Robert Tombs is playing GK Chesterton for the Telegraph, conjuring a “silent people” about to speak in the accents of 1908. The flags on lampposts in Stoke or Rotherham are presented as auguries of revolution, the English finally stirring from their supposed slumber. Tombs’s conceit is that to wave St George’s Cross today is not loyalty but resistance. A people turning against a cosmopolitan elite. He calls it “momentous”. He dresses it in Shakespearean lament and the grandeur of Engels’s “revolution must come.” But this is sleight of hand. He is mistaking the fire lit at asylum-seeker hotels for the storming of the Bastille.
Let’s be clear: no barricades are being built in Barnsley. What Tombs hails as revolutionary energy is nothing more than counter-revolutionary resentment. A politics of scapegoating migrants, cloaked in the language of sovereignty and “integration,” is not a new English revolution but the oldest trick of capitalist crisis: turning popular anger downwards. Engels, whom Tombs quotes, did not look at desperate Irish families in Manchester and warn against them. He looked at the owners of the mills. Tombs takes Engels’s words and turns them upside down, stripping them of their class target.
“Let’s be clear: no barricades are being built in Barnsley.”
The Telegraph’s resident historian’s narrative is a long gallop through English history designed to naturalise this new nationalism as the latest chapter in a perpetual national drama. The Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, all are invoked so that immigration today can be made to feel like another epochal “disruption.” But to compare dinghies in the Channel to the Black Death is grotesque. It is the rhetorical trick of every frightened establishment in history: when wages fall, when housing collapses, when inequality widens, blame the foreigner and present yourself as the guardian of national continuity.
He admits as much when he says the greatest threat comes not from migrants themselves but from an “elite” that refuses to integrate them. Here the logic is revealed: the real revolution Tombs wants is not the uprising of the working poor but the disciplining of universities, museums, civil servants – any institution not singing “Land of Hope and Glory” loudly enough. This is not the English Revolution of radicals but a Kulturkampf1 to silence dissent.
Even his Chesterton2 flourish “we have not spoken yet” rings hollow. Tombs resurrects Chesterton as a figure of the “national voice,” ignoring that while Chesterton was conservative and nationalist, he was no fascist, and his call to speak was never meant to justify scapegoating the vulnerable. Meanwhile, the mob has been speaking for itself over the last year: bricks through hotel windows, chants outside migrant centres, and yes, petrol bombs. Tombs tries to recast this ugly spectacle as the stirrings of national destiny, but history is merciless to those who confuse pogroms with progress.
What is happening under the St George’s Cross is not revolution. It is the state’s old tactic of survival: offer a flag in place of bread, a scapegoat in place of justice. Tombs mourns that England has ceased to be rich and confident, and he is right to feel the ground shifting beneath him. But the choice is not between cosmopolitan “elites” and nationalist mobs. The real English revolution will not be led by pub landlords painting red crosses on roundabouts. It will be led, if it comes, by those who reject both Tombs’s nationalism and Starmer’s managerialism, who insist that the crisis is not migration but capitalism itself.
“The real English revolution will not be led by pub landlords painting red crosses on roundabouts.”
History won’t call this a revolution. It will call it what it is: a counter-revolution dressed up in fascist bunting.
Footnotes
- “Kulturkampf” originally described Bismarck’s 19th-century assault on the Catholic Church, but here it signals the same tactic: elites using culture and institutions to enforce conformity, distract from systemic failure, and police dissent — exactly what Tombs celebrates under the guise of English patriotism. ↩︎
- Tombs invokes Chesterton’s 1908 line, “we have not spoken yet,” as if the mob hanging flags today channels some heroic English spirit. In reality, it’s a rhetorical flourish masking reactionary grievance, turning Chesterton’s call for thoughtful engagement into a licence for scapegoating. ↩︎
