist” mediaplex that will play face to the legacy media’s heel, and create the impression of an organic revolution in how the British public are informed. “Based” civic nationalism will defy the tired progressivism of the legacy media. It will be a Punch & Judy contest very much mirroring Tommy Robinson vs Hope Not Hate, Cameron vs Blair, Farage vs Starmer, Pepsi vs Coca Cola.

Whenever Farage breathes, these elements will cheer him on while the legacy media will oscillate between feverish indignation and sighs of impotent dismay.

Part of the pantomime will be abortive efforts that Farage will launch under the foregone conclusion that the regime will nix them, thus wasting the public’s time while bolstering his own image as a scenery-destroying maverick. To contribute to that illusion, the legacy media will act shocked and outraged by his various antics. They will attack him constantly for the most petty things, scandals in a wine glass, yet despite their “sabotage” he will remain “triumphant”, always “getting the better of them” while never actually getting anything that his voters want.

I think we should separate what he will promise, what he will “attempt”, and what he will actually achieve. I can see the following being promised:

• take Britain out of the ECHR

• repeal the Equalities Act

• repeal the Online Safety Act and abolish Ofcom

• make home-schooling much easier (deregulation)

• cut net migration (a race-blind, civic nationalist proposal)

• deport vast numbers of foreign criminals

• for serious crimes committed by foreigners, automatic deportation after jail (already on the cards)

• shut down the migrant hotels

• stop the boats

• in schools, promote British identity and culture (the Katharine Birbalsingh model)

• reduce inheritance tax

• more apprenticeships, fewer Humanities degrees

• restore law and order - proper sentences, build more prisons, etc.

• abolish the BBC / license fee

• “end the LGBT nonsense”

• “cut the red tape” and “get Britain working again” - helping business, farming, small shops, etc.

• “take an axe to the quangocracy”

• “get our country back on track”

Once in power, some of these promises will simply be forgotten about while others will be “attempted” with no success. Time after time, the system will put up barriers that Farage simply cannot overcome, “try” as he valiantly might.

For example, taking Britain out of the ECHR will prove an impossible battle that would take many years and “frankly, just isn’t worth the bother” because, after all, “we’ve got more immediate things to think about”. Staying in the ECHR will make it impossible to stop the small boats or deport illegal migrants.

Repealing the Equalities Act would be the sensible thing for the regime to do but would be completely anathema to it. If given any choice, it will absolutely refuse.

Likewise, the Online Safety Act, which is both ideologically dear to the regime and necessary for its survival. It needs as much censorship as it can possibly get through the legislative back door. More, not less, censorship will happen under Farage - just as more deplatforming happened under Trump than under Obama or Biden - because, just like Trump 2016, Farage and his colleagues will have no courage whatsoever against the regime.

Even deregulating home-schooling, which sounds like an innocuous idea and “a common sense vote-winner”, will be easily defeated by the regime. It will simply boost some organisation that advocates “child safety”. A few horror stories in the Daily Mail about illiterate parents trapping their poor kids at home, and the regulations will be expanded and the whole idea of home-schooling will be demonised. Well-meaning middle-class couples all over Britain will conclude that, really, it’s easier just to send the kids to the local comprehensive to get their skulls filleted and pumped full of Marxism. (And after all, that will free their mother to go back into work, bringing more money into the household!)

As for getting teachers to promote British culture and identity, I don’t believe for a second that Farage has the interest or determination to do what would be necessary. There isn’t a teacher in the land whose training hasn’t primed her against such “low-grade jingoism”. The government would have to threaten them with the sack, opening up a maelstrom of legal tribulations for itself, not to mention the massive problem of replacing large numbers of unsatisfactory teachers. What’s more, to gauge their “compliance”, it would have to send inspectors (“fascist spies”) into schools to monitor things. The PR would be an absolute nightmare.

After all of this circus, here is what I can see Farage actually achieving:

• deport some refugees, definitely a lot of the criminal ones

• shut down the migrant hotels - but only by “integrating” the refugees immediately into the community instead. Many rapes will occur, but “law and order” will prevail (see above)

• some deregulation of business that will ostensibly help farmers, small shops, etc. but realistically won’t make a dent in the domination thereof by global corporations

• abolish the license fee - but the BBC will remain, funded by advertising and general taxation

In summary I think a Farage premiership will be exactly like Trump’s 2016 presidency. He will promise a lot, deliver a very small number of good things, and otherwise be an abject disappointment that is nevertheless trumpeted by the “alternative” media as a stinging assault on the forces of “regressive” progressivism. Sitting in care homes, right-wing Boomers will chuckle naively at the news of Farage “sticking it to those wokies”. For them, the illusion will be as convincing as every other manufactured narrative they have swallowed since Woodstock. For the rest of us, the grim reality will grind on, conveying us towards the demographic hell that we know awaits us in our own dotage.

Rather, the above is how I think the regime wants things to go. If the situation were calmer, the plan would work.

But, as described elsewhere, I think Britain is a seething cauldron, and the years before and during Farage’s premiership are going to be anything but calm. By the time he gets in, he will seem a pitiful offering given the situation. Within a year in Number 10, he will seem as useless and out-of-touch as Starmer does today. A man installed to entertain, distract and mollify will instead be confronted with very serious matters. A man famed for his arrogance will find himself completely out of his depth - and this will be infuriatingly obvious to the public.

So we come back to my belief that the public are moving beyond the regime’s ability to bamboozle them. Things are happening too fast. Blame the Boriswave or African sexual impulses, blame Blackrock or our own corrupt civil service, blame Cameron or Johnson or Sunak or Starmer or, indeed, Farage. (Many people will.)

Even while he ascends towards power, Farage is starting to be seen as inadequate, too soft, too conformist, too lightweight. He is a showman, not a statesman. He is a sleazy stockbroker, not a visionary.

When the Alt-Right emerged in the early 2010s, talk of “the decline of the West” seemed fanciful to the general public. To speak, as we did, of the need for vision was to look pretentious to the “normies”. The difference today is stark. Ordinary people no longer need to be told of decline; they can see it, everywhere.

Given this, it is clear that a visionary is what is needed - not a clown, not a pretender, not an automaton, not a grifter, not a “reformer”, not a caretaker, but someone who actually cares about this country and is prepared to fight for it, someone who has the wisdom and courage to see beyond the awful things that must be done to the prize that awaits, justifying those sins.

Nigel Farage is definitely not that man. But his premiership will probably be what causes such men to finally emerge. His failure, being the most right-wing that the regime is prepared to tolerate, will be the final devastating proof that the regime itself has to go.

I actually think many of the public already know this. Ironically, it is Farage’s own fanbase - the burnt-out but unadventurous centre-right Little Englanders so lambasted for their “knee-jerk” “intolerance” - who are the only ones still needing to be knee-jerk and intolerant. His premiership will teach them.

(Addendum, February 2026. This essay was written before Farage brought countless non-white figures into Reform, before he brought in Conservative Party defectors who had betrayed the country while in government, before he said that Reform will inevitably make an electoral pact with the Conservative Party, or even merge into it, and before he reiterated that he vehemently opposes ethno-nationalism. It was also written before hints emerged that he will resign as Reform leader before the next election (avoiding the responsibility of being Prime Minister) which would presumably leave Reform with little option but to merge with the Conservative Party. If this happens, Farage’s bold new party will have soaked up endless amounts of nationalist energy and achieved nothing but the reviving of the establishment party it purportedly opposed. This essay was also written before Farage’s nemesis Rupert Lowe launched his own political party, Restore Britain. Finally, a sane and serious choice is available to people actually concerned for this country.)

In a healthy society, there would be no “scandal” here. Billionaire businessman Jim Ratcliffe’s comments would have been water off a duck’s back. People would consider them, or not, they would agree, or not, the discourse would adapt to them, or not, and civic life would hum on regardless.

The outrage that his comments ignited is itself a symptom of how far-gone British society is. It’s like an alcoholic enraged at someone politely, gently suggesting he has a drinking problem. Suddenly shelves are being torn from the walls, furniture up-ended, and the accuser’s financial arrangements being dissected in order to “prove” that the accusee is definitely absolutely not an alcoholic. But simultaneously, there is also the argument that it wouldn’t be a big deal if the accusee were an alcoholic, because there are historical factors that supposedly justify alcoholism.

Anyone watching the above spectacle would conclude not only that the accusee was almost certainly an alcoholic, but also that he was without a shadow of a doubt irrational, vengeful, dishonest, manipulative, delusional and deranged.

Welcome to Britain in 2026.

Ratcliffe’s exact words were:

You can’t have an economy with 9 million people on benefits, and huge levels of immigrants coming in. I mean, the UK has been colonised. It’s costing too much money.

The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, hasn’t it? I mean, the population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people.

Immediately, a storm erupted. Politicians (including the Prime Minister, chancellor Rachel Reeves, and the mayor of Ratcliffe’s home city Manchester) rushed to voice their disgust at what he had said. The loathsome Emily Maitlis came out with some typically stupid and loxist remarks, saying that Britain had an empire therefore the dissolution of the British people is (somehow) inevitable. But across the entire mainstream media, there was near-total lockstep. From the Morning Star to the Times to Have I Got News For You, from Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones to Piers Morgan, all were united in one purpose: discredit Jim Ratcliffe.

There were six prongs to the attack. The basic truth of what he said is irrefutable, so instead the focus was on nitpicking and fatuous character assassination.

“He’s a billionaire!”

The joke here is that the very people saying this are either billionaires themselves, or the loyal lackeys thereof. But the weakness of the argument is that it isn’t an argument. It is a mere statement of fact, with little if any bearing on the matter. If it does have any bearing, that hasn’t been explained. It seems we are meant to hate and distrust people simply for being billionaires - that is, if they oppose mass immigration. If they instead celebrate it, then they are wise and experienced people who should be listened to, and their wealth is a sign of intelligence and good sense.

“He doesn’t even live here!”

Indeed, he moved to Monaco in 2020. However, again, this is stated without any explanation of why it is being stated. Presumably it is supposed to imply that a) he doesn’t know what he’s talking about since he isn’t in Britain every day, and b) he himself is an immigrant (to Monaco) and thus a hypocrite for criticising mass uncontrolled immigration of violent unemployable unassimilable 75 IQ Africans and Arabs. This is a version of the moronic canard about “Brits not integrating in their Spanish enclaves”. Both of these implications fall apart as soon as they are examined, so they never are. They are simply stated, over and over again. (Our mainstream media has become a brain-washing and truth-denying industry.)

“He doesn’t pay UK tax!”

Indeed, having moved to Monaco, he no longer pays UK tax. Again, so what? What bearing does this have on his ability to understand Britain’s situation with immigration?

I think the implication is that, by not contributing tax, he is worsening Britain’s economy and thus reducing its ability to accommodate immigrants. But if so, surely the correct course of action is to reduce immigration in line with what the country is able to accommodate? Of course progressives don’t think of that; they think only of how selfish a man he must be for having moved abroad (like the immigrants whom they adore have done). Clearly, Ratcliffe should pay UK tax so that the country he obviously cares about can more thoroughly destroy itself.

But of course, all of this drags us into the repugnant territory of thinking about immigration purely in economic terms. Ratcliffe himself did this - opposing it not on cultural, racial or ethnic grounds but only economic ones. In that, he is united with the Establishment - but perhaps he was only couching his “bigotry” in economics so as to make it palatable to ordinary, good-thinking people? Either way, I think it is ridiculous, when we know about the other effects of immigration, to fret about its economic impact. Whether it is economically good or bad, it is bad in every other way, and that should outweigh economics for any sensible person.

“He got the numbers wrong!”

Indeed, the population statistics he cited were inaccurate. Had he said 2000 instead of 2020, his numbers would have been irreproachable, but he said 2020 so he is an ignorant lying fool. (And if he had said 2000… they’d still hate him for it.)

For 12 million migrants to arrive over 25 years is obviously less turbulent than over 5 years, but the end result is the same: supplanting, absorption and eradication of the native population.

I think, at this point, if you are quibbling over the exact numbers around immigration or are somehow unsure about where the demographics are heading, you should be in a padded cell. We simply don’t have time to debate how many Somalis can dance on the head of a pin - or rather, stamp on the head of a Brit.

“His own team at Manchester United has immigrants in it!”

Ratcliffe is 25% owner of the football club Manchester United, whose team mostly comprises immigrants (13 out of 21 players). How much that is due to Ratcliffe personally is unknown, but people rushed to accuse him of hypocrisy.

This is actually a silly argument, because immigrants in a sports team do not do the same damage as immigrants in a population. However, clearly one is meant to reflect the other. I actually agree that it is ridiculous for an English sports team to be majority non-white. I think it should represent its local area. But I also think its local area should be majority (or completely) White. If the Man Utd team’s demographics are representative of its local area, that only proves Ratcliffe’s point. If the demographics are not representative, that only compounds the absurdity of allowing international acquisitions for sports teams.

“Diversity has improved Britain and the economy depends on it!”

This is the standard defence. Keir Starmer, among countless other cretins, used it in desperate tweets “responding” to the “outrage” of Ratcliffe’s remarks. Anyone can see that it cannot possibly be true.

But, while few ordinary people believe this drivel in 2026, the wearing and religiose preaching of the chatterati suggests that they still do - or at least, that they are still prepared to pretend that they do. In the offices of the Guardian and the BBC, they might be running obsolete software, but they are doing so with pious determination and it is understood that he who comments on the fact will lose his career.

And unfortunately chatterati opinion still matters, for now.

Disappointingly but unsurprisingly, soon enough, Ratcliffe apologised. But he did so in a clever way which gave little ground and admitted no real fault. His wording referred to the feelings of those he had offended, not to the words with which he had offended them. He was implying that the onus was on them for objecting to a thorny issue being discussed, not on him for discussing it. He apologised for nothing more than failing to find a gentler way to say what, he asserts, needs to be said.

Of course this wasn’t nearly enough to placate the Establishment. But, had it been a full-throated apology, would it have worked? In other words, having made those controversial remarks, would Ratcliffe ever have been forgiven? Was there any possible “path back” for him? Of course not. The wound is real and it remains. The Establishment will never forgive him for pointing out its folly.

Moreover, he can’t be allowed to just do this and not suffer. It’s not personal; they need to make sure that other men, in a similar position, are sufficiently discouraged from following suit. If that takes Ratcliffe’s ruination, so be it. Better that enforced and unnatural silence than the British Establishment has to acknowledge what it has done to the country.

All of this happened while Rupert Lowe’s rape gang inquiry was going on, every day uncovering more terrible details of what immigration has subjected our girls to, by the thousand. But the mainstream have entirely ignored that inquiry, with only the Daily Mail making a cursory mention of it. If you relied on the mainstream to keep you informed, you wouldn’t even know this inquiry was happening.

But if you relied on the mainstream media, you wouldn’t have much idea about anything. And that, really, is the whole point here. There is a tissue of lies that we are all expected to believe in, especially if we have any prominence in society, and Ratcliffe, perhaps off the cuff without really thinking about it, pointed out that the emperor has no clothes on.

For how long can a society operate like this?

The summary is: I was still getting over the death of my mother when a very close friend died suddenly, then a relationship ended, then another close friend nearly died, and throughout was the constant question of whether I would soon have to move house, uprooting everything. There was little stability and even less security. Nevertheless, somehow, it has been a productive year for me in terms of writing.

At the start, I wanted to take January off to recuperate from Millenniyule X, but the revived media focus on the Muslim rape gang scandal compelled me to write an essay about that. The same also inspired an essay about Champagne Socialism.

Then the death of David Lynch prompted me to begin a major work about Twin Peaks. I spent two weeks doing research to prepare. In the middle of that period I took a few days off to write another essay, How Best to Boil the Frog?, inspired by Trump’s return to the White House. Then I began the Twin Peaks study, which involved watching each episode and writing a micro-essay about it, bringing in background info I had learned during the research. I watched the classic series and the film, and was intending to proceed to the 2017 series but felt “overloaded” and decided to leave it for a while. This turned out to be a very long while due to intervening events.

The idea of taking a post-Millenniyule rest fell by the wayside.

Out of nowhere one day, it seemed a good idea to write an essay “proving” the Great Replacement. This was written quickly but seemed insufficient; a series was needed. I worked out the titles, then it poured out of me and was very soon two-thirds finished.

Then… in late February, a close friend died suddenly - my landlord Allen. I did what I could for him - amateur CPR - and the paramedics arrived swiftly, but it was hopeless. A great man, and a great friend, had left the world.

It was my first “proper” bereavement. My maternal grandfather had dementia so wasn’t himself when he died, and the same was true of my maternal grandmother and then my mother. My paternal grandfather, I never knew. My paternal grandmother was compos mentis up till the end but I didn’t know her well. So all five of those deaths were much less disturbing than they might have been. In a way I had got off lightly. But with Allen it was completely different. He was of perfectly sound mind. He had projects, intentions, concerns, and thoughts about the world. He was voicing them right in front of me… and then suddenly he wasn’t. It was awful to see a great man disappear. My dear friend.

The loss was painful and confusing. At first I couldn’t concentrate on anything. After a few days I began writing an essay about him. It seemed essential to write a memoir of such a man. When that was mostly finished, I returned to the Great Replacement series and finished that, reckoning that it’s what Allen would have wanted. (The memoir of him will be published next year, on his birthday.)

Then, various essays sketched in 2023 and 2024 began being finished, one after another. It was great to feel the work reaching fruition - loose ends being tied up, more bricks in the wall, more things done and dusted. Among these were a few entries in the Grim Rhymer series and the entire Future Magic series.

I also began an on-going series of TV guides (five of which were published this year) and did more work on a series about the architectural history of my home town.

I created the Autobio page. This lists essays that talk about my life. Eventually I might collect all of these into a book, a sort of fragmented, non-linear autobiography. For as long as I can remember, I have envisaged one day writing an autobiography, and with these essays a lot of the ground will already have been covered so it would be a shame not to use it. At the same time, though, I like the idea of writing a proper, linear autobiography - in which case, that essay collection could serve as a companion volume.

In September 2024, when my mother died, I had begun writing a very long essay about her. It was a difficult one to write, not just because I wanted to chart the evolution and plumb the emotional depths of our relationship but because the essay itself has a rather elaborate structure. Getting that “right” was a technical challenge, alongside the other challenges of writing such a thing. I worked on it sporadically for six months, then focussed on it in April so that it would be ready for publishing on her birthday in May. Then, actually on her birthday when we scattered her ashes, I received some new information which had to be integrated at the very last minute. At 16,000 words it is six times my average. I was concerned about it being indulgent. Maybe it is, but I have no regrets. Many people thanked me for writing it as it helped them in various ways. One person described it as “a piece of literature”. I do think it is one of the best things I have ever made. My hope is that, besides the emotional impact and telling the story of our relationship, it illuminates my mother’s personality.

