The men waving flags outside migrant hotels like to think they’re defending Britain. They parade themselves as guardians of heritage and order, the self-appointed custodians of a nation supposedly under siege. Robert Jenrick, forever the opportunist, now turns up at these rallies like Mussolini reincarnated in a Tory rosette, face fixed into statesmanlike sternness, as though planting a Union Jack on a lamppost were an act of Churchillian courage.
But what we are witnessing isn’t patriotism in any real sense. It’s theatre. Provincial theatre, badly acted, the sort that thinks itself Shakespearean while everyone else can see the wobbly scenery. The flags, the marches, the angry speeches about “illegal migrants” none of it speaks to the real crises shaping Britain: collapsing infrastructure, unaffordable housing, a stagnant economy, a political class without vision or legitimacy. The small men with big flags talk about “taking back control” but wouldn’t dare name the forces that actually govern Britain: private equity funds, arms dealers, the offshore accounts where real power lives.
Farage and the Politics of Jealousy
Nigel Farage built his entire career on what might be called jealousy politics. Not jealousy of the rich by the poor (that would at least carry a whiff of class politics) but a manufactured rage that someone, somewhere, is getting something for nothing. Migrants in hotels, students protesting about Gaza, climate activists blocking roads: all painted as freeloaders, parasites, or enemies of “hardworking taxpayers.”
It is a masterstroke of reactionary politics because it erases capital from the equation entirely. The landlords charging the Home Office eye-watering rates to house asylum seekers vanish from sight; the property developers land-banking empty flats disappear; the bankers and hedge fund managers who turned housing into an asset class beyond human need melt into the background. What remains is the image of the hotel, the migrant, the protestor, symbols of a nation supposedly stolen.
Jealousy politics thrives on these symbols because they demand no investigation, no grasp of economics, no serious engagement with power. They invite rage, not analysis. Farage knows it. Every pint-raising photo-op, every speech about “our country” being taken away, every manufactured scandal about hotels or dinghies or benefit cheats performs the same function: turning the losers of neoliberalism against those even lower in the hierarchy, while the winners keep winning.
Starmer and the Authoritarian Centre
Enter Keir Starmer, Britain’s great administrator of decline. If Farage is the showman, Starmer is the clerk: dry, managerial, muttering about stability while signing whatever papers the Home Office or Treasury slide across his desk. Yet for all the contrasts in style, Farage needs Starmer as much as Starmer needs Farage.
Every inch of political ground Farage clears to the right, Starmer cements in law. Deportation flights, injunctions against protestors, the creeping criminalisation of solidarity itself — Labour delivers it all with a solemn face and talk of “serious government.” Farage whips up the mob; Starmer gives it the machinery of state power.
This is what the so-called centre ground has become: not a bulwark against authoritarianism but its most reliable engineer. It builds the police powers, the surveillance laws, the border regimes, all under the banner of moderation and pragmatism. The right provides the panic; the centre provides the permanence. When the next demagogue arrives, he won’t need to build a police state from scratch. Starmer’s Labour will have left him the keys.
The Dialectic of Decay
This alliance of demagogue and technocrat belongs to a very specific stage of capitalism: the stage where capital itself has run out of promises. For forty years it could sell privatisation, credit, homeownership, the stock market, the dream of mobility. Now the dream has collapsed. Wages stagnate, rents soar, pensions evaporate, public services rot. What remains is the surveillance camera, the deportation flight, the riot cop.
Politics in such times grows inward, punitive, obsessed with control. Flags proliferate as living standards fall; security powers expand as welfare states contract. Farage talks about “our country back” while the country itself is auctioned off to bond markets and trade deals. Starmer talks about “stability” while delivering the authoritarian tools the next government will use against its enemies. Neither can name the forces hollowing Britain out because both ultimately work for them.
The provincial Mussolinis strut across the stage precisely so no one notices the real play unfolding behind the curtains: the slow handover of sovereignty itself to capital, the long retreat of the political class from anything resembling vision or ambition.
After the Flags
The decline of Britain will not come with fascist marches down Whitehall or tanks on the Mall. It will come with more flags, more deportation flights, more injunctions against protestors, more speeches about stability while the country falls apart. Farage will provide the scapegoats; Starmer will provide the paperwork.
This is how authoritarianism advances in liberal states: not through sudden coups but through slow, grinding normalisation. The provincial Mussolinis keep the spotlight on migrants, activists, outsiders, while capital takes the land, the housing, the infrastructure, the future itself. By the time the nation realises, there will be nothing left to wave the flags over but rubble.
