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In ‘The progressive case for anglofuturism’, Aeron Laffere challenges the assumption that anglofuturism belongs exclusively to the political right.
“When the Marxist philosopher Franco Berardi wrote about “the slow cancellation of the future” in 2011, he was diagnosing a persistent malaise in the contemporary political imagination. Somewhere along the 20th-century journey of war, economic depression, and financialisation, political movements lost any capacity to imagine a future that wasn’t just a continuation of the present. Partly in response to this, political theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams wrote the left-accelerationist manifesto, Inventing the Future. It envisioned industrial renewal and exponential take-off in computing delivering an abundant, post-scarcity utopia. Berardi wrote a scathing response that pointed to the “post-humanist” endpoint of a technology fetish divorced from material concerns. There is undoubtedly something tragicomical in Anglofuturist ideas: that industry and capital could foster, rather than eliminate, our sense of home in the future seems to run against all historical understanding. But we steeled ourselves to accusations of cringe and pressed on. Our early episodes on raising Dogger Bank from the sea and building more British spaceports earned laughs but also, to our surprise, raised emotions. In a political climate characterised most of all by disbelief in the possible, the portrayal of a utopian tomorrow that felt like home seemed at least to hold people’s attention.”
In ‘Acid Patriotism’, Clive Martin writes on how a new fusion of rave culture and nationalism has turned right-wing protests into a form of chaotic hedonism.
“Certainly, something is working on younger people – a demographic that the right has always found difficult to court. Beyond the frothing boomers, such protests are full of kids who appear as if they could be watching Kettama at Warehouse Project at 2am and belting out ‘Jerusalem’ in Piccadilly Gardens on the way home. Scan footage of the crowds, and there are a lot of shoulder bags, a lot of Stone Island trackies, and broccoli hairdos. How political they really are is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard not to believe they are attracted to the sheer spectacle and anything-goes mentality at some of these events – in lieu of much else to do.
The reasons for this are probably innate. A friend of mine who’d made friends with some younger people at a pub in the Northwest says they all go heavy in the gym, listen to hard European techno, play darts on ketamine, and play golf on ketamine. Infamously, a Teletech shirt was seen at the Middlesbrough riots, and it’s easy to wonder if British life, British drug habits and British politics are just getting more intense in some kind of tandem freefall.
That there is an inherent disconnect between drugs (which are meant to bring people together), party music (which is meant to do the same) and right-wing politics (which are meant to do the exact opposite) matters little. From skinheads listening to ska to second-generation immigrants running for Reform, the right has always been knowingly, gleefully chaotic and hypocritical.”
For UnHerd, Aris Roussinos revisits Benedict Anderson’s widely misunderstood ‘Imagined Communities’, arguing that Anderson was an advocate of nationalism’s emancipatory power.
“Wrongly deployed as intellectual ballast for post-national, globalised, multicultural projects by those who have misunderstood him, Anderson instead stands firmly against all these things: globalisation and human rights discourse are simply fig-leaves for an imperial order that will, as all its predecessors have done, crumble in the face of a nationalist wave it has itself created. Indeed, he observes, the intellectual animus against nationalism is directly attributable to imperial requirements. “Like all empires, the American empire needs enemies. ‘Dangerous nationalism’ (which of course did not include American nationalism) emerged to fill the vacuum left by the evaporation of ‘the communist threat’.” Instead, it is the nation-state, for Anderson as for his Marxist Brexiteer brother Perry, that enables human flourishing, even if the excesses of nationalism must be restrained. As Anderson puts it: “This is why what is increasingly needed is a sophisticated and serious blending of the emancipatory possibilities of both nationalism and internationalism.” Rather than its dismissive obituarist, anyway, it is time to reclaim Benedict Anderson as nationalism’s humane advocate — and its prophet.”
Sam Kriss reviews One Battle After Another and Eddington, against the backdrop of Corbynism’s collapse, the Gaza protests, and the Green Party’s anodyne populism.