Mid May saw the end of a six-year relationship. We had been off and on for the first few years, but over time had come to love each other deeply. But it was a long-distance relationship and eventually, as such relationships famously do, became untenable. It was a heart-breaking split because neither of us wanted it, but due to our respective commitments at home, we couldn’t overcome the distance.

Then, just a week later, a close friend had a cardiac arrest and very nearly died. Severe brain damage looked inevitable. Either way, it seemed the world was going to lose a precious soul. Instead, miraculously and amazing even the doctors, her recovery was complete. Thank God, she is still with us and still herself. But this episode was a nightmare, possibly the scariest experience of my life. It put some things into perspective for me.

Then began the summer, which was a summer of stress and fear of eviction from Allen’s property. I could relax sometimes but this fear was always hanging over me. It was a horrible summer. In retrospect I should have taken matters into my own hands and moved out by choice, but I was very attached to the place. In any case I had no idea where to move to, or whether it was even possible for someone like me to get a “normie” landlord.

In the meantime there was chaos in Britain. This inspired prolific writing for me. There was a flurry of essays covering the Bob Vylan debacle, civil war, the Yookay meme, the question of government malice, Zionism in America and here, and the Afghan asylum scandal. The last is the only essay I’m not happy with; I rushed it in order to get a “hot take” in and ended up putting out something sub-standard. It’s a mistake I won’t repeat. I’m just not the guy you should come to for “hot takes”.

At the end of July I received official notice of eviction. Thus, autumn was spent looking for new accommodation. This involved an appeal for help of various kinds. The reality forced me to accept that my financial situation really isn’t good. With that in mind, please support me if you can:

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In August, I received confirmation that Antidem had died - actually in February, the same month as Allen. I feel guilty that I didn’t know him as well as I should have. But that was as much his choice as mine, to be fair.

Also, it seems ridiculous that we had to wait six months to learn of his unfortunate passing. There was also a false confirmation that Lady of Shalott had died, and this held for months before being disproven. Our movement should have mechanisms to ensure that we are less “scattered” than this. When someone dies, their relatives and friends might have no idea about their life online, the many friendships and collaborations that they were involved in. Something should be done about this. Each content creator should have someone “in their real life” who will inform a nominated online person if something bad happens, and that online person breaks the news to the community.

In late August I began work on Millenniyule 2025. This work continued while I prepared to move house and then actually did so. And, now ensconced in my new abode, it is time to actually “do” Millenniyule. So that is where this year, for this Substack, ends.

My organiser program (which I expanded this year) is able to compute various numbers about my writing work. The current situation is:

Published: 120 essays (317k words)
Unpublished: 263 essays (320k words)
Total: 383 essays (637k words)
69% of the essays I have started are yet to be published
Average length of my published essays: 2,638 words

And now for the highlights of 2025. I’m afraid there are many, because, at the risk of seeming vain, I really think the quality has gone up and I have reached a peak.

• The Archetype of the Champagne Socialist

• Warship and the Immortal Memory

• Doctor Who and the Mutants

• Kathleen and Colin

• The Woke Right

• the Great Replacement series, especially Is It Democratic?

• The 2025 Audit on Muslim Rape Gangs

• Grilling and the Yookay Inferno

• An Example of the Muslim Rape Gang Cover-up

• TV Guide: Rising Damp (for some reason I’m very pleased that I wrote this and about once a month I read it over, which I almost never do with my own work)

• The Wages of Wokery

• After the Murder of Charlie Kirk

• TV Guide: New Scotland Yard (as above, I love this essay and find myself reading it over a lot, and have expanded it since publishing)

• Our Modern Waywardness (this is an example of social history writing of which I have done much in 2024 and 2025. Due to the extensive research involved, most of these essays are yet to be finished, but they are in the offing and there will be a lot more of this material in future.)

I am proud of most of the 2025 essays. I think this has been my best year so far on Substack and it was actually a challenge to select “highlights”.

It is honestly baffling to me how I managed this work while my life was so turbulent and stressful. Of course there is the cliché that emotional upheaval is creatively energising. That is probably true. But I am too old for the “tortured artist” thing and I feel this experience has taken a toll on my health. I really hope 2026 is calmer.

With that said, there is much on the slate for next year. I will promise nothing, since events can be unhelpful and inspiration erratic, but here are my goals for 2026:

• finish the Twin Peaks series

• finish the Life of Brian series

• finish the 1977 Gay Trial series

• finish the series about the architectural history of Linlithgow

• finish The Seeds of Gay Doom. This series was begun and “completed” in 2024 but this year I wrote a new chapter, documenting the second season of the RTD2 era of Doctor Who. I also began a coda chapter on the demise of RTD2, to give the series a proper ending. However, I can’t finish that until the demise is officially confirmed, as that is essential for “the story”. Apparently this will happen at the end of 2026. Therefore, I expect to publish these new chapters in early 2027.

• write more of the Grim Rhymer series

• write more of the Loony Left series

• rewatch films I knew in the 1990s but haven’t watched since, and give them a fresh appraisal - “Revisiting the 1990s”

• write some more TV guides

In addition, people are asking for my essays to be made available in paper book form. The obstacle there is deciding how to arrange them into collections that have internal unity, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Like most things, it just needs some time spent on it. Then I will see whether any publishers in our movement can be enticed.

But first… a break. Working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week is my natural tendency, but after the events of this year I really need a rest; my last one was in August 2023!

Once recuperated, there are “IRL” things I really should attend to, things I have been putting off. There is a lot that I need to get into order. Obviously I can do that while writing, but a break from “MW work” will definitely help me make a start on all those things. Luckily I have some essays ready. Those will begin going out at the start of March, and I expect to return to full-time writing shortly thereafter. (That’s my plan, anyway. But it was my plan this time last year, and events intervened.)

I want to thank everyone who has supported me in 2025. I will probably forever be more famous for Millenniyule and my 2010s videos, but Substack is now “my main thing”, sustaining me financially and keeping me occupied creatively throughout the year. I also think that written, polished essays are a more enduring contribution than videos, potentially a valuable resource for future historians, and I take that responsibility very seriously. But this work wouldn’t be possible without the people who make it a livelihood for me. Thank you.

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It is renowned as a sci-fi sitcom but, while excelling at those two genres, it is more still. I would go so far as to say that, at its best, Red Dwarf is as good as television gets. It has depth, it has frights and chills, and it is sometimes very touching. All of it is character-driven, and the characters are as memorable as any in the annals of British comedy.

It also has a lo-fi feel that is absolutely charming. The production design is great, particularly in the “golden era” of seasons 3 to 5 when, to my mind, the ship’s interiors resemble an up-market leisure centre from that era (the early 1990s).

The model work, too, deserves praise, ranging from the pyrotechnic exit of Starbug from the mothership in Demons & Angels, to the ominous intro used throughout the first two seasons. Special mention should also go to the music, all composed by the very talented Howard Goodall.

Being a prestigious BBC property, Red Dwarf is very well-protected online which means that few of the episodes are available on video-sharing websites. I have linked where possible, but to view most of my recommendations you will need to “go the legal route”.

In my selections, eagle-eyed readers will notice a complete neglect of episodes post Season 6. That is sadly not an accident. Other than the moose gag in Trojan, I just don’t like any of it. This is a show that plainly needs both of its original writers - Doug Naylor and Rob Grant - in order to be up to par, and unless they can work together again, I don’t think it will ever recapture its 1988-92 glory.

The apex episodes

Marooned
This has a very simple storyline which mainly serves to place Rimmer and Lister alone together for an extended period of time. The episode rests on - and is loved for - the conversations they end up having. The contrast between the two characters allows for interesting chat about civilisation, achievement, confidence, vulnerability, sincerity, and what life is all about.

Back to Reality
This episode combines everything that made Red Dwarf great: comedy, science-fiction, philosophy, scares, and brilliant character work. The premise is an original one, especially for the time, and it is very well-executed by cast and crew. The show is famous for its cameos and this episode has not one but two, from Timothy Spall and Lenny Von Dohlen, both very memorable.

Season 1

I have a lot of affection for the first two seasons. They are very different from what follows, especially Season 1 which is ultra low budget. The storylines are generally quite weak, but the characters and dialogue are so good that it just doesn’t matter. There is also a more sombre tone, again especially in Season 1; outer space feels genuinely lonely here in a way it just doesn’t in later, more action-packed, seasons.

The End
It is necessary to watch this, the very first episode, so as to understand the premise of the show. It’s also quite a thrilling novelty to see the ship pre-accident with all of its crew going about their humdrum work. You see how life aboard the Red Dwarf was, when things were “normal”, and it is completely different from how it will be hereafter.

Me2
This is the first Rimmer-centric episode, and Chris Barrie makes it hilarious from start to finish. The idea is a simple one: could you live with a duplicate of yourself?

Season 2

Kryten
There are many funny moments in this, and it is interesting to see Kryten being played by a different actor (to be honest, the character is completely different in this debut appearance). This episode is also worth watching for the hilarious parody of Australian soap opera Neighbours.

Thanks for the Memory
This is probably the first “great” episode of Red Dwarf, achieving its classic combination of good character work, good sci-fi, good comedy, clever plotting, and a bit of substance. It’s also very moving.

I can’t talk about this episode without drawing attention to this lovely special effects shot, made by combining live action footage with several layers of model work. Amazing what you can do with a low budget, right?

Stasis Leak
This episode is funny, above all. It is one of the first times we see alternative versions of the main characters. It’s also great to revisit the ship pre-accident, which includes seeing Mac McDonald again as Captain Hollister and Clare Grogan as Kochanski. The plotting is intricate and the story intriguing. Also, some parts are very nicely done; there’s an ominous tone to the black & white “flashback” footage, a sense of danger and dread about what is going to happen on the ship very soon, an awareness of the sheer scale of the events that are being toyed with by this time-travel.

Season 3

Polymorph
An absurdist rip-off of Alien and every 1980s monster movie, this episode is one of the classics beloved by fans. Lots of memorable lines.

The Last Day
This is a touching episode centred around mechanoid Kryten having to be deactivated because his replacement has arrived. The replacement is Hudzen 10, “the ultimate machine” - another great cameo performance, this time by Gordon Kennedy. Robert Llewellyn also doubles as the spokesman of Divadroid International, with an amusing “yuppie” voice.

Season 4

Justice
An interesting sci-fi idea is at the centre of a revolutionary penal complex where prisoners learn to behave well. Lots of funny stuff, even before we get to that. (I’m thinking of Rimmer’s “holiday” snaps and Kryten’s suffering through them.)

White Hole
Again, an interesting sci-fi idea produces lots of funny moments. The characters have to deal with time dilations. After amusing moments where Rimmer admonishes Lister for drunkenness, we get a climax with the only ever interstellar game of pool.

Dimension Jump
The first (and only good) appearance of Ace Rimmer, this episode asks how you would feel if you met an alternative version of yourself who had done much better in life than you have - and how he would feel about you.

It’s also hilarious, riffing on Top Gun, a theme emphasised in the music by Howard Goodall.

Season 5

Holoship
This under-rated episode is the show’s second take on Casablanca (the first being Season 4’s Camille) and by far the more effective. It is not just very funny but very moving. What’s more, it is redemptive for Rimmer. A really great story.

The Inquisitor
An original and intriguing premise opens the door for many funny moments and lots of good character stuff. The Inquisitor himself is both funny and terrifying; his threat, the capability he has developed, is surely one of the most awful things imaginable. My favourite bit in this episode is Kryten’s monologue early on, telling the legend in a needlessly dramatic fashion.

Terrorform
A hilarious episode journeying into Rimmer’s psyche, where his insecurities and fears are manifest physically. It also has hilarious scenes before (with Kryten’s hand conveying his predicament to the crew) and after (when they have to sweet-talk Rimmer in order to survive). Look out for the cameo by the gorgeous Sara Stockbridge.

Quarantine
This is one of the funniest episodes overall, with Lister, Kryten and Cat being trapped in quarantine by a deranged Rimmer. But even before that, when they explore the research base, there are some hilarious moments, especially with Professor Lanstrom (another great cameo, this time by Maggie Steed). It’s also quite scary here and there. And I love the model shots of the research base.

Demons & Angels
This is another episode where we see alternative versions of the main characters, in fact two versions, and both are hilarious. Peak praise has to go to the “low” version of Rimmer - an unforgettable twist on the character.

Special effects fans should also enjoy the model work in this episode, which even thirty years later looks incredible.

Season 6

This is sadly when the show’s decline started, and it is perceptible immediately, with an excess of recycled jokes (especially the Space Corps directives), generally flatter character work, and the cast hamming it up (especially Chris Barrie) so that they don’t seem like “real” characters any more. However, it does have three good episodes: Legion, Out of Time, and...

Gunmen of the Apocalypse
Many consider this one of the overall “apex” episodes, and it is very good. It adds “Western” to the genres the show has flirted with, and even throws in some Film Noir as well. The storyline is complex and the premise interesting, and there are lots of funny character moments.

Episodes that show Earth

Thanks for the Memory (flashbacks)
Backwards
Timeslides
Tikka to Ride
Ouroboros (flashback to Aigburth Arms pub)
Back to Earth

Episodes with pre-accident flashbacks

Balance of Power
Me2
Stasis Leak
Ouroboros

Where to see the shuttles

Blue Midget (original) - Thanks for the Memory
Starbug - season 3 onwards
White Midget - Ouroboros
Blue Midget (new) - Back in the Red (Part 3)
White Giant - Cassandra

Touching episodes

Kryten - when Kryten talks about his dream of a garden
Better Than Life - when Rimmer talks about his father
Thanks for the Memory - when they talk about lost love
Marooned - when Rimmer talks about his father
The Last Day - when the characters talk about their mothers
Holoship - when Nirvanah makes her sacrifice, and Rimmer makes his

Curiosities

Back to Earth - the only episodes not to have audience laughter. I miss it, but I think these episodes aren’t terrible and make for an interesting novelty.

The End (The Original Assembly) - included in the Bodysnatcher collection, this is the original take of the first episode, before emergency reshoots were done to solve teething issues with the cast and crew. It’s an interesting alternative, and a glimpse at the very first attempt to make this programme.

Marooned was shot mostly with handheld camera.

Bodyswap was shot without a live studio audience.

What I would have liked

I would like Marooned to have been a Christmas special, twice as long as a usual episode. Given the premise and the conversation topics between Rimmer and Lister, it could easily have been extended without becoming boring. In fact, the extra time would have helped to convey their plight. And, given the snowy planetoid they are marooned on, it would have been suitable for the festive season.

An episode later on, perhaps a finale episode, where they revisit the ship’s iconic sets that have appeared throughout the run, especially the original Drive Room from Season 1 - a set I love and which, unlike the original bunkroom, has never reappeared.

See my other TV guides here.

One of the differences between British and American society is the prominence of Jews in America. This creates a heightened awareness among the gentile public of “Jewishness” in general. Due to this and the First Amendment, American White nationalists often misunderstand the climate in Britain and recommend strategies which are simply not viable here.

In Britain, Jews are much less prominent in our culture because they are much less numerous in our population. If a Briton grew up and always stayed in rural towns, in his entire life he might never meet - or knowingly meet - a Jew. In the cities, most people will have had some experience with them but it will usually be limited to having dealt with a Jewish estate agent, lawyer, etc., which yields an apolitical, even “acultural” perception of them. Maybe they once knew a friendly shopkeeper who ordered in that thing they wanted - a nice memory but a very limited experience. Maybe they once had a stereotypical ruthless landlord, but they might not realise that he was Jewish, in which case his behaviour doesn’t contribute to a “pattern” in their mind. As a result, there is much less recognition among British people of Jews “as a group”. Even those who are aware of it tend to think it is defined purely religiously; they are just White people who have a different religion from most of us. This is how they are perceived by apolitical normies, everyday conservatives, and the anti-white woke Left.

Because of this, Brits are much less likely than Americans to realise that many of the key figures in their media are Jewish, or to see any significance if this were pointed out to them. In the legacy media: Stephen Fry, Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, Melanie Phillips, David Aaronovitch, Robert Peston, Esther Rantzen, Vanessa Feltz, David Baddiel, Matt Lucas, Simon Amstell, and even Rachel Riley. In the new media: Andrew Gold, Winston Marshall and of course the loathsome Konstantin Kisin. For Brits, these are just people with slightly strange names, and often not even that. When David Baddiel complains about anti-Semitism, well, he’s just protecting himself and other Jewish individuals from bigotry, isn’t he?

Thus, they don’t conceive of such a thing as “Jewish power” and wouldn’t believe you if you told them. In fact, they are so unaccustomed to the concept of group identity that they wouldn’t understand that they (White Brits) are a group, or that Jews could be one as well, or might see themselves as one. The idea of “opposing” it is therefore alien to them.

Yet, so concerned are some Jews about this possibility, they have given Tommy Robinson a career thwarting it.

I believe that the entire purpose of Robinson (and Douglas Murray and nowadays Nigel Farage) is to repurpose English nationalist sentiment for Zionism, or at least to prevent it from going “anti-Semitic”. While Robinson renounces English ethnic identity, he constantly celebrates Jews and Israel. In fact, he decries Muslim immigration to Europe while advocating Israel’s wars which increase it. Farage is more subtle but the same.

In fact, Zionist capture is all over our politics. Becoming a politician in Britain apparently entails getting introduced to the existence and influence of organised Jewry - knowledge that completely eludes the ordinary public.

During the previous Parliament, Declassified revealed that 27% of the MPs (180 of 650) had received money from “the Israel lobby”. The Conservative Party is effectively owned by that lobby. They are especially predominant in its senior echelons according to David Cameron, who once quipped that it would be more accurately called “the Torah Party”. Of its 365 MPs, a staggering 80% were members of the Conservative Friends of Israel. This percentage was the same in 2009 and probably long before then.

Of 202 Labour MPs, 75 (37%) were members of the Labour Friends of Israel. That party is less “captured” than the Conservatives, but still enough that Jeremy Corbyn, for not being sufficiently pro-Zionist, could be demonised as “anti-Semitic”, ousted as leader and replaced with the ultra-reliable Keir Starmer (complete with Jewish wife and kids).

