The Faragist mind is a curious thing. It sees Hitler’s tanks rolling across Europe and concludes the real mistake was fighting back. Jack Anderton, enfant terrible of Reform UK’s propaganda machine, believes Britain should have sat out both world wars, preserved its empire, and today be “regaining” Australia, Canada, and South Africa. What masquerades as radical candour is in fact the oldest trick of the reactionary imagination: blaming decline not on capitalism, not on the plundered colonies rising against imperial rule, not on the exhaustion of an empire built on stolen labour, but on the act of resisting fascism.
But Anderton’s counterfactual collapses on contact with history. Had Britain sat out 1914, Germany would have dominated Europe, strangling Britain’s trade routes, reshaping the balance of power, and likely accelerating the collapse of empire under worse conditions. Ireland’s independence struggle, India’s revolt after Amritsar, Egypt’s 1919 revolution, all flowed from the war itself, proof that the empire was already fracturing. Neutrality would not have preserved imperial dominion; it would have left Britain isolated as rivals carved it up.
By 1939, the stakes were clearer still. To refuse to fight would not have meant quiet prosperity and a preserved empire. It would have meant Hitler triumphant across Europe, the Holocaust unchecked, and Britain reduced to a Nazi client or a divided imperial carcass between Berlin and Tokyo. Far from securing independence, neutrality would have guaranteed subordination, to fascist powers abroad and to capital’s authoritarian enforcers at home.
This is the dialectical knot: for Anderton, empire is both the lost Eden and the promised land. He cannot admit that empire’s dissolution was inevitable, written into the contradictions of global capitalism and anti-colonial revolt. Instead, he rewrites history into a fascist fairytale: Britain impoverished by war, cheated of its “natural” dominion, humiliated by America and Germany. The alternative he proposes is collaboration with Nazism, and later Russia: the dream of authoritarian stability through submission.
These are not abstract musings. They are the kind of conversations you can imagine in a Reform UK pub meet: the ones that start with “Hitler wasn’t that bad, really,” and end with praise for David Irving as a “great historian.” It is the seepage of the far right into the everyday, the casual rehabilitation of fascism as common sense. Anderton gives it a blog post, a sheen of policy, but it is the same rot (nostalgia for empire, sympathy for dictatorship, contempt for democracy) poured into new bottles.
Notice the consistency. If it was a mistake to oppose Hitler, then it is a mistake to oppose Putin. If Britain was wrong to defend democracy in the 1940s, it is wrong to defend Ukraine today. If violence and repression secured the empire, then violence and repression à la Bukele will restore a new one. This is not foreign policy; it is colonial nostalgia turned into a programme for authoritarian nationalism.
The point is not that Anderton is a lone crank. He is the distilled essence of Faragism: empire without responsibility, power without cost, state violence without limits. That he cut his teeth on TikTok algorithms only confirms the trend: fascism as meme, collaboration as “common sense,” dictatorship as “meritocracy.”
The left must answer not by defending Britain’s imperial adventures, but by stripping the argument bare: the fantasy of regained colonies is not a path to sovereignty but to permanent subordination—to Washington, to Moscow, to capital itself. The real betrayal of Britain was not resisting Hitler, but the dominant class that built an empire of exploitation, dragged millions into slaughter, and now produces apprentices like Anderton to repackage the same poison in the language of social media.