“How long have we been here? I think Pynchon was right: it really was all over after 1968. That’s why, when an artist in 2024 tries to imagine what an active and thriving radical movement would look like, it looks exactly the same as Beyoncé’s 2016 halftime show. Retro kitsch. But while I will never hear a word against Thomas Pynchon, he does have a blind spot when it comes to the counterculture, the counterforce, ‘the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire.’ He lived through it and it was beautiful. I didn’t. But from here, in the aftermath, it looks like the reason the left no longer knows how to do anything except imitate itself is that half a century ago, it won. From the French Revolution onwards, the left stood for freedom, emancipation, the ability to want whatever you want to want and to always get it. Against repression and oppression in all its forms. We got it. After 1968, capitalism could plausibly offer, in response to all our demands for freedom, more of itself. As a result, we moved from an age in which the great overriding problem is no longer that the world won’t let us get what we want, but that desire itself is disappearing. The left, in the way it’s been constituted since 1789, has no answers here. It will not be remembered. There will be something that can respond to this problem. It will come in a shape we can barely imagine.”
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For the Centre for British Progress, Andrew Bennett argues that the British Business Bank – the UK’s closest equivalent to a sovereign wealth fund – no longer meets the country’s strategic needs, and sets out how it could be redesigned to back scale and sovereignty in key industries.
“Now here is how the British Business Bank describes itself: “a government-owned economic bank specialised in helping businesses in the UK access financial support.”
In many ways this comparison is unfair – the BBB was not created to be a sovereign wealth fund – but that’s the point: Britain has a parochial economic development bank focused on job creation and fixing ‘access to finance’ market failures, rather than a capital allocator with the capability, culture and velocity to build wealth, double down on winners and advance our strategic interests.
This matters because, whether or not you think the UK should have such an institution, the BBB is increasingly being tasked with allocating capital as if it were such an institution. Since 2014, the BBB’s remit has ballooned from an initial £1bn commitment to more than £25bn in investments, loans and guarantees, yet there has been almost no attention on reforming the institution itself and making sure it is equipped to allocate this level of capital well.”
Rian Whitton calls for a new national strategy focused on cheap, secure domestic energy, rather than an overreliance on intermittent renewables and optimistic green-growth assumptions.
“Britain’s energy situation is at a crossroads. Due to over twenty years of policy failure, our country is locked into an indefinite period of electricity costs up to 200% higher than those of our European neighbours and over 400% higher than those of the United States. Meanwhile, our broader energy production is declining, resulting in further dependence on foreign markets and higher prices.
Economy-wide decarbonization remains a distant and expensive prospect. Fossil fuels still supply just under 75% of total primary energy demand, and residential and industrial electricity prices are now 4-5 times higher than gas prices per equivalent unit of energy, undermining the economic case for electrification across residential heating, transportation, and industry. This “spark spread” is also one of the highest in Europe, and by itself serves as an ample demonstration that the UK has expensive electricity for reasons far beyond its reliance on gas to supply marginal power. With electricity prices this high, deep decarbonization will be impossible absent huge government subsidies, on top of the £15-20 billion that billpayers are already paying a year in direct and indirect subsidies for decarbonising the power sector alone.”
The UK tax system is so broken that the New Economics Foundation and the Adam Smith Institute are now co-publishing papers together on how to fix it. Organised by the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation, the authors argue that the UK doesn’t necessarily need higher or lower taxes, but smarter taxes that don’t block investment and growth.
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In Late Soviet Britain, Abby Innes argues that Britain’s thirty-year neoliberal experiment mirrors the logic of late-Soviet planning. Both systems, she suggests, tried to replace politics with technocratic control, only to erode their own institutions and capacity for renewal. The result is a state unable to adapt to the realities it has created.
Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures is a collection of essays exploring how our culture has become trapped in its own past. Drawing on music, film, and theory, Fisher argues that late capitalism has exhausted the future, leaving us haunted by the unrealised possibilities of modernity.
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James Butler speaks with former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane and economist Daniela Gabor about why governments fear the bond markets, how central banks have come to shape economic policy since 2008, and what that means for the power of elected politicians today.
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SAVE THE DATE. On Wednesday 12th November at 1pm, John Gray will be in conversation with Jonathan Rutherford on what comes after progressivism. Attend in person at Policy Exchange, 1 Old Queen Street, Westminster SW1H 9JA, or watch online. Register here.