Needless to say, the Liberal Democrat Party has its own “Friends of Israel” organisation. So do Farage’s parties; UKIP had one and now Reform UK is to get one.

The single exception is the Green Party. It does have a faction called Jewish Greens, but that is led by a man who seems rather anti-Zionist. The party itself is led by “certainly not a Zionist” Zack Polanski. Presumably it is being used as a silo to hold idealistic “hippie” Jews. However, we can bet that if it ever becomes an electoral force, all of this will change and Jewish Greens will be dissolved and replaced with a “Friends of Israel” organisation.

This is because, to join the club of British politics, supporting Zionism is an absolute requirement. For context, and to illustrate how ludicrous that requirement is, in 2007 the British government refused to ratify a convention on the grounds that “there are no indigenous people in the UK”. Thus, all of our mainstream political parties (and the British government itself) accept the reality of a Jewish people and their entitlement to a homeland, but deny the existence of an English people and thus their entitlement to a homeland (the very homeland that the British government and all of these parties supposedly exist to serve and protect).

This bizarre situation seems designed to have exactly the effects it has: hamstring British politicians, prevent them acting in the British people’s ethnic interests, and prevent them prioritising Britain over Israel.

Thus, if Israel needs money, we give it. If Israel wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza, we finance it and accept the resulting refugees. If Israel wants to be “first”, we settle for Britain being “second”. None of this is justified, except by the politician’s own personal interests; he wants bribes and junkets (presumably) and doesn’t want to be blackmailed or have his reputation or career annihilated.

But the compromised position into which this puts our politicians and commentators is fatally easy to “show up”. When Matt Goodwin bullishly declared that we should put Britain first and not any other countries, Aaron Bastani had only to ask “not Israel?” to have him squirming. Yes, despite what he had just said, Goodwin wants to make a special case for Israel. He attempted to justify this by saying that many Jews in Britain care about Israel. Well, many Pakistanis in Britain care about Pakistan. So what? It doesn’t mean the rest of us need to give a fig about Pakistan - and we don’t. Israel likewise.

But then, nobody tells us we should care about Pakistan, even though there are over five times as many Pakistanis in Britain as Jews… yet we are told to care about Israel.

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In America, public support for Zionism has been weakening with each generation. This was already apparent by 2014. In 2023 the decline had become so pronounced that ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt cited it as a major future problem.

It has multiple causes:

• the Holocaust (and World War II generally) receding in time

• 4chan

• the rise of 1st generation social media and then, after it turned censorious, the rise of 2nd generation (mostly uncensored) social media - Tiktok, Substack and X (Twitter)

• the drift away from mainstream media which kept 99% of people “on the same page”

• the progressive obsession with supporting “the underdog”

• “Jews are White” + “Whites are bad” = “Israel is bad”

• Israel’s behaviour

• the Jewish lobby’s increasingly clumsy messaging

I won’t detail each of these - they are self-explanatory - but will touch on all of them.

The Holocaust was the armour that shielded Jews as a group, and especially Zionism, from criticism. It could always be invoked, no matter how tenuously or disingenuously. Everyone knew: it’s a slippery slope from noticing this or that to carting them all into the gas chamber. Everyone understood that it was the lowest point of Western civilisation, something in the past that we must avoid in the future and atone for - nigh constantly - in the present. However, Gen X were less strident about all of this than the Baby Boomers. The Millennials less so (I’ve never even seen Schindler’s List). The Zoomers, less again. As the Holocaust drifted into the temporal distance, its rhetorical power dwindled.

I think that simple, unfixable problem is the primary factor behind declining support for Zionism. It enables the secondary factors.

Among “normies”, opinions are not so much arrived-at as picked up, unthinkingly, “from the ether”. The ether used to be defined by the mainstream media but that is now in steep decline. The average ages of viewers of American mainstream TV are sobering: ABC (61), CBS (64), CNN (67), Fox (68), MSNBC (71). This decline is happening even with the online versions of these outlets:

These TV channels artificially kept the Holocaust prominent in people’s thinking despite it being fifty, sixty, seventy years in the past. As the mainstream media loses traction, so does the Holocaust. We are returning to the natural state of man: being concerned about one’s own country, culture, family and life prospects instead of something that happened to a foreign people in a foreign country eighty years ago.

With “legacy” media dethroned, social media becomes important. The ether must be defined somehow, after all. The controllers of legacy media were acutely aware of this and tried to colonise the online space, astroturfing gatekeepers like Breadtube, Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman, and lobbying for everyone else to be deplatformed or deboosted. But Tiktok was never quite onboard with that censorship, neither was Substack, neither was Elon Musk. Old memes and greentexts from 4chan found new life. The ether was re-defined.

To be clear, I don’t think that most young Americans today are “anti-Semitic”. They just have a much more skeptical, ambivalent attitude towards Jewishness and Zionism than their grandparents had. And they are increasingly aware of concerns in their own lives, things that make it hard to care about what (to them) are mere abstractions, or “other people’s problems”. The idea that they should put such things ahead of their own concerns feels like an imposition.

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In March 2025, über-woke TV writer/producer Russell T Davies spoke at the “Gaydio Pride Awards”. In a rabble-rousing speech, the 61 year-old said:

I think times are darkening beyond all measure, beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime. The threat from America - it’s like something out of Lord of the Rings! It’s like an evil rising in the West. And it is evil.

We’ve had bad prime ministers before. We’ve had bad presidents before. [unintelligible] What we’ve never had before is a billionaire tech baron, unelected, openly hating his trans daughter. We have never had this in the history of the world. It is terrifying, because he and the people like him are in control of the facts. They are in control of information. They are in control of what people think. And that is what we are now facing.

However, he was optimistic about how marginalised but plucky gays will defeat a bigoted establishment:

But do you know what we’ll do? You know what we always do in times of peril and crisis?

We gather. And we meet in cellars at night, and we talk, and we plot, and we sing, and we paint, and we manifest ideas. We go on marches, we do [petitions], we attack, we talk to politicians, we organise ourselves. In the end what we do is we educate. We take everything we know and we go out there and we educate.

It’s a cosy idea. The setting - cellars at night - is so cute, you just know this man has never been an actual rebel, trying to change the world from a position of weakness. He has never been so unfortunate as to have to actually “speak truth to power”. The power, even if veiled, was always on his side.

However, you can see why he wants to believe it. The idea bolsters the typical leftist self-image:

• brave

• oppressed

• resourceful

• creative

• sensitive

• peaceful

• intelligent (able to persuade politicians)

• enlightened and wise

• educators of the masses

Davies gave this speech shortly before a TV drama he had written over a year earlier was broadcast. Clearly these thoughts had been in his head for some time, because the drama featured a scene closely matching his description:

The disabled, the trans, the gay… the “non-conformists”, the ones who “don’t fit in”, the ones who “think differently”… they gather in a (pristine, well-lit, well-organised and very spacious) cellar, where they inspire each other with song, dance, painting and performance. Because this is how change happens, right?

Davies’ description of “changing the world” was so perfect in its naivety, it revived thoughts I have had for some time about where this notion came from. How did leftists get it into their heads that they had changed the world with “ideas”, not sheer financial and political strength?

Let’s go through some historical precedents, “moments” that probably contributed to this archetype of joyous leftist rebellion.

1900s-1910s: Russian Communist émigrés

Lenin and many colleagues lived in exile in dingy boarding houses around Europe.

They were not “singing” or “painting”. They were certainly plotting, but their plotting was based on a ruthlessly realistic understanding of power - real power, not “the power of ideas”. They had no intention, and saw no need, to “educate” the masses or “petition” the powerful. With huge financial backing from Wall Street, they were going to take over the government, murder the Tsar and his family, seize power by force, then use it to impose their vision on the masses with ungodly brutality. Millions of people would be murdered. As Lenin (supposedly) said:

If for the sake of Communism it is necessary for us to destroy 9/10ths of the people, we must not hesitate.

There would be no educating, no persuading. The masses would be terrorised until they either submitted or were dead. Sensitive? Wise? Enlightened? Peaceful?

We needn’t discuss the implementing of other Communist regimes. They were all the same as this.

1900s-1910s: Bohemian circles in London

This is probably closest to what Davies was describing. In the years around World War I, “Bohemian” groups in London would meet in artist colonies, galleries and drawing rooms to discuss ideas, play music and share art, and generally “be creative”.

It was implicitly and stridently progressive yet not doctrinally so, because the doctrines had not yet been written. This left room for creativity and wandering. This was the London of EM Forster and Lytton Strachey, the Bloomsbury Group and the Fabian Society, but also of Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, the Vorticists and the Theosophists. Reactionaries brushed alongside progressives because neither side was “on top”.

However, to focus on the progressives (since Davies would never laud reactionary politics), it has to be noted that they didn’t have a manifesto or a party or a plan, made no political demands, and didn’t achieve anything concrete in terms of changing the world. It was not political activism. You might call it metapolitics - laying cultural groundwork for later political change.

It is also vital to note that, unlike Davies’ notion of political rebellion, these people were fully accepted by the mainstream and “the establishment” even while they strayed from its beliefs. They were not oppressed. This is why they lived in comfort and decadence, and had the freedom to “sing”, “paint” and “manifest ideas” etc.

1960s New York City

When Camille Paglia champions “that ‘60s spirit”, she is probably thinking at least partly about NYC. At that time there was much less wealth in the city than today, so it was possible for poor artists to rent or even buy large loft spaces, for budding entrepreneurs to open off-beat cafes, and for people to live there and frequent these places without being millionaires.

There is no doubt that, in the spheres of music, literature and art, 1960s NYC was a bustling hothouse. Was it political, as Davies espouses? Some of it certainly was (I’m thinking of the feminist and gay activism) but most of it was simply creative and decadent. Lenin and his émigré chums achieved actual political action because they were anything but decadent; they had drive, focus and relentless determination. And of course, they had elite backing. In 1960s NYC, the latter was also true. Record labels and publishing houses were expressly cultivating the underground, the controversial and the leftfield. As for the art world, it was pouring cash into the outré, the avant-garde and the bewildering. The epitome of this would be Andy Warhol with his “Factory”, peopled by an assortment of creatives, degenerates, oddballs and nutcases.

This was not political activism as such, like Davies raves about. It was metapolitical, and (almost as if mainstream politics had become irrelevant by the 1960s) it had definite social, cultural and political consequences. This is why, many decades later, people often say that we are still living in the aftermath of the 1960s.

The important thing is that all of this was, for sure, pushed from above.

1969: Woodstock

Similarly, Woodstock was a creative phenomenon that had metapolitical effects. Unlike Andy Warhol’s Factory, it has the reputation of being spontaneous, organic, grass-roots, etc. This is untrue. It was organised by elite, well-connected Jews who, in a newspaper ad asking for business ideas, described themselves as “young men with unlimited capital”.

It certainly was counter-cultural and subversive, but against a culture that was already largely defeated and certainly didn’t have “unlimited capital” with which to defend itself, let alone the organisational potential or the clear-eyed determination of that force which was now openly opposing it.

1980s: feminist and gay pride marches

Davies had personal experience of this as a young adult, having taken part in gay activism in the 1980s. Yet, I don’t think he was reminiscing about this when he said his jubilant words at Gaydio. Perhaps he remembers it that way, but I am dubious. British gay men, of his age, tend to be in love with the late Victorian and Edwardian demimonde, Bohemian edginess flirting with high society, decadence and debauchery, marriages of “convenience”, cottaging, cafés frequented by theatrical types, eccentric “fag hags” and talented and forthright young men. It is the world of Oscar Wilde, living on in eternal oppression, bravery, aristocratic erudition and learned wit… even a century after the oppression has ended, the education dumbed down, and the erudition long since given way to Guardian midwittery - credibility bought with a spice latte. I wouldn’t be surprised if Davies transposes the glamorous Edwardian “ideal” onto his personal memories of a bunch of middle-brow gay guys in a pub in 1985.

However, no matter the erudition of his comrades, it can certainly be said that they were not “open-minded” in the manner that he celebrates. By 1985 that had been replaced by doctrine. I also think it is increasingly clear now, to ordinary people, that any “education” these activists had to offer the masses - whether on gay rights or feminism - was misguided at best and malicious at worst.

Moreover, they certainly were not “plotting”. They didn’t need to. By 1985 the powerful were on their side, even if still clandestinely. Cinema and TV were depicting gay people freely, and feminism was thoroughly embedded in everyday life. These things had already been selected, at a very high level, and the likes of Davies were merely pawns to implement it “on the ground”. They were pushing at an open door, even if they sincerely believed they were oppressed rebels.

I would be amazed if Davies has ever been in a situation such as he described. If his own words are to be believed, gay men face greater threat in 2025 than he and his friends did in 1985.

2010: Occupy

Occupy was not what Davies described, but it was left-wing and, at least apparently, organic. There are unconfirmed rumours that George Soros funded it to some extent, but I don’t believe this. I think it was a grass-roots movement and therefore quite shambolic. And of course, it didn’t achieve its aims. What did happen, either in response to Occupy or because Soros was indeed using it as a prototype, is that the corporate world started massively funding left-wing activism, in order to get such people in line with globalism and corporatism. This eventually got to the point where so-called anarchists were defending global capitalism, corporate censorship, state oppression, and government-imposed lockdowns.

2010s “wokery”

Virtually any left-wing movement that flourished in the 2010s probably had funding from Big Capital or powerful NGOs.

The Left (and yes I dare to make such a blanket statement) were happy to support all sorts of things as long as they were done by people who professed agreement with them on all social issues: feminism, immigration, diversity, abortion, childlessness, gay rights, trans, and “safety” (eg. from covid or from “hate speech”). Meantime, Big Capital was happy to profess agreement with the Left on all these issues, because this made them obedient.

Thus, we saw freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry and freedom of association being trampled by the powerful while their actions were defended by “the open-minded Left”. We saw blatant contradictions being argued by the “intelligent and educated” Left. We saw hellish injustices being excused by the “more moral” Left.

It was an appalling spectacle because it demonstrated the power of, well, power. It can contort people so that they will contradict themselves, defend the indefensible and believe the unbelievable.

2018: Greta Thunberg

This one is too easy.

Let me first make the concession that Greta Thunberg is not the decadent sort of activist that Davies described. I cannot imagine her being open-minded enough to “talk” in a relaxed way and “manifest ideas”. If she sings or paints, it will be for therapeutic rather than creative or social reasons.

Greta became a global figure overnight because she had elite backing; her wealthy parents had been climate campaigners for a long time and were in touch with various media moguls.

To underline: when you are getting glowing cover stories in Time Magazine and GQ, you are not counter-cultural, you are not “speaking truth to power”, and you are certainly not oppressed.

For years, she had prominence and prestige and was worshipped for intoning, as if either wise or learned, about climate change and what we all must do to combat it.

When she did something the elite didn’t like, however, they instantly transformed her into a mocked irrelevance.

2018: Chemnitz concert

This is a truly grotesque inversion of “protest”, a mockery of “people power”, since it was entirely organised from above - not merely astroturfed but wholly created by the powerful.

In the East German city of Chemnitz, a migrant killed a German, Daniel Hillig. Anti-migrant protests erupted, outnumbering the leftist counter protests. Concerned this might sway the public, the city organised a rock concert against racism. The goal was to lull the masses back to sleep and intimidate the Right into silence by weight of sheer numbers.

Hillig’s body was hardly cold when thousands of leftists, having been bussed in from around Germany to manufacture the crowds, danced and cheered to far-left rappers, on a stage financed by Big Capital and broadcast by 11 different radio stations and a mainstream TV channel. The truth not only didn’t matter, it was being actively buried. Educating? Enlightening? Oppressed? Speaking truth to power? Laughable.

2018: Extinction Rebellion

While claiming to be a grass-roots movement, this had funding from “major donors, NGO’s, trusts and foundations”. This explains how spruce and well-resourced it all was, with professional placards, highly-organised demos and even well-crafted bespoke costumes and make-up.

There are two points to make about this movement.

First, it was not the decadent bohemian set-up that Davies enthused about, but a very 2010s creation: highly ideological and doctrinaire, shrill and joyless. They did not “talk” or “manifest ideas”, and they certainly didn’t do it “in cellars at night”. They were not being funded to sit around exploring ideas and having fun. They were being funded to sway the middle-class towards believing in climate change and the measures against it that corporations, NGOs and globalist bodies wanted to undertake.

Second, the movement (though still extant in October 2025) effectively died when elites turned their backs on it. As the apotheosis of wokery, it was doomed when that fell out of fashion. That happened because elites got cold feet about transforming the world with social justice and Agenda 2030. (I believe this, in turn, happened for geopolitical reasons, but that’s another story.) The point is that, without elite backing, Extinction Rebellion has been dormant for more than a year, despite the many talented people who were clearly involved in it.

2018: Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests)

This stands as a great counter example, showing what happens when a movement lacks elite backing and defies the regime: the regime defeats it.

The Gilets Jaunes was a French movement best described as anti-globalist. I first realised it was being treated by the regime as “far-right” when Hope Not Hate had it on the cover of their 2019 “State of Hate” report. In reality it was not “far-right” at all. But it certainly wasn’t progressive. It was a populist movement partly sympathetic with the “old left” (eg. demanding an increase to the minimum wage) but mostly concerned with abuse of the working and middle classes by the elite via exorbitant taxation.

An estimated three million people took part in civil disobedience lasting nineteen months between November 2018 and June 2020. Ironically, a movement against globalism, neoliberalism, government corruption and state contempt for ordinary people, was ended by the covid lockdowns which epitomised all of these things.

While it lasted it was largely ignored, demonised and sometimes violently suppressed by the French government. Riots were put down with police using grenades which resulted in thousands of needless injuries, including dozens of protesters losing hands and eyes. President Macron was never afraid.

However, it should be noted that the Gilet Jaunes, despite being entirely grass-roots, did enjoy a few victories. Of its 42 demands, five were conceded by the French government. But these concessions were bought with much suffering and struggle, and the other 37 demands came to nothing.

If there was any “singing” or “painting” going on among the Gilet Jaunes, it is somewhat overshadowed by the life-changing injuries inflicted on them by the elite.

2012-2020: Black Lives Matter / Summer of Floyd

BLM emerged in 2012 and made $90m in donations in its first year, being advised by Tides Foundation and the Centre for Media Justice. Within a few years it was being supported by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

BLM peaked with the “Summer of Floyd” in 2020. This was so astroturfed that it’s frankly astonishing anyone believed it “organic”. Every corporation, academic department, NGO, charity, government and nearly every TV channel around the West voiced outraged agreement with BLM, even against the clear truth that George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose. For a succinct list of companies that funded BLM (to the tune of many tens of billions) in the wake of Floyd’s death, see here.

The only counter-cultural thing about BLM was this graffiti:

And, once again, now that wokery has fallen out of favour at the elite level, BLM is in decline.

2020: CHAZ

An adjunct of the astroturfed 2020 BLM riots, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle actually was grass-roots activism, though not of the high-brow type that Davies espouses. Having gone off-script by seizing a small part of the city centre, antifa were very much left to their own devices by Big Capital, NGOs and the state (which explains the shambolic nature of the encampment) while mainstream media gave them sympathetic coverage.

The antifa apparently thought that, by setting this example, they would bravely make a stand for their beliefs and educate the general public on a better way to live. The actual result was a mixture of chaos, dirt and impotence. It achieved nothing, because it had no backing.

2022 Ottawa trucker protest

Like the Gilets Jaunes, this is an example of a genuine grass-roots movement being crushed by the elite. This movement was immediately condemned as far-right (and “racist”) by the regime in Canada because it defied the wishes of the regime and the regime’s go-to bogeyman is always “the far-right”. In actual fact it seems to have vastly comprised centrists and mild right-wingers.

However, being of this persuasion and of a certain social class, it lacked the “creatives” and intellectuals that Davies raved about, so is not the sort of thing he was alluding to. I include it only to demonstrate, as with the Gilets Jaunes, that a protest without elite backing will go nowhere. The elite will shut it down, for example like GoFundMe shut down their campaign, depriving them of $4m in public donations, which they needed since they certainly weren’t getting any funding from Big Capital.

The movement’s spokesman and co-organiser, Benjamin Dichter, presented it as well-meaning and earnest, speaking of “peace, love and unity” and even a “journey of enlightenment”. This did him no good. A week later, he and his colleagues were all arrested (and tormented), forbidden from using social media, and had their bank accounts frozen. After three gruelling years on trial, many of them are now being sentenced to prison time.

Just two years ago, the “peril”, “crisis” and oppression that Russell T Davies imagines gay men face today were being felt by a different group: the Gender Criticals. Many of them had lost jobs, contracts, and friends by disagreeing with the elite progressive consensus on trans rights. This is small beer compared with what I and my colleagues in the Alt-Right suffered, but still, it was a genuine ordeal.

The interesting thing, as I noted in a 2023 essay, was how these Gender Criticals naively imagined that society is democratic and that one gets one’s way by professing one’s goodness and wisdom (just as Benjamin Dichter attempted). Having defied the elite for the first time in their lives and got “cancelled” for it, the Gender Criticals would now “speak out”.

I wrote:

Presumably they think being real rebels will resemble their experience of being faux rebels: you will campaign, make your voice heard, speak derisively about those who oppose you, get a few chat show appearances about the matter and maybe a book published by Simon & Schuster, voice your arguments, win the debate, and finally, after literally weeks of struggle, you will heroically effect the change that you want. Victory! Champagne all round.

But of course, that will not happen. The Gender Criticals will discover that being a real rebel is actually very hard. It is not glamorous, it is not fun, one thing doesn’t just swimmingly lead to another, people aren’t desperate to meet you, you don’t get books published to critical acclaim, Foyles don’t invite you to sign copies of the hardback and give a quirky speech to an adoring crowd, in fact you probably struggle to get a book published at all, and TV chat shows don’t invite you on to say your piece about that burning issue you’re so bravely flying the flag for. No. When you are cut out of the mainstream, you don’t get to “speak truth to power”. You get to be irrelevant. You get to be unemployed. You get to be mocked. You get to be forgotten.

That was in June 2023, when wokery was yet to be “deboosted” and the USAID funding was still in full flow. Since then the elite has turned somewhat against the trans agenda. As a result the Gender Criticals have had some “wins”. But those wins happened, not because of the Gender Criticals or their sensible arguments or their courageous lobbying, but because elites decided it was in their interests to switch. Maybe, at a push, they looked down and saw the Gender Criticals and were inspired by their pleas, or maybe those people mattered not a jot and the switch was pure expediency.

That switch is exactly what Russell T Davies, speaking twenty months later at Gaydio, was outraged about. He opposes the Gender Criticals because he is vehemently pro trans rights. But, when he talks about fighting for progressivism by “plotting”, “meeting in cellars at night”, “painting”, “manifesting ideas” and “educating”, he should remember that, without elite backing, you will get nowhere. In fact you will get punished, like the Canadian truckers, or the Alt-Right, or the Gilets Jaunes.

In the last year or so, leftists have experienced this reality for the first time in my lifetime. Examples in Britain would be the Bob Vylan performance at Glastonbury and the proscribing of Palestine Action. But the best example is their surprise at being punished for celebrating Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder.

It is arguable that Davies himself encouraged that murder. In a Big Issue interview in August 2025, his rhetoric had hardened since Gaydio in March. Now he was advocating that the LGBTQ community “should be revolting in terror and anger and action”. A month later, an LGBTQ activist murdered an innocent father of two.

In jubilant reaction, many leftists went public saying truly repulsive things. They clearly felt safe doing so, presumably believing (however subconsciously) that the elite were on their side and would shield them from blowback, and perhaps even reward them for celebrating murder. When this didn’t happen, their bewilderment was understandable; never before had they been without the backing of the elite (which they affect to despise). They were like fish out of water.

Davies was freshly outraged. Accepting an award, he gave another rant, saying it was a terrible harbinger that people had been punished for celebrating the murder. He also complained about being a victim of industry “censorship”, or rather, a new requirement that “you have to balance it” on issues. It appears that, between March and October, Disney stopped co-funding his show Doctor Who, partly because it was too woke (yes, even for Disney!). Davies’ employer, the BBC, presumably then told him that they will no longer allow him to make one-sided leftist propaganda. To him, this is censorship, and at the podium he excoriated his superiors.

Imagine how pampered you would have to have been all through your career that merely being required to be balanced and to not celebrate murder feels like an outrageous imposition.

But this might be just the start of the impositions. If the elite give up on his worldview wholesale, and if he persists with it nonetheless, it will backfire on him. His naive notions of underdog rebellion will be disproved. When he attempts for the first time in his life to actually “speak truth to power”, maybe he will, for the first time in his life, not be rewarded for being “stunning and brave”. Maybe, like the Gender Criticals when his kind were in charge, he will get to be irrelevant, unemployed, mocked and forgotten. He won’t be allowed to “manifest ideas” or “educate” the public; the powerful have decided against that.

So much for the underground. So much for democracy.

I do not mean to say that there is no such thing as “people power”, that ordinary people have no agency at all. I just mean that, unamplified by the powerful, your voice will be but a whisper and you will be punished just for whispering. The necessity of elite backing is a secret that has always been known to those who sought it out, only to pretend after the fact, whether to kid themselves or to dupe their admiring fans, that they succeeded without it.

We of the Alt-Right learned what Davies has not: political activism is useless until you have at least some backing from the powerful. It might be different in times of upheaval, but we are (for now at least) in a time of stability, insofar as an elite hold sway and those who defy them get punished - as we saw with Charlottesville, the Gilet Jaunes, Jan 6th, the Canadian trucker convoy and the Southport riots.

This is not a counsel of despair. What I am trying to do is cultivate the hard-headedness that the Communist émigrés had, because they actually succeeded in their aims. Speaking personally, my natural habitat is the decadence of laid-back chatter in dimly-lit London drawing rooms, but I know that the metapolitical is in itself impotent, and must be seen as a stepping stone to the political. The journey to be made is from the raw idea to the elite. It might be that the metapolitical phase can be deemed successful only if that transition is achieved.

Below is the original version of the photograph which has become iconic as the image that closes Kubrick’s film. He intended to stage the photo himself but his researchers found this one and it was exactly what he needed. He said:

I originally planned to use extras, but it proved impossible to make them look as good as the people in the photograph… I think the result looked perfect. Every face around Jack is an archetype of the period.

One can see exactly what he meant:

A mystery for 45 years, the photo’s provenance was finally identified in 2025. It was taken at a Valentine’s Day ball in London in 1921. So it does not show American high society of the Great Gatsby mould, even though it looks like it. This demonstrates the lingering similarity (as well as the sheer interplay) at that time between Britain and America. On either side of the Atlantic, the upper-class phenotypes had not yet diverged (first in America with its infusions of Germans, Jews and Italians then in Britain with the Third World) so the two groups were still indistinguishable.

Of that bright young crowd in 1921, the vast majority would be British. Some of them have been confirmed. Some elite Americans have been identified by Rob Ager, but I think he is unlikely to be correct.

Among this very WASP crowd was one single anomaly. The man at front-centre (later pasted over with Jack Nicholson) was an eccentric Russian Jew, Santos Casani (Joseph Zisling), who had moved to London around five years before. A former soldier turned ballroom dancer, Casani had been disfigured in a crash two years earlier so was actually wearing a prosthetic nose in the photo. He remained in London for the rest of his life, teaching dance, and died in 1983.

The ball took place at the Royal Palace Hotel in Kensington. Designed in 1892 by Basil Champneys, this was a lovely Victorian building in the Queen Anne style, with stunning interior décor. The exact location was the ballroom of the Empress Rooms, an opulent extension added to the hotel in 1897 and designed by Herbert Legg.

The Empress Rooms was extraordinarily well-fitted with no expense spared in technology or aesthetics:

The ball-room, which is by far the largest in London, will be made to serve also the purpose of a hall for concerts and public dinners, and will be used on Sunday evenings during the London Season for dinners à la carte, at which the Royal Blue Hungarian Band will play. The rooms will be available for wedding breakfasts, balls, banquets, receptions, concerts, &c., being very handsomely furnished. Great attention has been paid to the floor of the ball-room, which is set on springs. This room has panels covered with cerise tinted silk, and the wainscoting is of polished birch and sycamore, the ceiling being in white and gold. The electroliers are a great feature, being of exquisite design and finish; and, in addition to this centre lighting there are thirty five-light brackets round the walls, and these as well as the centre electroliers are fitted with cut-glass globes, the result being that the room is lighted to perfection without the slightest glare.

Immediately, the Empress Rooms became a focal point for high society. Newspaper coverage from the late 1890s and early 1900s notes a staggering succession of parties, balls, dances, concerts and exhibitions held there.

In an alarming example of life imitating art, in 1902 there was a masked ball in the very room where the photograph would be taken, and…

1904 saw a “leap year ball”, at which ladies were invited to approach gentlemen:

The earliest photo I could find is this, from 1905, which I believe was taken from the same balcony as the 1921 photo but looking at the other end of the ballroom:

In 1920 the Empress Rooms reopened after renovation to bring its aesthetics “up to date”, and this Art Deco style is what we see in the famous photo.

That 1921 ball was organised by renowned dance teacher Belle Harding who had been associated with the Empress Rooms for many years. She had written in the Daily Mirror in 1919:

The charm of life lies in variety.

The charm of modern ballroom dancing lies in its variations, and is eloquent of the mood of the moment.

I am constantly being asked whether, in these days of peace, we may look for a return of the old-fashioned waltz - demure, reserved, but very tiring - and I reply, in its old form, never.

In this restless age, when one dances both day and night away, the restricted evolutions of the old waltz has no appeal. We do waltz, but it is a modern version.

A walk, a chassez, a canter, and other variations are introduced to relieve the monotony, and pander to our modern waywardness.

Born in 1865, Harding had grown up in the late Victorian era. Though she seems acceptant of post-war frivolity, she seems also to understand that something is wrong. I don’t think I am reading too much into her words. Can “waywardness” really be meant as a good thing? “Restless” perhaps, but I don’t see how any thoughtful person could think it good for society to be “wayward”. Harding would go on to enjoy her heyday in the 1920s so, while she observed this “mood of the moment”, she benefited from it so perhaps didn’t think it terribly concerning. In retrospect, we know that it was.

Even at the time, it was obvious to many of a certain age that the Great War had uprooted Britain. People, especially young people, were happy to be at peace, but they didn’t know what to do with it. What did the future hold, and what should it hold? An uneasy situation for a country whose empire had already lost its confidence. And, due to the Great War, so many young faces had been lost from high society. Then there was the threat of America - for how long would it bow to the Old World? Troubling questions. Well, at least there were pleasant diversions to occupy the mind.

The actress, aristocrat and socialite Muriel Barnby had a women’s gossip column in the Sunday Pictorial under the pseudonym “Kiki” (previously “A Town Mouse”). She wrote to her fans in the run-up to Harding’s Valentine’s Day ball:

Oh, yes, I’d almost forgotten to tell you a very exciting bit of news. I’m to be one of the judges of the foxtrot competition at the Empress Rooms on St. Valentine’s Night at the “hearty ball”. You’re given a heart to wear on your sleeve when you arrive - in case you haven’t got one - and somewhere there’s another to match it.

Afterwards, she reported:

Miss Bedells and I were judging the dancing competition at the Empress Rooms that night, and Heather Thatcher was another of the judges. She wore an Early Victorian gown with lace frills, demure rosebuds holding her “bertha” on her shoulders. And with it she wore a tortoiseshell monocle.

Lord Leigh, who was born in the [eighteen]‘fifties, was at Miss Harding’s supper-party, but wouldn’t judge, being “a mere amateur”, he said. Nevertheless, he was the gayest of us, and couldn’t understand why people needed coffee or spirits to keep themselves going.

The ball was also reported in Kensington’s local newspaper:

A special dance was held under the direction of Miss Harding at the Empress Rooms, Royal Palace Hotel, on St. Valentine’s Day (last Monday). Ballot dances, Continental attractions, and a fox-trot competition with novel prizes were performed. The judges were well-known members of Society, the Stage, and the Press. Murray Pilcer’s Band played some good music.

It all sounds so harmless and good-natured. But what of all the young elite who could not attend, because they had died in the Great War? Vigorous, capable, brave and honourable, the best of our gene-pool, ready to take their country into the future, but instead they were just dead meat dissolving into soil - a lamentable waste which, it seems to me, doomed their country in the long term.

Still now, there was the lingering wealth and prestige from Victorian times. See how the Empress Rooms were advertised:

The following year, the Evening Standard gave an account of what must have been an astonishing experience at the venue:

Sunlight is the last thing usually associated with an all-night dance, but it was a feature of the ball held last night at the Empress Rooms. A wonderful lighting scheme had been devised, and at nine o’clock at night the effect was that of a strong afternoon sunlight.

As the night wore on the sun went down, sunset gave place to dusk, and at midnight the great ballroom was apparently illuminated by the soft light of a full moon, which in turn sank to rest, and the half-light of dawn was followed by morning sunshine. At 2:30am the dancers were disappointed to find that they had to go home in the dark, after all!

The expertise, ingenuity and wealth to achieve this in 1922 can hardly be exaggerated. It was late-imperial decadence, certainly, but still the venue was being advertised with a note of Victorian rectitude, as in this pictorial which explained the brilliant engineering of its now-legendary dance-floor:

In surveying what followed, we should consider the ambition (and nascent foreignness) of Britain’s child America. When the merry 1921 ball took place, the Federal Reserve had already existed for eight years, Wall Street was ploughing towards the Great Crash of 1929, and in the decade after that Franklin D Roosevelt would engineer Britain’s castration with World War II. That cataclysm would divorce Britain from its imperial and Victorian past. It would also (as shown in Jack Torrance) divorce Americans from their civilisational heritage. But it would do the same to Europeans. Indeed, one can see foreshadowings of this in aesthetic changes before the war, as classical elegance gave way to modernist whimsy:

But foreshadowings are one thing, a world war is another. Britain would never be the same again.

Ominously, the Empress Rooms retained prominence in London society until exactly that point. After a final dance in May 1940, the times precluded frivolity. The venue is absent from newspapers until 1944 when a darts competition was held there. During those years of disuse its opulence would have decayed somewhat. In 1945 a diorama exhibition took place… and then nothing.

Just before the end of the war, Belle Harding died, aged eighty. It seems to symbolise the end of the era she represented. This is made more stark by the fact that she was in good health, still dancing and teaching, and only died because of a horrible accident at home.

The Empress Rooms went unmentioned in newspapers until 1949, at which point it was used as an issuing centre for ration tokens (a grim demonstration, in a place that formerly epitomised Britain’s wealth, of its post-war penury). In the 1950s its grand larger rooms were used as offices by the Civil Defence Corps, no doubt being stripped of their beauty in the process. Meantime, Kensington Council used the building’s upper storeys for social housing.

In 1955 Santos Casani was interviewed on “the Torrid Twenties” and “the Terrifying Thirties”. He reminisced:

Ah, that was the time when people had money and liked to spend it whatever time of the day it was. And it was the time when people loved dancing. They would dance at tea-time, dinner-time, and supper-time.

Casani had disdained the arrival of primitive dances such as “the Black Bottom”. No doubt he was alluding to that when he lamented the inversion of hierarchy that had occurred as culture became “democratised”:

In those days a new dance used to be started by society and dribble down to the palais. Now it’s the other way round. It starts in the jungle and ends in the nightclub.

But perhaps that is what happens when the elite occupy themselves with trivia; if they won’t take their position seriously, why shouldn’t people consult the jungle? But, at the same time, we need to bear in mind America’s influence, and its emerging new elite who exalted Black culture, especially in dance. Casani’s casual racism was picking up on that. He was nostalgic for a WASP culture that, though itself degraded by the 1920s, had visibly been supplanted by the 1950s. Nowadays we complain about rap, drill, twerking, “wiggerism” and MLE, but they are not the first uses of Black culture to assault White civilisation.

The same interviewer also spoke with Casani’s colleague Josephine Bradley, who recalled:

The most popular place for tea dances was the Empress Rooms at Kensington. I wonder what’s happened to them.

These two jewels of Victorian London, the Royal Palace Hotel and the adjoining Empress Rooms, survived for forty years after the 1921 photo was taken. In 1958 they were bought by Jewish hotelier Maxwell Joseph. Soon after, he secured investment from financier Israel Instone Bloomfield and a building grant from the Labour government. In 1960 the Empress Rooms were demolished without ceremony, without acknowledgement of their former grandeur and importance. The hotel was demolished the following year. On the site of both was built a new hotel, a Brutalist monstrosity designed by Jewish architect Richard Seifert.

And so we see the historical dynamic that Kubrick reflected in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut: property, wealth and power transferred from one elite to its successor; the first corrupted by success, the second calmly destroying what it had bought.

The Shining (1980), which concerns the American ruling class from 75 years earlier, is different.

In the early 1920s, America had not yet ascended to superpower status. It had helped end the Great War and was heavily industrialised and extremely prosperous, and thus had shown its potential in various spheres, but it was yet to wrest the mantle of supremacy from its British parent. The Great War had already sown the seeds for that transfer, and in the meantime America shocked and delighted old Britain with jazz and the Charleston and the Black Bottom, and tremendous amounts of money continued to be made across America while Britain struggled. But there was still very much a presumption that “civilisation” was “the property” of the British, and Americans had to “live up” to their example by preserving their ways, holding to their standards, emulating their manners and trusting their judgements.

This idea was especially held by America’s upper-class, and the existence and distinctiveness of that class was itself significant; in America in the 1920s, “class” still meant more than how much money you made each year. It was a cultural status as much as a financial one. It expressed differently than in Britain, of course, but was very much a reality.

Kubrick’s film is an adaptation of a 1977 novel by Stephen King. I will assume reader familiarity with the film but not with the novel, and will speak of some differences between them. Deleted scenes and deleted chapters will be referenced. There will also be slight mention of King’s 2013 sequel, Doctor Sleep, and its 2019 film adaptation, but familiarity with them will not be needed.

Of special note, for our purposes, is one particular change that Kubrick made. In both novel and film, the Overlook seems eternally stuck in a moment in its past, a sort of “temporal fulcrum point” around which everything dreamily revolves, constantly referring back to it, facets of the moment being replayed, and people from the present being inserted into it retroactively. In King’s novel, the point in time is a masked ball in 1945. Kubrick changes it to a July 4th ball in 1923. I think this change is very significant.

By 1945, American culture had transformed radically from 1923. It had gone down a far more egalitarian route, lauding the “everyman” who had fought World War II, and celebrating the power of capitalism to make everyone equal and successful. This dethroned the WASP elite, and indeed all overt elitism and cultural hierarchy. Kubrick shows us the chaotic results of this change (in the form of the spiritually-crippled Jack Torrance) but he has the Overlook tied to the era before the change: the 1900s through to the 1930s, when the WASPs were still “on top”.

It is conceivable that this only appears to be the case, and that the Overlook is fashioning itself for Jack Torrance’s psyche. Maybe it is much more versatile, and, when targeting someone else, would emphasise some other period of its history. But I doubt it.

Admittedly, the deleted scrapbook sub-plot (removed only to keep the film a reasonable length) would have shed light on the Overlook’s history after 1923, showing that many deaths and murders have occurred. But these scenes would not negate the Overlook being “fixed” in 1923; they would only show that it had hurt many people since then, before the Torrances.

I think Kubrick was concerned with the end of empire. His Overlook embodies the dangers that face a people at that civilisational juncture.

We will discuss the various ghosts we see in the Overlook Hotel, as well as some of its staff.

Kubrick’s film has a very minor character called Bill Watson, a quiet and efficient man.

In King’s novel, Watson has far more dialogue and is very different - talkative, uncouth and (quite proudly) uneducated. Furthermore, he is actually the grandson of the man who built and first owned the Overlook, Robert Townley Watson (born 1864). That a wealthy man like “Bob T” could result in such working-class progeny is interesting. It seems to be a milder example of how the Overlook exploits and demeans people.

As explained in the novel’s deleted prologue:

One of the last of the Western giants that arose in the years 1870-1905, Bob T. came from a family that had made a staggering fortune in silver around Placer, Colorado. They lost the fortune, rebuilt it in land speculation to the railroads, and lost most of it again in the depression of ‘93-’94, when Bob T.’s father was gunned down in Denver by a man suspected of organizing.

Bob T. had rebuilt the fortune himself, single-handedly, in the years 1895 to 1905, and had begun searching then for something, some perfect thing, to cap his achievement. After two years of careful thought… he had decided, in modest Watson fashion, to build the grandest resort hotel in America.

From there, Bob T transitioned from a life of speculating to a life of hard manual work. He was devoted to the Overlook from the start, in the same way that later men like Grady, Torrance and (to some extent) Ullman would be. He lost everything in the course of keeping it going. Bankrupt by 1915, he sold it, but with the condition that he be allowed to remain as caretaker, for life, along with his son Richard. (His other son, Boyd, who had a mind for business, died mysteriously on the Overlook’s grounds while it was being built. This seems to be the first example of the Overlook fashioning a family to its needs.)

Born in 1897, Richard was a practical and hard-working boy, “more fitted for this [caretaker] life than one of affluence and college and business things”. He was married in 1922 and his son Bill was born shortly after (being nearly sixty in the novel). Bob T died in the early 1930s. His son remained, and eventually his grandson took over - a caretaking dynasty staying constant while the hotel passed swiftly from one owner to another.

For me as a Brit, it is difficult to understand the character of Bob T. That he could be both a shrewd, successful investor and a hard-working practical labourer seems like a contradiction to me, but perhaps makes more sense to Americans. More oddly, he was born into a “staggering fortune” and would presumably have got the best schooling money can buy, yet his dialogue and thoughts do not seem like those of an educated man. He seems uncouth, cynical, unsophisticated and resentful of rich people, just like his (much less wealthy) grandson would be. He must have had some social grace in order to navigate the world of big business, but this is not illustrated by King. Had the prologue been retained, perhaps these inconsistencies would have been cleared up in redrafting.

As for Kubrick, his film omits all of this history and presents Bill Watson as nondescript in personality and position. With this and the (late) removal of King’s scrapbook sub-plot, it seems that Kubrick wanted the Overlook’s early life to be vague and indistinct, lost in a haze of “WASPness”. Details would only get in the way of that.

I also think he did not care for King’s idea that the hotel had always been a financial drain on its various owners, never turning a profit in its 70-year history. That does not accord with what we see in the film: a successful and prestigious establishment that might be past its heyday (the jet set era, thirty years earlier) but is still doing well on the fumes of that.

This ghost is unnamed in the original novel and credited in Kubrick’s film as “Injured Guest”. In Doctor Sleep, King retcons him to be Horace Derwent, a character from his original novel. This creates problems since the man, as seen in both films, has clearly been killed with a blow to the head, while according to the original novel’s (deleted) epilogue Derwent died of old age.

Another inconsistency is that he is English in Kubrick’s film but American in Doctor Sleep (both novel and film) - but this has to be done, since the original novel stated that Derwent was American.

It explains that he was a sadistic bisexual magnate who was born poor in Minnesota but quickly gained extreme wealth through shrewd business decisions and shady connections. He owned the Overlook in the 1940s and remained linked to it well into the 1960s via money laundering and shell companies. He had connections with the mafia and they found the remote hotel convenient for various purposes, including conducting a “hit” there in 1958. Jack speculates that Derwent might even still own the hotel now, in 1977 (the deleted epilogue states Derwent died in 1976, raising the possibility that, upon death, he has united with the hotel).

Derwent came from the working-class (in a heavily Scandinavian, not Anglo, part of America) and the mafia are Italian/Jewish, all of which is a pronounced departure from the Overlook’s graceful WASP origins. Perhaps this is another reason Kubrick omitted all of this from the film.

In Kubrick’s film, Grady sounds extremely English. Yet, when Ullman is telling Jack about this former caretaker, why does he not mention that he was English? It would surely be unusual. The explanation is presumably that, when Grady was a man, he wasn’t English. He was a working-class American of 1970, but the Overlook has fashioned him in death into a posh interwar Englishman.

In fact, King’s novel might confirm this. Ullman tells Jack that Grady left high school without graduating. Now here are snippets of Jack’s first encounter with him:

He almost fell over the drinks cart that was being wheeled along by a low-browed man in a white mess jacket…

“Sorry,” Jack said thickly.

“Quite all right,” the man in the white mess jacket said. The polite, clipped English coming from that thug’s face was surreal…

“I was told you hadn’t finished high school. But you don’t talk like an uneducated man.”

“It’s true that I left organized education very early, sir. But the manager takes care of his help. He finds that it pays. Education always pays, don’t you agree, sir?”

Of course, the text doesn’t necessarily mean that Grady has an English accent, just that he speaks well, but there is no doubt that the Overlook has changed him. With Kubrick’s film, the same thing perhaps explains the mystery of why an upper-class Englishman took a job as caretaker at a remote hotel in Colorado. It might also explain why Ullman calls him Charles but “he” introduces himself as Delbert; the Overlook has given him a whole new identity, only tangentially based on the discarded one, the one it destroyed in a blitz of murderous insanity.

The same is undoubtedly true of Grady’s daughters. They would have been working-class American girls of 1970 - the kind whose father does janitorial work - but are now upper-class English girls.

The maître d’hôtel who says “good evening, Mr Torrance” when Jack joins the ball is English. Maybe in life he was an Englishman, or maybe, as with Grady, the Overlook has made him into one.

The woman in the bathtub never speaks so we don’t know whether she is American or English. But the film’s casting ironically makes the point: the young version is played by an English actress (Lia Beldam) while the old version is played by an American (Billie Gibson).

As a sidenote… in the novel, this woman died just a few months before Jack’s interview. I don’t like that. For me, part of the “sting” of this scene is the idea that she belongs to some unknowable pocket in the past, and has been drifting in the stale water of that bathtub for decades.

Another aspect of that scene which I find very affecting is the utterly blank look on her face as she rises out of the bath. It is as if the Overlook has drained everything out of her, creating a thoughtless mannequin that can somehow hurt people. I find this much more frightening than when she is cackling at Jack.

The man receiving fellatio from a bear-costumed man has very WASP features but doesn’t speak, so again we don’t know.

Lloyd the bartender is the only ghost whom we know to be American. However, even this isn’t straightforward. The actor Joe Turkel uses the old-fashioned “mid-Atlantic” accent, occasionally sounding pretty much English. The mid-Atlantic accent was associated with actors (which is probably how Turkel, hailing from Brooklyn, learned it) and with upper-class Americans such as would have visited a hotel like the Overlook. The accent is certainly not what one would associate with a bartender. As a result, this character seems to be, again, a hold-over from America’s pre-1945 past, when it was still deeply connected to Britain and still aspired to Old World notions of aristocracy and class. (The only discrepancy with Lloyd is that Turkel was a Polish-Jewish American so didn’t look WASP-ish at all.)

The hotel’s manager Stuart Ullman is American, although he celebrates royalty having visited the hotel who obviously would not be. But he rather vulgarly equates them with modern movie stars (“all the best people”). This seems like a comment on the decline of Western culture; “celebrities” used to be people of refinement, learning and accomplishment, now they are people who merely look good and have a talent for acting (a job which historically was seen as akin to prostitution).

In King’s novel, Ullman is unpleasant, arrogant and snobbish. Kubrick changes the character completely and has him played by the charming Barry Nelson. Friendly, polite, good-natured and coming across as pretty much “a standard man” in modern egalitarian America, the film’s Ullman is very different from the stereotypical WASPs of yore, and (with Nelson’s Norwegian genetics) doesn’t fit their phenotype.

But nonetheless, he is their successor. When the simple Wendy makes amazed, naive and superficial commentary about the Overlook, Ullman deftly handles her inferior cultural awareness. He does it with the subtlety of a true “man of the world”, and there is no sense of contempt.

However, a (famously) deleted scene from the end of the film would have shown that Ullman was involved with the supernatural goings-on at the hotel, fully complicit with evil despite his very affable demeanour. Kubrick kept this scene until the absolute last minute, removing it only due to audience feedback, so clearly it was his intent that Ullman be “involved”. For me this makes far more sense; I can’t believe that Ullman is the manager yet doesn’t “know”.

Class

Kubrick’s version of Jack Torrance is working-class. This is not just because he is played by Jack Nicholson, that charming ruffian. It is in the very characterisation - his dialogue and behaviour. He is radically different from the man in King’s novel, who is very comfortably middle-class. For example, he says the following about IQ tests:

I don’t believe in them. They strait-jacket the expectations of both parents and teachers.

One cannot imagine the film’s Jack saying something like that.

Like Kubrick, King was interested in social class, but he had very different intentions. Kubrick had the understanding of hierarchy that comes with being a very rigorous and intelligent thinker. He understood there will always be an elite, and that while this is both good and bad, it is always natural, necessary and therefore in a sense “right”. By contrast, King is a standard post-1945 liberal and sees the middle-class as the proper apex of society, with anything “above” that being culturally fraudulent, materially rapacious, and morally indefensible.

His Jack is of the middle-class but has “fallen” due to alcoholism. He was a well-regarded teacher at a private school but got fired after drunkenly punching a student, so is reduced to applying for a caretaker job at a hotel. This only happens because a former drinking buddy from the private school (Al Shockley) is extremely wealthy, has a 35% share in the Overlook, told him about the job and ensures he gets it.

By contrast, Kubrick’s Jack would never be allowed anywhere near a private school. He would never have an extremely wealthy and cultured friend whom he has a lot in common with. That is just not commensurate with the man we see. He is intelligent, but inescapably working-class in his manners and attitudes. He puts on a face for Ullman at the interview and sometimes acts lofty over the (much less intelligent) Wendy, but quickly descends to his brutish default whenever alcohol dissolves his pretensions. We see that there is a hollowness to him; left with infinite time to write a novel, he writes gibberish… because “there is nothing there”.

Jack is the product of what World War II, and the dethroning of the WASP elite, did to America. He is deracinated from all of history - the pre-1939 America, and the deep continuity that would give to “the Old World” of Europe. He values money and respectability - note how he balks at the idea of “working in a car wash” - but does not understand higher culture, does not understand what respectability is actually for.

Conscious of this lack in himself, he mocks higher culture. Stepping into the 1920s high society milieu of the Overlook ball, he does not “rise to the occasion” but instead flaunts his uncouthness. He speaks boorishly to the refined Lloyd and ostentatiously “joke dances” around the upper-class guests. This is a man who has no idea how to behave, who cannot adapt to a higher culture but hasn’t the humility to keep a low profile. He knows about money, power and sex, but not other forms of wealth. He is a predator.

This again seems to speak of Western decline. Ullman mentions “movie stars” because we don’t have aristocrats any more. 1970s America has ignorant bimbos in hot-pants but not elegant young women who went to finishing school and wear beautiful ball-gowns, living and sustaining a higher culture. 1970s America has Jack Torrance, a vulgar everyman who wants to sexually conquer those aristocratic women but resentfully loathes the culture that produces such beauty. He respects it only because it is powerful, because he feels impotent and desires power.

In this sense the film makes it difficult to side with one or the other - the elegant 1920s culture that has turned demonic, or the vulgar 1970s guy who bespoils it.

On the other hand, while only the base aspects of that culture appeal to Torrance, the same might be said of the 1920s ghosts themselves. They do not speak of higher things, do not seem to be interested in anything but power. For this reason, The Shining could be seen as an attack by Kubrick on WASP elites. But I think that would be a superficial reading.

I have long thought that, in Jack Torrance, the film shows a man “up against history”, the sheer force of which crushes him. Scanning the novel recently (I read it once, at the age of 11) I found an oddly similar thing written by King:

[Jack] promised himself he would take care of the place, very good care. It seemed that before today he had never really understood the breadth of his responsibility to the Overlook. It was almost like having a responsibility to history.

The Overlook “employs” him but the weight of the duty is more than a mortal man can bear. Jack is an ordinary man forced to “preserve” (but actually to contend with) the history of the Overlook, of America, of the West.

A related interpretation would say that a man cannot be up against “history”, because history is not inert. It is a space in which events and trends occur and slowly give birth to elements, forces which have their own agendas, and are immanent in the world.

In King’s novel, Jack is a good man corrupted by one of these elements. In Kubrick’s film, he is a bad man - psychotic, selfish and shallow - who is delighted to have finally found something that authorises these traits he has always had to subdue. The alcoholism is incidental, whereas in the novel it is the Overlook’s “predecessor” in corrupting Jack.

I believe this is the real reason King so dislikes Kubrick’s film: it turns his personal avatar (Jack Torrance) from a good, cultured man corrupted by alcohol into a reprehensible boor who would be so even without alcoholism. This deprives King of his comforting excuse and implies that he is by nature an angry, resentful, insecure charlatan. And indeed, his writing hardly represents the pinnacle of culture, however talented he may be. Those old aristocrats might have been pretending too, but if so, at least their pretence wasn’t predicated on jealousy. I think King hates Kubrick’s film because Kubrick’s Jack is the real Stephen King, not the victim he constructed for his novel.

Empire

That the Overlook was built on an ancient Native American burial ground is a detail absent from King’s novel and added by Kubrick, along with several other allusions (the hanging cloths in the lounge, the tins of food in the pantry, Wendy’s attire and hairstyle). I think Kubrick was a hard realist, and his attitude to empire was like MR James’ attitude to learning: it’s going to happen, and it needs to happen, but it always has a price and the first price is that it makes you complacent. He possibly believed that it also makes you evil, but I don’t think so because the film does not attack WASP culture in general, nor Anglo, nor European. It doesn’t even attack imperialism really, but simply shows that it comes with a cost. We know imperialism was on Kubrick’s mind because the film alludes to it with Jack’s line about the “White man’s burden”, the racism of Grady (“a nigger cook”) and the callous building of a luxury hotel (a plaything for the rich) on ground that is sacred to a conquered people.

The film gives us no understanding of the interplay between the WASPs who built and have died at the Overlook through the years (becoming malevolent ghosts) and the Native American spirits that already inhabited the ground. We cannot know whether the evil stems from one group or the other. Possibilities:

• the WASPs were always evil

• the WASPs were made evil by the Native spirits. (It would seem a strange revenge for the Native spirits to inflict on their oppressors, to make them powerful and immortal.)

• the evil somehow results from the two groups “combining”

I doubt Kubrick saw imperialism as inherently and wholly bad. (Does anyone seriously believe that he saw Congolese primitives as equal - in any way - to the people who built the English mansion he bought? He was far too much of a realist for that.) When you have a fallen view of human nature, as he undoubtedly did, it is much easier to accept that people do bad things without being bad, or wholly bad, and that they do things which are necessary but have bad consequences, that life simply doesn’t rhyme in grand couplets of justice.

But of course, that isn’t enough to say.

Kubrick’s film doesn’t have “a message” as such. It is not “political” or even “moral”. Kubrick is too detached for that. His film is cerebral, contemplating the spiritual. It is a meditation on evil as a force in the world. We first see how the WASPs became vulnerable to that. We see the profound emptiness at the end of empire, when higher purpose has given way to raw mercantile acquisition, vulgar wealth and hollow frivolity. These things seem to be what drove the WASPs of the Overlook. But the hotel itself (and its ghost versions of those people) represents something darker still. It is something perennial and elemental and inhuman, and which I don’t think can be ascribed to any particular human group, certainly not the WASPs. In their late-imperial waywardness, they fell into a foreign trap, not something they created themselves. They were not wholly innocent and good in the first place, but they were naive (as all humans are to the elements) and they got corrupted by something, hollowed out and transformed into husks like Lloyd and Grady, doomed to spend eternity uttering the desires of an unseen, awful thing.

Kubrick laughed off attempts to interpret the film, saying that it was just a horror movie. Certainly it would be a mistake to be too literal about it. But I think it is obvious that, while being vague and imprecise, he was contemplating something, and I think it is this metaphysical relationship between human beings, power, and the sheer overwhelming weight of history, of elemental forces. One group rises only to be cut down by circumstance or by its own hubris, and usurped by some other.

Thus, Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is a quasi-sequel to The Shining. There, we see that, while ordinary Americans are kept busy with material nonsense and the mirage of egalitarianism, there is still an elite in America. It is concerned with perennial things, spiritual matters, and power for its own sake. As before, it owns and controls everything and keeps ordinary Americans in line. It just isn’t their elite any more.

New Scotland Yard is a police procedural drama series made by LWT in the early 1970s. It bridged the gap between the tame, “traditional” Dixon of Dock Green and the much more gritty and “realistic” The Sweeney. The latter is lauded today, but isn’t my kind of thing. In fact the police genre doesn’t tend to appeal to me at all. And yet, I love New Scotland Yard, which straddled that televisual transition between different ways of depicting the British police. It has elements of both, and to some extent they are embodied by its two main characters.

Those are detectives Chief Superintendent John Kingdom (played by the charming John Woodvine) and his assistant Inspector Alan Ward (played with delicious malevolence by John Carlisle).

They work in CID, the division of “the Met” that handles serious crime. Each episode sees them getting posted to a local police station somewhere around London, setting up shop there and investigating the case, and ends with them cheerfully leaving to return to HQ - a crime solved.

While Kingdom is a very straightforward man, Ward is complex: affable yet sinister, intellectual yet vicious, effeminate yet violent, eccentric yet intolerant, sympathetic to Communism yet racist. I think Carlisle was five or ten years too old for the character, but he’s so fun to watch, it really doesn’t matter.

The two men get along but don’t really like each other. There is tension because Ward is younger, arrogant and likes to cut corners, and seems to have joined the police thinking it would be a chance to beat up scumbags, whereas Kingdom, while older, embodies the “new” policing of the era: bureaucratic, thorough, methodical, scientific, and absolutely “by the book”.

Kingdom and Ward are the only regular characters. There is a small number of semi-regulars: Kingdom’s wife Angela (played by Sally Home), her suave journalist brother Harry Carson, Sergeant Bates, Constable Thomas, WDC Fry, coroner Dr Cobb and journalist Phillip Barkis. Each of these appears only a few times. I would have liked to see far more of Carson, an intriguing character well-played by Barry Warren, but sadly he disappears after the first season.

But these supporting characters are just that. The focus is on the people unique to each episode - the criminals and victims, their friends and relatives and colleagues. What is great about New Scotland Yard is how well-drawn and engaging these many characters are. This is clearly a priority for the show as it takes time to develop each one, through scenes that would nowadays be considered “padding” but which give the show its soul, and also through the deciphering done by Kingdom. He is firm but sympathetic, and he often solves a crime by coming to understand the people involved.

What’s more, there is often a surprising amount of depth in the dialogue. This is civilised drama, before “realism” came in and persuaded us that ordinary people are inarticulate, ignorant and uncouth.

There is nothing unusual or avant-garde in New Scotland Yard; it’s just good “meat and potatoes” storytelling, reliable from one episode to the next, with a bit of depth, and a lot of cosiness in the production. It was in the standard mode of the time: video in studio, film on location. In keeping with LWT’s house style, the emphasis is on studio material, but there is plenty of real vintage London to savour. We get a delightful snapshot of the capital at that time - a place, a world, a whole way of life, that is gone now.

For some ungodly reason the producers decided to “shake things up” after three seasons, so the fourth revolves around a different pair of detectives. Played by Michael Turner and Clive Francis, they are sadly much less enjoyable. There is one good episode in that season, though, and I will include it.

You can’t really go wrong with this show. In the first three seasons, every episode is good. The characterisation is sometimes a bit clunky, and the stories occasionally a bit far-fetched, but nothing ruinous. Even the fourth season is still solid storytelling - if you can do without Kingdom and Ward.

Recommended episodes

Point of Impact
A leftist political demo leads to a police officer being accused of murder. The tussle between the leftists and the reactionary counter-movement (“the Law & Order Brigade”) is interesting from a 2020s perspective, as is their mutual distrust of the police. Also intriguing is the show’s treatment of the accused officer, who would nowadays be diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.

The Come Back
This is atmospheric and tense. Kenneth Cranham (Dr Channard!) plays a vicious young psychopath with a devoted, kindly old mother who is desperate not to see the truth about her son. Very good scenes with her.

The Palais Romeo
An interesting story about a young man with a thing for older women. I really like the handling of that character. The storyline made me realise that, in some ways, London back then was similar to a provincial town, in that people (White, English people) had community gatherings, dances and so on. It is different now, a city of much more isolated, atomised individuals.

Also, I adore the police station set in this one, especially the “bedroom” with its nook for handbasins! This is a much less wealthy London than we know today, so its rooms are dingy but often spacious - a combination I love.

Hard Contract
An angry middle-aged man realises that his employee is a contract killer and decides to take advantage. It’s all a bit far-fetched but the episode works, because the characters’ motivations are explained. It makes sense. This is a great example of the show taking time to deliver a satisfying story.

Perfect in Every Way
An engaging story about a precocious young man. There is interesting psychological stuff with him and his parents, culminating with a beautifully-done interrogation scene.

And again I love the police station set. It’s a distinctive structure with half-storeys and wood partitions. We don’t see the outside of it but I always imagine it being something like this. I don’t know how sets like this could be hammered together for just a single 50-minute production, which, as far as they knew, would only ever be watched once!

Reunion
A pleasing story about an escaped convict who runs into just the right woman to help him. Their interaction is touching, and the woman (a resourceful oddball played by Sharon Duce) is a lot of fun. I love the atmospherics of the lawyers’ office with the nightclub next door. All in studio, the effect is achieved so simply - ambient sound and lighting, with a slowly flashing neon sign “outside” the window.

Nothing to Live For
A fast-moving and gripping story about love, betrayal and humiliation. Terrific performances from Philip Madoc and Lynn Farleigh. (The latter actually later married the lead John Woodvine, and they remained together until his death 53 years after this episode was made.)

A Gathering of Dust
An unusual story about a long-buried past being accidentally uncovered. The first 20 minutes involve Kingdom and Ward being trapped in an underground room with a dead body. They spend the time looking for clues. I thought the entire episode was going to be like this, and they would actually have solved the case by the time they got rescued! Alas, LWT were not quite that adventurous. But still, it’s a good episode.

Shadow of a Deadbeat
This might be my favourite episode. It’s grim but touching. Great atmospherics, largely achieved with ambient sound. The sterile modern underground garage contrasts with the derelict house. I love the latter - very nicely done.

The opening scene shows an argument between two alcoholic tramps. It’s one of those cases where the performances are so engaging, and the camera/director so unintrusive, you could quite happily watch the conversation for ages. I’d like to know more about them, how they live, what they’re hoping for, etc. Sadly we only get a few minutes of them bickering and then the storyline begins. It’s a storyline that doesn’t work out well for either of them.

There’s a beautiful, layered performance from Richard Mathews (pictured) as the tragic but humorous Danny Pearce, and also an amusing turn by David Webb as a snooty security guard.

A technical note: yes, the derelict house is over-lit, but that was a necessity due to the Plumbicon camera technology of the time (the EMI-2001). But it doesn’t detract at all. Another curious thing is that, but for two (studio) shots of the outside of the derelict house, there are no exterior scenes whatsoever; the story is told entirely “indoors”.

The Money Game
A charming relationship between a middle-aged man and woman, two divorcees just trying their luck with an amateur crime while wondering whether to get together for their old age. It’s really endearing. Derek Smith (also of The Guardians and The Boy Merlin) is always a pleasure to watch. There is also some surprising comedy, with Ward going undercover and having to act normal. This is one of only two episodes written by the show’s script editor, Basil Dawson.

We Do What We Can
A well-meaning man is sucked back into a life of crime, but redeemed by his courageous wife. A gripping story with Stanley Lebor as a rather terrifying villain. There is a sub-plot which is clearly there to bolster the emotional punch of the main plot, but is sadly under-developed so not really successful, but still, you will get the point.

Hoax
Two hoaxes play out simultaneously, but one involves Ward and the other might not be a hoax but a deadly game. There is an interesting role played by a very young Michael Kitchen. Observe how polite various people are to each other! A display of good English manners, still prevalent in 1972. This episode is also the only glimpse we get into Ward’s personal life (he lives with his mother and is apparently loveless).

My Boy Robby?
The star of this is not Dennis Waterman (immediately pre-Sweeney) as a young rapist but Bernard Kay as his vicious father. There is also a good turn by Avril Elgar as a strident spinster and John Savident as a smug solicitor. This episode also contains the show’s only reference to lesbianism, and rather chauvinistically casts it as a result of male cruelty towards women. That aside, there is something adorably twee and “safe” about the idea of two young women living together in the early ‘70s and taking refuge in their feelings for each other. Subversive, no doubt, yet still so much more innocent than the equivalents on TV today.

Where’s Harry?
Similar to Reunion, this sees an escaped convict finding comfort with a kind woman. The characters and storyline are very different, though. Here the convict is played by Derek Newark, an effective character actor also seen in Rising Damp and Doctor Who. The relationship whose promise we see emerging between him and the woman is a really sweet one - you can easily imagine them getting married and loving each other forever. This episode also has a criminal kingpin played quite chillingly by Barry Jackson.

Bullet in a Haystack
An interesting episode in that an impending crime is discovered by accident while a completely separate crime is investigated. Features a nice performance by Sam Kydd as a seasoned pickpocket. He plays Cutler as a wily working-class Londoner, in a way that feels historical in 2025; you would probably encounter exactly this kind of chap daily back then, but they are all gone now.

Weight of Evidence
An unusual episode in that we see the crime taking place but are left wondering whether it has been correctly remembered by a witness (and us), with a man’s fate hanging in the balance. The question is only answered at the very end. Features a surprising early performance by Bob Hoskins and a disgustingly villainous turn by George Innes.

Property, Dogs & Women
The nearest thing to a “Christmas” episode. This again has a lovely police station set, and I like the interaction between Kingdom and the boy Jimmy, played with gusto by the actor who, a decade later, would play Mickey Pearce in Only Fools and Horses.

All the episodes show a London that is gone forever, but perhaps this one most of all.

Jimmy is an archetype that was extinct by the year 2000 - the Cockney street urchin, the lad from the wrong side of the tracks, but he means well, the cheeky chappie who has an answer for everything and the Irish “gift of the gab” (and indeed the actor was of Irish descent), full of bravado and needs guidance to keep him on the straight and narrow. Throughout the centuries there must have been thousands upon thousands of boys just like that, all over London. But there are no Jimmys today. The influxes have been too diverse for the archetype to withstand, and it has been dissolved and washed away.

Aside from Jimmy, this episode also gives a real sense of a particular community in some little corner of London - a community with its own characters, conventions and arrangements. It is a certainty that this community, with all of its unique aspects, would be annihilated by the demographic upheaval London saw in the decades that followed.

Pier
This has an intriguing and unusual character in the suspect, nicely written and played. At this time TV writers were still getting to grips with the reality of young people taking recreational drugs, but I think in this case, although the portrayed effects of marijuana are laughably inaccurate, the phenomenon is handled well. Depicting the experience of intoxication is also the only time the show veers into experimentalism, with some rather “far out” visual effects. In addition, the scenes of interrogation by Kingdom are riveting. When you see this, it’s depressing to know it’s the final episode with him, the last time you’ll see him wrapping his mind around a case, around a suspect. He really is a great character, a proper patriarch, played reassuringly by Woodvine.

For All Their Faults
From the fourth season, this sees a man accused of a heinous crime. We are kept guessing until the very end.

Episodes depicting homosexuality

We Do What We Can
Where’s Harry?
My Boy Robby? (lesbianism)
Diamonds Are Never Forever
The Stone

Episodes depicting recreational drugs

Ask No Questions (heroin)
Pier (marijuana)

Episodes set outside London

Evidence of Character (a Home Counties village)
Papa Charlie (countryside, various towns)
Pier (Margate)
Come-Back (West Country)

Episodes depicting race relations

Among 46 episodes only one depicts race relations, which goes to show how much less diverse, and more harmonious, British society was back then. Nonetheless, the episode - A Case of Prejudice - is loaded with a political agenda. None of the other 45 episodes are like this.

We see a London whose police are still just beginning to grapple with diversity, and have various ideas about Black men.

Ward says things which would nowadays get a police officer sacked on the spot. Kingdom, the sage patriarch, teaches that wisdom means putting stereotypes aside so as to be objective about people, and also being aware that they are subject to other people’s stereotyping of them, including subtle treatment betraying prejudice (what we would now call “microaggressions”), and they will behave accordingly (what we would now call “acting out” due to “the racism of low expectations”).

In turn, Ward accuses Kingdom of what we would now call “positive discrimination”. This offends Kingdom since he aims to be strictly impartial, unswayed by what we would now call “political correctness” and certainly not beset by a “White saviour complex”.

Later, Kingdom receives wisdom from a Black activist: we all have prejudice, even those of us who believe ourselves free of it (we would now say “unconscious bias”). The key is to be aware of this (“mindful”) and, in Kingdom’s defiant words, “fight it, control it, eliminate it”. We would now say “check our privilege” and “fight for equity”.

All of these concepts were yet to be named, but present and discussed in 1972. It is fascinating to see all of it in embryo, being presented to the British public for the first time.

When the police (of course) discover that the murderer was a White man, not a Black man, Kingdom rebukes Ward: “You have a whole vocabulary of insulting looks and remarks reserved for people with a black skin that does you no credit”.

Kingdom then gives a dressing down to a young unemployed racist (describing him as beset by “impotence and inferiority”), and then to his Svengali, a middle-aged middle-class White racist who runs an organisation “Anti-Black Action”. Finally, he encourages a Black playwright to persevere with his activism, saying that, when it comes to changing society, “it’s never too late”.

The message could not be more clear, shrill or self-castrating: White people who have any objections to Black immigration are hateful, insecure and ignorant, Black men are no more violent than White men, and the enlightened attitude is to treat everyone equally and to labour against prejudice, especially within ourselves.

However, given what we now know about the relative criminality of Black men and White men (including within London specifically), Kingdom’s “wisdom” seems naive and Ward’s “prejudice” seems more likely the product of observation and common sense, which Kingdom is diligently educating himself out of. But he had the luxury to do so, back in 1972, because his kind were still the overwhelming majority of London’s population.

Whenever I watch New Scotland Yard, I find myself pondering a question both painfully obvious and painfully pertinent: “What would a man like John Kingdom think of the capital today…?”

As an addendum… 53 years after this episode was made, the Met police still hasn’t got to grips with Black men! The process of self-questioning advocated by this episode is a never-ending one, putting native English people in the dock in perpetuity.

Episodes depicting Kingdom’s problems

The scripts occasionally venture into the “inner turmoil” of the lead character, mainly concerning his rocky marriage. I think the show could do without this, but it is done quite well, and gives rise to some touching moments between Kingdom and his wife.

The Palais Romeo
Perfect in Every Way
Papa Charlie
Monopoly
Pier

Related to this is Kingdom occasionally voicing doubt about his job. At one point we even hear him decrying modern society as “lousy” and questioning why young people shouldn’t commit crime given the chances they are allotted. Coming from a man like him this kind of thing is intriguing so in a way you want more of it, but I don’t think it “helps” the show. I want Kingdom to be a rock-solid patriarch, an authority figure - always reliable, on the side of good, and solving problems - not a “flawed and realistic” character. The show flirting with this kind of thing is an example of it straddling two eras, and I think many would now agree that the earlier era was, even if naive and simplistic, the healthier one.

Technical curiosities

Shadow of a Deadbeat - entirely shot on video, in studio.

Papa Charlie - entirely shot on film, on location. (The two episodes are consecutive so I wonder if the directors struck an agreement, one using the other’s allocation of film.) This contrast shows how different the same actors can seem in the two paradigms: video/studio/multi-camera and film/location/single-camera. Also, this episode is surprisingly gritty and brutal.

Nothing to Live For - location shooting done on video (“OB”), unusual for the time. I couldn’t see a reason for it until a scene came up that used both location and studio footage, then it made sense for the sake of visual unity.

What I would have liked

Just more of the same. More, more, more. This is a perfect example of a formula that worked very well and didn’t need changing. I’d love to have seen Kingdom and Ward up against the evolving society of the 1970s as the decade progressed. I don’t know what the producers were thinking in replacing them after three seasons.

But maybe Woodvine himself decided to hang up the cuffs. This popular TV show would have been regular work and well-paid, but perhaps not what a Shakespearean actor wanted to be doing in his prime years. However, for all his prodigious output, upon his death he was most noted for a rather unremarkable turn in the Hollywood movie An American Werewolf in London. As for Carlisle, he enjoyed prominence on TV once more in The Omega Factor (1979) but never again after that, perhaps because he too was a Shakespearean actor and preferred the stage. I also suspect his style was too “clipped” and “theatrical” as naturalism took over TV in the ‘80s.

Laments aside, we do have 39 highly enjoyable episodes and I recommend them most heartily, not just as engaging “police procedurals” but as a delightful record of a bygone era - in terms of both London life, and British television-making.

RIP actor John Woodvine, 21st July 1929 - 6th October 2025.
RIP actor John Carlisle, 6th September 1935 – 7th December 2011.
RIP producer Rex Firkin, 3rd July 1926 - 7th December 2014.
RIP script editor Basil Dawson, 2nd April 1914 - 19th April 1979.

See my other TV guides here.

At first I thought I shouldn’t write about this matter, because it is very specific to America which is not my country. But as the weeks have passed some ideas have occurred to me. To avoid using the term “turning point”, I will say that this event has certainly been “a watershed moment”. The situation has been irrevocably changed.

I would recommend reading John Carter and Greg Johnson on the matter, and listening to the Distributist. There have been many other good commentaries, including from the Old Glory Club. From this side of the pond, a southerner made this video and a northerner wrote this short illustration of what might be the truth behind the assassination.

But in all likelihood we will never know the truth. As with JFK we will wonder forever. The deception, if there is one, will be too well-constructed to be definitively unravelled. And really, would it be all that surprising if some fanatical leftist really did do this, and the “official” story is the truth?

For my purposes here, it doesn’t really matter who did the killing. What I find more significant is the ghoulish reaction to it from the Left worldwide - which indicates why I, in Britain, have decided to write about it.

I will also not be talking about Charlie Kirk himself, except to agree with the consensus:

• he was a good and decent man

• many of us were too harsh on him, especially latterly

• his death symbolises the futility of Classical Liberalism

• the evidence seems to show that, while not yet “our guy”, he was well on the way to becoming so. Given his trajectory I suspect that within a couple of years he would have been “with us”.

• that might well be why he was killed. Their golem turning against them would be far more damaging than someone who was always their enemy continuing to be so.

With all of that said, I will get to the matter at hand.

In 2017, after Richard Spencer got sucker-punched, I made a video about the incident:

It conveyed my disgust at the glee shown by leftists at the assault, which was inflicted by a masked man who showed up out of the blue and immediately ran away so that his victim was unable to defend himself or retaliate. Such behaviour would once have been seen as cowardly, dishonourable and shameful. In my video I analysed earnestly what seemed to me like a notable revelation that the Left, in 2017, did not care about honour. Well, such things are not revelatory in 2025, which is why I have decided against re-publishing the video.

After the gruesome murder of Charlie Kirk, we have seen much worse from the Left than their glee at Spencer’s misfortune. He was merely punched; Kirk was deprived of most of his natural life-span. This also deprives a wife of her loving husband and two infant children of their loving father. Yes, he was a family man - well-adjusted, stable, accomplished, honest, decent… all the things that so many in fringe politics are not, and that so many on the Left venomously disparage.

Significantly, the vitriol and mockery came not just from hard left activists (antifa) but from “professionals”, including teachers and college lecturers - people of influence and prominence, especially over the young. These are people who had a lot to lose, yet they did not hesitate to come right out and publicly mock an innocent man being brutally murdered. Apparently, they had no idea they had a lot to lose. I am glad that some of them have now learned this, being fired and (hopefully) becoming unemployable. There is a time for charity and there is a time for vengeance, and right now I want to see women in tears and eunuchs on the dole. I feel no guilt for saying this. They made me unemployable for trying to protect my ethnic group; I am very happy for them to be made unemployable for mocking a good man’s brutal murder.

Their behaviour has been truly disgusting. Even before we were told that the murder was left-wing political, they were cheering it. Yet, while cheering it, they desperately wanted to blame it on the Right, falsely claiming (and in some cases knowingly falsely claiming) that the killer was a groyper or some other type of right-winger. So, as ever, they wanted the thing without paying the price for the thing. Similarly, they wanted to celebrate his murder but also to deny celebrating it, since such behaviour is clearly reprehensible. The phrase “he had it coming” was a spineless and honourless euphemism for “he deserved it and I’m glad it happened”. They want to celebrate a brutal murder yet still be thought of as good people - always avoiding the price that must be paid, like children in a sweet shop. But these were adults, and adults in trusted positions in society, adults entrusted with the shaping of our children’s minds and our society’s conventions. Horrifying. We learned, with real-time lessons, that we are surrounded by smirking, giggling, hysterical psychopaths - or people who might as well be.

Meantime, the mainstream media - which leftists always furiously deny is on their side - was absolutely on their side, justifying their celebration of Kirk’s murder by spreading lies about him when his corpse was still warm. Even before his children knew that their daddy was dead, the media worldwide was falsely demonising him. They continued doing this for several days afterward until the public backlash forced them, if not into shame, at least into shameful silence. I say “shameful” because, like the devious little girl who has been found out, they will try again as soon as they think they can get away with it.

The result of all this is a gaping chasm that I doubt will disappear in our lifetimes. Right-wingers surely now see themselves, not as citizens “just like everyone else”, but as the only sane and responsible people around.

In recent essays I have said that the Left is “done”. I meant specifically in the British context but of course it applies to various extents elsewhere, including America. The Left’s reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk indicates that they might have given up on debating, but not on winning, and they are switching to the more “direct” tactics for which they were once well-known. The gleeful remarks indicate that they are uninterested in debating; they simply want their opponents deleted from the game. Without wishing to trivialise matters, it reminds me of how, once they realised they couldn’t out-argue us, they wanted us simply deleted from social media, and they didn’t care about the ethics of doing so.

In my 2017 video I talked about honour and morality, and opined that a great percentage of the Left simply don’t have any. I think this was naive of me. I also said that they can do all of this because they lack self-reflection. Again, naive. I now think they know exactly what they are doing and are simply much more realistic than we are. At the end of that year, on Millenniyule, Prof. Mike Isaacson unnerved me by saying, in effect, “you must have known that we on the Left would be violent towards you on the Right”. Honestly, I hadn’t known that. Like many on the Right, I genuinely had the innocent belief that a battle of ideas would be won with ideas.

We on the Right tend to think of discourse as a game which you might well lose if it turns out that your opponent has better arguments. This is a pampered, complacent view which can only work when not much is at stake, or when you don’t believe much is at stake. The Left always believe much is at stake, so they have a far more pragmatic approach to discourse. It amounts to: “give your opponent a chance to agree with you, and if he doesn’t, kill him”. You and I might find that disgusting, dishonourable, primitive or even stupid… but many on the Left seem to think, regardless, that it works.

Few of them will actually be prepared to do the deed, but those few will find themselves celebrated, rewarded, defended and protected by the more reserved majority. In the same way that most Muslims are not jihadists but do foster and protect them, most Leftists are not terrorists but… well… just look on social media.

What this means is not that we on the Right should employ such tactics, but that we should be very aware that this is what we are now dealing with. We are not in a discussion any more. We will still persuade some leftists to our side - probably a great number who are disgusted by the behaviour of their cohorts - but we should no longer act with that as our goal. Rather, our goal should be to insist on our worldview and to implement it, not with the hard-won agreement of our opponents, but against their vicious protestations. In other words, our approach should be to plough ahead and let them either join us or be crushed by us. Seeking to reason with them and win them over was the naive, innocent approach of Charlie Kirk, and the fate it led him to has been met with joy and laughter from his enemies - people he probably thought of as future friends.

From now on, we have to accept, believe and act as if we have the moral high ground, because we absolutely do. We are dealing not with adults but with psychological children, and we have to be the parents. And I am not talking about “peaceful parenting”. When they misbehave, we must discipline them, because we are the only adults in the room and if we don’t take command, they will create sheer carnage of our societies. We have intuited this for years and now it has been proven for us in the most disgusting way. We must respond with strength of character and conviction. We must be resolute, resourceful, unabashed and implacable.

This necessitates a drastic change in the attitude of right-wingers, especially conservatives. They are accustomed to being passive, reasonable, etc. That has to end now. It results in letting the Left set the agenda, and that also has to end now.

The conservative’s (sometimes sincere) justification for this submissive behaviour is that we should “take the moral high ground” and not “descend to the level of our opponents”. Well, this is a war. In a war, there is being respectful towards your enemy, and there is handing him your weaponry and hoping for the best. We can be decent without being suicidal.

We must keep in mind, always, that the Left really are our enemy, and we should behave around them as around a rabid dog: never relax, never trust, never give an inch.

We must drag people to our position by magnetism, success and sanity, not by seeking the Left’s approval but by mocking it.

Above all, our predisposition to look for ways we can compromise and give in to them and avoid conflict, to look for sacrifices we can make so as to show that we mean well… all of that has to end. Our assumption that they, not we, have the authority to decide society’s fate has to be extinguished.

Most of all, our fear of acquiring and using state power must be overcome. Our societies are being destroyed and it is in no small part because of that attitude among right-wingers. From the ardent libertarian to the sleepy conservative, we must become comfortable with the idea of obtaining power and shamelessly using it to change society, because the Left certainly are comfortable with it. They might be naive about everything but power, and conservatives tend to be the inverse. Power is the only way anything gets done in the world. You either have it and use it, or you are subject to other people having it and potentially - or really - using it against you. To submit to that and to justify doing so on the grounds of some abstract principle is not courage but cowardice.

For a list of other traits of which we should try to purge ourselves, watch Academic Agent.

Voices, on both the Left and the Right, now calling for “calm” and “reconciliation” should be ignored. I give Erika Kirk a pass here. At her husband’s memorial service, she said she has forgiven his killer. Well, let her be the grieving widow, and let her do what she feels she must in order not to be tormented by hatred throughout her remaining decades, but the rest of us should not emulate her. We should be tough.

Matt Walsh has pledged solidarity with anyone on the Right. I don’t know whether he would include the likes of us in that pledge, but I think we should behave as if he does, until and unless he demonstrates otherwise. I would strongly discourage attacking him for any of his past pronouncements. Anyone who makes such a pledge should be rewarded for it. We are going to need all the solidarity we can get, and anyone pushing purity spiralling is wasting everyone else’s time and making our defeat more likely.

The end goal should not be the building of temporary successes but the permanent destruction of the Left’s ability to reproduce itself. This means changing the social mores of everyday life to sane, eugenic ones. It might well mean dismantling the university system as it now is, a factory of leftist indoctrination. It will require changing laws, banning organisations, defunding or even abolishing institutions, and shaming or even imprisoning individuals. It will not come naturally to us as right-wingers but if we falter, we will lose Western civilisation. Moreover, even lukewarm measures will enrage the Left and prompt violent response from them. Escalation is now unavoidable, so the sooner we shift to top gear, the better.

Three years before that 2017 video, I made another one which now seems relevant. It was at the start of my channel, a more naive time even than 2017, let alone 2025, but nevertheless the title of that video was:

I think recent events have vindicated this title and drawn that future necessity quite a bit closer.

These people might not literally be evil, but if not they are certainly possessed by evil, blinded by it, drunk on it. Left to their own devices, they will maniacally destroy everything good, true and beautiful. That is all they have ever worked towards, all our lives.

They might be spiritually kids, but we have been kidding ourselves.

The main promise of AI imaging is that the writer will - or at least could - become the general creator; the author not just of the words, but of the work. A drama, even one that appears to involve hundreds of crew and dozens of actors, might in fact be entirely the creation of one person, using sophisticated technology to, as the old phrase goes, “realise his creative vision”.

Of course, this does not mean that dramas will necessarily be better, but it will revolutionise what they are.

The BBC started as an outfit working purely with radio. Once television became feasible it branched out into that. For this purpose, the BBC acquired small spaces all around London and converted them into television studios. These were distinct from film studios in that the cameras were not discrete machines chewing through celluloid, but wholly electronic and hooked into a complex system for live editing and broadcast. After a decade of being scattered across the city, BBC television operations moved into a massive new headquarters, BBC Television Centre. This was a building custom-designed for producing high volumes of television in every genre. It housed every department needed for pre-production, production and post-production.

Around 2010 the BBC began to retire Television Centre. I read some industry experts discussing how it had become redundant. The main reason astonished me: the entirety of post-production - foley, grading, editing, titling, graphics, visual effects, sound effects, storage - could now be done by a single person “using an averagely powerful laptop”. Advancing technology had rendered superfluous all of these different departments, and all of the specially-trained people staffing them along with the many specialised tools they used. All the functions of the post-production phase could now be packed into a simple laptop and performed by one person, even in his home.

Post-production had become the work of one person, or a tiny number of people, doing everything on an extremely versatile yet off-the-shelf device.

Of course, the production phase could not be so reduced. You still needed actors performing, on a set built by people, wearing costumes made by people, shot with cameras operated by people, lit with lights controlled by people, and all of it directed by someone. These many jobs still had to be done “in meat-space”, by humans.

The pre-production phase was likewise undefeated by technology. You still needed people to scout for locations, design the studio sets, design the costumes, assemble the crew, audition the actors, do the costing for all of this, find the money for it… and of course, write the script that is the embryo for all of it.

Post-production was usurped by digital tools on a laptop twenty years ago, and I surmise that AI will do the same to production and pre-production. The only job it cannot usurp is the writing of the script. (In theory it could do this too, but I doubt many people would be interested in watching such a thing.)

Cinema was always “a director’s medium”. Due to the sheer number of options available to the director, his choices (and therefore his tastes, personality and concerns) mattered immensely to the finished work and could outweigh the influence of the writer. This was in stark contrast to television drama. Due to limitations of time, money and the multi-camera mode of production, TV directors simply didn’t have many options as to how to shoot a scene (this is why most of them yearned to graduate to cinema). Therefore, the script was all-important. The writer, not the director, was “the author”. TV drama was “a writer’s medium”.

In the 1980s British TV drama production shifted from video to film and from multi-camera to single-camera, generally becoming more cinematic. The TV director now operated much more like a cinema director. By the 1990s the director, not the writer, was “the author”. TV drama shifted its focus from script quality to spectacle, style, aesthetic and tone. In my opinion this was a huge cultural loss for Britain.

For two reasons, I believe AI could restore drama as a writer’s medium:

1. A single person - probably the original writer - can create the entire thing on his own.

2. Hollywood, with all of its special effects and explosions, cannot compete with a 15 year-old with a laptop. He can achieve the very same special effects and explosions using AI, therefore they become worthless as “selling points”. The same applies to having A-list actors - they too can be replicated with AI, if desired. Leaving acting quality aside, the only way for a drama to compete with any other will be the quality of its script.

This becomes more relevant when we take into account that Hollywood has forgotten how to write good scripts. Films today are dreadfully written. The industry has run out of things to say. Or rather, it has become so ossified and formulaic that it no longer has the inclination nor the leeway to say anything true. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this essay, and I don’t think I fully understand them anyway. But it is clear that Hollywood is no longer in the business - if it ever was - of reflecting the human experience honestly. A script from a thoughtful 30 year-old who has lived a bit but is back living with his parents is likely to be more honest and engrossing than anything conjured in Hollywood by a blue-haired moron, overseen by psychopathic moguls, and fine-tuned by a succession of unimaginative focus groups.

But, even in the good old days of Hollywood’s heyday (pick your decade), films were made by consensus. Rarely if ever did a writer’s “vision” get to the screen. Indeed that was not even seen as the goal. It was the director’s vision that was prized, with the writer’s script being merely a guide for him. (As a sidenote, it is striking how many distinctive and creatively-successful films happen to be written and directed by the same person. It’s almost as if something special occurs when a man is allowed to nurture into adulthood the child that he created. If the original writer can get to be the director, this seems to bode well for a film.)

So in theory it was the director’s vision that should get to the screen. However, in practice, it was often the studio’s vision that was realised. At any rate, virtually every director had to compromise with the studio with every film he made. Sometimes this was for the best; directors, like art students, can get lost in pursuing shock and controversy for its own sake, and some directors are simply not very talented and need “the higher-ups” to save them from themselves. But even so, it is the case that film-making, certainly in the mainstream, has always seen the individual voice get tamed or muted, often completely.

We were horrified when O’Brien reminded Winston that, in Oceania, all books are written by committee and “no book is produced individually”. We understand instantly the assault on human dignity and creativity that must happen when an individual voice is crushed – not just by ideology, but by group consensus. We know what it means: a lack of honesty, distinctiveness, originality and truth. If we feel this way about book writing, why not drama production?

Note that I say “drama production” - not film-making, cinema or TV. That is because what we are talking about is revolutionary change. The forms of old will become irrelevant, the limitations obsolete. Cinema will be seen as an art form of the 20th Century, just as the “electronic theatre” which I dearly love is now seen as a thing specific to 1970s Britain.

We already see Hollywood slipping into the past. In my adulthood, the annual Oscars has gone from something everyone knew about and many watched, to something that nobody cares about at all. This is for a whole slew of reasons that include Hollywood sleaze and corruption, bad writing, rampant wokery, endless sequels and reboots, and lamentable “cape shit”. With these deficiencies plus the competition from video-gaming, Hollywood as an industry seems to be dying, and nobody is even mourning it.

Having said all of that, the three-act 90-minute format that Hollywood popularised will probably remain, because of audience habituation and simply because it works well for a lot of stories, but I doubt it will remain the default. As cinema-going has been usurped by streaming at home which makes any format possible, the one emerging as the favourite seems to be multi-episode arcs, whether three or twenty episodes, and sometimes multiple seasons of those. This much longer form provides room for characters and worlds to breathe, for plots to have more twists than could possibly fit into 90 minutes, and for the story to have more novelty than is afforded by the three-act structure after a century of familiarity.

Of course, limitations can be inspiring and they can provide the structure that a story needs, so, to repeat, I don’t think we are seeing the death of the “feature film” format; I just think writers won’t be restricted to it unless they choose to be. And good writers willingly choose restrictions, because they know that too much freedom is deadening for creativity. But, in future, this really will be the writer’s choice; he will decide on the story and on the duration it needs to be told well.

There are dramas I have had in my head for ten years, twenty years, even more. I will describe them in broad terms.

• a children’s animated show about a community of animals, each one having a personality based on people I knew in my childhood - old Scottish people born in the 1920s, etc. It would be light-hearted and show how different characters get along despite their peccadillos. It would show a community that dealt with eccentricity, class, simple people and intelligent people. It would be an expression of rural Scottishness. At its heart would be a love of home and of community.

• a set of character studies of fictitious left-wing activists circa 2011, immediately post-Occupy

• a sci-fi romance about Britain and being a young man (mostly written in 2012). This is my eternally unfinished novel

• from the above, a spin-off novella about the life of a Brutalist town from its inception to its demolition

• a set of novellas begun in 2022:
  - a TV writer in a personal crisis
  - a lesbian literary editor being blackmailed
  - a church through the ages
  - different versions of a relationship
  - following a woman’s career at a corporation, from age 21 to retirement

These stories haunt me, every day. But I am waylaid with my work for Millennial Woes, so there is simply no time to get back into these stories and finish them. However, that is not the point. The point is that every one of them is very “visual”. The sci-fi romance, in particular, would be extremely adaptable to the screen. I have every aspect of it very clear in my head, pictured while I was writing it. I know exactly how every part of it “should” look. The novella about the church - inspired by an Erasure song - would be a beautiful piece if realised. Again, I have it clear in my head.

The question, of course, is how likely it is that these things will ever be brought into the real world. Leaving aside my own personal obstacles to writing them, adapting them is surely a pipe dream. What TV or film company would have any interest in my work? Even without the connection to me, would these stories have any appeal for the cretins of today’s media industry? It seems extremely unlikely. And, if by a miracle they did adapt one of them, I am certain they would wreck it; the priors of today would compel them.

But, with a sufficiently controllable AI imaging tool, I could make all of these myself, on my own. It would be a lot of work but it could be done.

Pondering AI in recent months, I have tried to imagine what obstacles, if any, would remain for drama-makers. In what ways will we still need “an industry” to produce, or aid in producing, these things?

The obvious area is actors. I have some experience of getting AI to render dialogue. It was for the female “train station announcer” in the Millenniyule 2023 trailer. For each line she said, I had to get many different renditions from the AI, then cut those up to use the most appropriate bits. It was onerous. The problem was that the AI doesn’t understand what is being said, so has no idea of what intonation to use for any given line of dialogue, and how to vary the intonation according to the character’s mood, situation, etc. Perhaps some kind of notation system could be developed, similar to what we have for music, that would instruct an AI how to “render” dialogue, with moments and sections of a certain tone being markable in tandem with the text - that tone then being tent-poled between key words. Perhaps this “notation” could be derived automatically by software from a recording of one’s own voice, then finetuned and applied to the character. Or, possibly, we will still use real actors. I imagine a mix of the two being standard practice. A real actor’s performance could be augmented after the fact rather than tediously (and expensively) bringing them back to the studio for re-takes; this would also be how a simple word was changed to accommodate a script revision. Meantime, sole producers would rely almost completely on AI.

(Even while I write this essay, technological development has advanced towards this sort of work. A Chinese company called ByteDance have unveiled software called DreamActor-M1 which enables one actor’s performance to be transposed onto a different actor. One interesting benefit to this is that it eliminates the danger for actors in making something politically dangerous, since, even though their original performance was real, they would not be recognised as the performer and thus their career, even though it wouldn’t be helped, would also not be destroyed. Immediately, this creates new possibilities.)

Another area where humans will still be desired is soundtrack composition. I would not want to instruct software to generate “a grand orchestral soundtrack in the mid-Romantic style” and then tolerate what it came up with. Music seems like something that has to be - that should be - conceived by a person, no matter how well software can do it. For the same reason I hate the idea of the script being dreamt up by software, music composed by software just seems utterly wrong. The tool must never become the author. The tool must always be completely subservient in the creative realm, used by the author to realise his intent. The intent must be his, never the tool’s.

For the rest - set design, costume design, director of photography, sound effects - it would really be a case of “how much do you want to do yourself?” It would be a choice, not a limit. You could do it all yourself. The deciding factors would be how much of your life you were prepared to spend on this one project, and how good you considered yourself to be in the various areas involved. Very few people are that multi-skilled and persistent, so I suspect a lot of specialists will still be gainfully employed even in an era of AI imaging - but they will be employed by a lone drama-maker to take some weight off his shoulders, not by a huge production company.

I can imagine AI stepping in again, to replace some or all of these specialists depending on the drama-maker’s resources. In the same way that a film director will ask a costume designer to come up with some ideas, the drama-maker will not want to do months of research himself for this one aspect of the drama, so will instead ask the AI to make some suggestions, which he will then choose from and tweak, etc. The process will be very similar, except that the human element has been replaced by AI. But did we ever care about the will of a costume designer? Or did we care that the director got what he wanted?

A related point is that it can actually be dangerous to get too involved with the minutiae of a project. Doing so frequently distorts the goal. The more involved the work is, the more distorted the goal becomes, and the more mental fortitude is required to prevent this happening. This is the tug-of-war between the macro and the distracting, niggling micro. This occurs not just with minor aspects of a production, but even in the act of creating some large aspect - that work can be so involved as to make one forget what one was aiming for in the first place. Sometimes this can be serendipitous - one ends up stumbling on some possibility that one hadn’t foreseen - but other times it can be demoralising and tiring. Again, AI could eliminate this problem by taking a lot of “the donkey work” off the shoulders of the drama-maker.

But then there is the problem of distribution. What will actually become of the dramas that are made in this way, by some nobody with a computer? Instead of just being things he shows to his (half-interested) friends, how do we get these dramas to a large number of people, and ideally to become “part of the culture”? This has been a problem ever since Fruityloops enabled the penniless nerd to make music in his bedroom and webcams enabled the politics sperg to make videos in his garage. The problem is that there is a massive abundance of “content” and the viewer has no way to sort the wheat from the chaff. This is why YouTube’s famous algorithm was a gift to the world (before they crippled it with censorship): it enabled people to find the videos they were looking for, or didn’t even know they were looking for. Now, would being distributed in this way recoup the costs of making the drama? Actually yes, in many cases, because those costs will be tiny. In an ideal future, you would also have local cinemas screening films made by people in the area. This would be a way to revitalise local cultures and identities that, currently, are being dissolved by the homogenising effects of globalism. Imagine seeing ten films every year that are set in your city, or even your town, and which record your culture, show your accent, depict your landscape, and address the issues that only your community care about. Such a thing is now very conceivable.

This doesn’t eliminate the problem of the established (or “legacy”) production companies being able to pay for advertising and algorithm prominence. But, as ever, they will be targeting the masses and the masses will be seeking them out. This exploitative master-slave relationship is one that I don’t think can be disrupted. Short of a political dictatorship, we just have to accept that the masses will always consume “slop” - gratefully and un-self-consciously - and leave them to it, and likewise leave the purveyors of said slop to purvey it. Something better - a situation where the masses aspire to high culture - would require an actual civilisation, and we don’t really have one any more. What we do have, however, is a minority of people who want to produce new art and drama, and I do believe AI will make that a thousand times more possible for them than it has been hitherto.

In such a world, the skilled drama-maker will be seen as the man who can do with imagery what a great author can do with words - craft a scene, pace an event, illustrate a mood, hint at a dynamic, construct a setting, convey an environment. All of the responsibilities, which have hitherto been split across hundreds of individual craftsmen, will merge into the singular domain of the drama-maker just as they have always been the singular domain of the author. The drama-maker will be operating in that total sense, that wholistic sense, responsible for the grand result but also for every tiny detail, just like an author. And it will not be easy. Sure, anyone will be able to generate a drama, just as anyone can point a 4K camera at traffic and automatically get “a high-definition shot of traffic”. But to do it well, to produce something that is not merely technically proficient and technically beautiful but actually good, will still be the preserve of the artist, unmistakably talented and obsessively engaged.

In that sense, AI imaging will be like every other new technology that came before it. With every tool, there are crappy, soulless, lazy and Philistine ways to use it, and there are dignified ways. With every tool, there is the risk of it taking over and dictating how the job should be done and what the job’s end result should be. These are risks that have plagued us since the beginning of time. I do not mean to deny the unique problem of AI (and remember I am speaking exclusively about AI imaging, not chatbots) but to remind us all that it is our choice how we use this and it is our moral duty to make the correct choice.

Regarding the technology itself, in a way we are lucky: we don’t have to make any choices at all, because this is happening whether we like it or not. No matter what we decree, proclaim or believe, other people will use AI imaging and our lives will be saturated with the fruits of it, good and bad. To complain about it would be like complaining about the weather; to try to keep it out of your life, utterly futile. Probably you and I are already daily seeing things - adverts, posters, images - that were created with AI, and we don’t even know it. The transition is happening… has already happened.

You can, of course, resist AI imaging in the sense that you can choose not to use it yourself. There is moral virtue in that choice, just as there is in a craftsman insisting on making his own tools. But I increasingly believe that there will not be a lack of moral virtue in choosing to use AI imaging.

After all, you didn’t build the components in the device you are reading this on, and neither did I. In a way, we have been in the realm of “magic” for decades now, even centuries. But there will be future “magic”, and we can only guess at it and how it will affect our lives. I believe that we should not condemn each other for using it, but hold each other to a standard in how we use it.

It is a tool. No matter how useful it is, it must remain that. The tool can enable us to make new things. But we must always remain in charge, faithful not just to the project, and not just to our own creative ego, but also to the shimmering original idea which compelled us in the first place.

In 2007 a restored version of Blade Runner (1982) was released. Part of the restoration was changing the head of an obvious stuntwoman to that of the actress, Joanna Cassidy. The faces clearly didn’t match and neither did the wigs. The restoration crew got Cassidy into a greenscreen studio and filmed her performing the required head and face contortions. They could have simply plastered that footage on top of the original, but the stuntwoman’s wig would be visible underneath. So first, they digitally removed the stuntwoman’s entire head from the footage! You can glimpse the resulting intermediary version here.

When I saw this in 2007, I was stunned. It was one of the most amazing feats of technical wizardry I had ever seen. It seems as if they had software that could analyse footage and work out, if a particular element were removed, what would now be visible “behind” it given the surrounding context. This was amazing because the surrounding context in this case was extremely complex, with lights and objects shifting around in different directions, and most of them out of focus. I am still baffled as to how this was achieved, especially in a pre-AI era.

Eight years later I saw a similar thing with the remake of Robocop. The original was made in 1987 when it was impossible to do any of the sort of augmentation we will discuss, so the character looked like a man wearing a huge bulky suit rather than an actual cyborg. In 2014, it was possible to slim everything down after the fact, so that it looked like the cybernetics were his actual body, not something wrapped around it. The effect is incredible:

Notice that, as in the Blade Runner effect, the background - what would be visible if he were slimmer - is somehow being “restored”. Look especially on either side of his waist, where the floor that was hidden in the filmed shot is somehow “restored”. It’s possible this was achieved by filming the camera move through the set without the actor present, then repeating the exact same camera move with him there, then strategically combining the two shots. But it’s also possible that software was “guessing” the background.

Disregarding that question about the background, what is certain is that almost every element of his cybernetic suit is augmented - reshaped, tightened up, replaced. If you lay the two versions on top of each other and switch between them, you can see that almost no element of the original figure remains in the finished shot, which therefore is effectively CGI, but one guided very tightly by real footage. Clearly, the software had reached a point where it could discern shapes and then “work with them”.

And again, this was without AI as we know it today. We are now in a very different era. To give a flavour, here is a YouTube comment about Alien 3, directed by David Fincher in 1992, beleaguered by a studio who kept interfering and forced him to make a film he wasn’t proud of:

Believe it or not, Alien 3 may yet actually get a director’s cut at some point... I can’t get into details except to say that I know for a fact the idea is floating around in David Fincher’s direct circle... You’ve got to remember guys... it’s 2025: the limitations of what can and can’t be done to finish a decades old film simply don’t exist anymore if you’re willing to take the time and effort to do it.

What he means, apart from anything else, is that scenes which Fincher wanted but was prevented from filming in 1992 could now be created digitally, even “with” actors who have died in the interim. As he says, it wouldn’t be easy. It would take time and persistence - but it is now possible.

AI will enable augmentation and “resynthesis” of material - both visual and aural - in ways that have never been possible before.

Switching language

The era of clumsy dubbing could be ended by the ability to automatically change dialogue to a different language. This involves both resynthesising the actor’s voice to produce different words, and visually changing their mouth movements to match. It is already possible.

Changing dialogue

Dialogue can be changed after the fact, whether to remove swear words (to make the drama suitable for a wider audience) or to fix mistakes made in performance or to align with a later version of the script. Again, this is already possible.

Fixing errors

Think of the possibilities for repairing or slightly altering a shot taken in the traditional way. If this technology had been available to Kubrick, he wouldn’t have needed to do innumerable takes of every shot until he got exactly what he wanted. Slight errors or imperfections, whether by the actors or the crew, could have been fixed very easily with AI. Even errors that would have confounded the best image technicians of 2015 would present little trouble for a well-trained AI today. As a result, Kubrick would have made his films much faster. In fact, if this technology had been available to him, we might have twice as many Kubrick films as we do have. Does that mean they would be half as good? I see no reason to assume so. What always matters is the drive and intent of the creator. If Kubrick went about his craft in the way that lazy AI creators go about theirs today, he would do just one take of every shot and his films would be absolute garbage. With or without AI, what matters is the commitment, engagement and talent of the creator.

Upscaling footage

I’m not actually a huge fan of high image resolution. I think there’s a lot to be said for smudginess, softness, and a nice bit of film grain or video noise, etc. However, large image scale is clearly desirable in many contexts. Until the advent of AI it wasn’t something that was ever done very well. The AI results speak for themselves - simply incredible.

Restoring colour to footage

Colourisation is usually done to footage that was originally colour but for whatever reason was only preserved as a black & white copy. I happen to know of a more bizarre example: due to an industrial dispute, episodes 2 to 6 of Upstairs Downstairs were unnecessarily shot in black & white. The camera-men disabled the colour tubes on their cameras leaving only the luminance tube operating, which resulted in a black & white image. It has always aggravated me, because I just don’t find these five episodes as engaging as the 63 other episodes of the programme. With AI, this problem could easily be rectified, the episodes restored to how they should have looked. The same is true of series like The Edwardians, where some episodes only exist as black & white copies because the colour mastertapes were junked.

Simulating dead technologies

There have been many camera technologies down the decades, and I believe all of them could be simulated with AI.

Let me give one example. A camera technology that I have great fondness for is colour tubes. The most famous of these cameras, the EMI-2001, debuted in 1968 and was the “workhorse” of the BBC for well over a decade, characterising the look of “70s British TV”. Even as newer cameras made it obsolete, the EMI-2001 remained beloved and BBC engineers cannibalised parts in order to keep an ever smaller number of them going. The last EMI-2001 cameras were finally retired in 1991. The husks of quite a few machines still exist today, but it would be virtually impossible to make one of them operational. The tubes, the crucial element that gathers the image as an electronic signal, aren’t even manufactured any more. It is a dead technology.

But it was a beautiful one. The look of EMI-2001 footage is highly distinctive and gives a story a very particular “feel”.

I have tried - believe me - to make modern digital footage look that way. I have tried both with After Effects filtering and with programming. Nothing comes close.

I believe that AI will manage the task, and this thing from the past will be recovered. Moreover, it will be recovered in high-definition, even 4K. Why not?

Recreating lost footage

We could salvage dramas that are simply lost. In Britain, many TV programmes were junked in the 1960s and ‘70s. For many, complete soundtrack recordings exist. AI could recreate each of those programmes using the soundtrack as the guide as to how the actors should move and look as they speak. Supplementary materials - photos of a set, notes by the costume designer, camera scripts, publicity shots, out-takes, an off-air recording of one particular scene, shots of the actors in other productions or playing similar roles, etc. - could be used to get the AI recreation closer to the original, lost version. Would it ever be exactly the same as the original? Certainly not. But it would be a thousand times closer than what we currently have, which is nothing.

Separating mixed sounds

Dudley Simpson was a composer who wrote and recorded - with the help of his own synthesisers and a small band of multi-instrumentalists - the music for many BBC programmes. A unique talent, Simpson wrote music that is very distinctive and utterly charming. However, the BBC did not keep copies of his music, only the programme soundtracks which have mixed-in dialogue, etc. I once read that Simpson kept his own tapes of his music but lost them all during a house move. As a result, while we can enjoy his music in the programmes, we can hear very little of it by itself. Doubtless Simpson’s work is not alone in this sad fate. With AI, the music could be separated out from the programme soundtracks and finally heard on its own.

Sound resynthesis

A niche area of audio technology is “resynthesis”, where a sound is analysed to produce a unique algorithm - essentially the DNA of the sound - which can then be used to resynthesise the sound at different pitches, for different durations, or with altered characteristics. You could even swap characteristics between sounds - give a trombone the body of a grand piano, etc. Impossible sounds, things we really have never heard before, would become possible.

Despite its great potential, resynthesis has always been a niche thing, for the simple reason that it has never been possible to do it well. One attempt was the Hartmann Neuron, but its capabilities were nowhere near what one would hope for. The technology simply wasn’t there in 2002, because a necessary part of analysing a sound is recognising - as a human would - its characteristics. The Neuron could only guess at the characteristics of what it was “hearing”. AI would be much better at this task.

Trait transposition

A similar thing could be done on the visual side: recognising the elements of an image and recreating them elsewhere. For example, from a city street scene:

• that car

• that truck

• that building

• that traffic light

• that pedestrian

• that group of pedestrians

• this density of traffic

• the general layout of the street

• the weather

• the light conditions (eg. time of day, position of the Sun)

• the visual texture of the recording medium

• that camera move

Element melding

It will also be possible to create elements in the real world and integrate them into the AI work. For example, you could have a real actor give a real performance, then have the AI inject them into a scene. You could even have it change their face or accent. You could take real footage of a setting and have the AI digest that and produce new shots of that setting. You could record a real camera sweep using your smartphone, then tell the AI to reproduce that exact sweep across a digital setting. You could integrate a real matte background you have painted, or a real miniature model you have constructed, or a real puppet you have animated with sticks or strings or servos, etc. In this way, AI imaging could actually reinvigorate traditional animation, sound creation, and techniques of “in-camera” special effects, by providing new ways to integrate them into a drama.

Character creation

I can imagine a software environment for gradually creating characters, over time. This would be visual, aural (their voice) and psychological (their personality). It would encompass their clothes, their build, their face, their tics and mannerisms, how they use their voice… everything. During the process of creating a character, the user could tell the AI to experimentally show him in different situations - eg. at the supermarket checkout, selling a house, breaking up with a lover - which in turn would inspire the user in terms of story, dynamics with other characters, etc. Once the user is satisfied with the character, the software could render him photo-realistically in AI videos - a character performed without the intermediary of an actor to perform him.

Conclusion

As we have seen, AI means that the handling of sound and image can radically change. Creating the raw element - a sound, a scene, even a character - will not be done in the old-fashioned way of creating or finding a physical thing and somehow capturing it in an electronic record, but by conjuring it by verbally instructing software. Then the raw element will be integrated into a digital scene, or created incidentally as a part of the same when it is conjured wholesale. This could be done with a thousand elements that make up a scene, some of them being created individually, some in tens or hundreds. Some will be picked out afterwards for special augmentation, some removed, some multiplied. The process could be endlessly complex or guilt-inducingly simple. But the creator will be driven by his vision and what it uniquely requires, and some elements will be important enough to warrant his attention and others will be incidental and left to the whims of the software. This balance between man and machine will, of course, be critical to whether the result can be considered beautiful art or worthless slop.

In summary, AI tools are incredible not only for their ability to fix or salvage what has been made, but to create from scratch that which has not been made and, indeed, could otherwise never be made, especially by a sole person. If I am right, then how we produce drama will entirely change, and accordingly, how we consume and consider drama will be likewise transformed.