Thankfully, the worst is yet to come

Yesterday I set out how Restore Britain might make itself useful, but I'm inclined to think it's probably already too late. If there is to be a street movement, its leaders are going to have to be relatable, even if they have colourful backgrounds and robust politics (i.e. not neo-nazi thugs), and the political wing is going to have to be united and coherent. It cannot withstand high level factions of the party freelancing their own agenda - and I’m reliably informed this is the case.

At some point I think Rupert Lowe will be forced to sack Charlie Downes because of the company he keeps, at which point the party will split, and what remains will be little more than a replica of Advance UK with a Tommy Robinson wing - essentially becoming a latter day Ukip on steroids, while its offshoot ethnonationalist party curls up and dies due to its own obnoxiousness. If we see an emergent street movement, it is better off crafting its own political wing from scratch.

The problem there is that the street movement is likely to be comprised of people like Danny Tommo, who is presently projecting an image of being all mouth and no trousers, and being a bit of a grifter (especially when he’s invoking the “Christ is King” baloney). That makes him easy prey for the media.

I’m under no illusions here. Street movement leaders will not be clean cut types with impeccable backgrounds, but they still need to come over as sincere and credible - but we haven’t seen such people arising from these cohorts, especially if they’ve been in the orbit of Tommy Robinson. The return on financial investment has not been good. Consequently, I’m not wholly convinced this approach can work.

The point for me is that the movement as a whole has to be relatable, and sufficiently presentable so that ordinary people feel empowered to join it and defend its actions - which it cannot do if the leadership are grotbags. There is a fundamental decency to the British people and any political movement has to reflect that. The moment you have antisemitic misogynist thugs in the mix is the moment people start to peel away, just as they have with Restore. While optics are less important than they are for a political party, they still matter. The people have to see themselves reflected in a political movement.

This doesn’t exactly leave me brimming with optimism, but then we’re still in the early days of this pre-revolutionary state. For the time being, any street protest is going to be a limited number of activists with mediocre leadership. Things have to get a lot worse before we start seeing a more animated general public. The good news, I guess, is that things are going to get a lot worse.

As much as anything, there are geopolitical tensions driving up the cost of petrol which in turn is going to drive up the cost of food and everything else, while electricity prices may rise by a quarter. The next year or so will be when the “just about managing” are no longer able to manage. A third of UK adults have less than £500 saved for emergencies, and 59.2% have less than £5,000. Britain is notionally a wealthy country but its people are not.

This gets to a point where we start seeing bailiffs force fitting prepayment meters, and the poorest households going at least three days a month with no electricity at all. We will also see a consumer credit repayment crisis and major council tax arrears. Council tax debt remains the third most common issue raised with National Debtline, affecting 31% of callers.

Meanwhile, political disaffection only gets worse from here on in. So far Andy Burn’em has been keeping it low key in order to extend the bounce in the polls, but soon enough he will reveal himself to be as tone deaf and inept as his predecessor, unable to deliver on his promises, and unwilling to do anything remotely radical or useful. He is also hobbled by the state of public finances which are worse than he understood. The bond markets do not look happy.

There is some speculation that Labour will call a snap election in the near future while the right is still hopelessly split and disorganised, which sounds plausible to me. This sets us up for five more years of Labour misrule which can only exacerbate the kind of conditions that cause public unrest. Burn’em is also likely to face his own Southport moment, demonstrating just how far out of touch he is.

There is only one political certainty about the near future and it’s that Labour will not do anything to put Britain on an even keel. It is only capable of making things worse. Their future standing with the British public is contingent on how well they can mask the damage they’re inflicting, or blame it on an external force. But they will run out of excuses eventually. There is no concealing the fact that the fundamentals are broken, which makes unrest and disorder inevitable.

Your guess is as good as mine as to how and when this unravels, but I think it has only held together as long as it has because the decline in living standards has been imperceptibly slow, and people are still coping even if they’re stretched. This will not last. It cannot last.

What changes, when it changes, is the public’s sense of time. For years the country has accepted each new insult as an isolated incident. People absorb it, complain, and go back to work. That is how a slow collapse disguises itself as normality. The moment it stops working is when households realise they have no financial resilience left.

At that point politics leaves the polling station - not because the British have suddenly become revolutionaries, but because the formal channels have spent a decade proving they do not bend. You can vote for a reset and get a reshuffle. You can watch a government discover that the Treasury, the courts and the bond market are the real sovereign. After enough of that, the street stops being a last resort and becomes the only place left that still answers.

It will not look like the present circuit of rallies. Those are still optional. They are attended by people who have already decided they are political. A genuine street movement begins when people who never thought of themselves that way start turning up because staying home feels more dangerous than being seen. Parents. Tradesmen. The quietly broke.

A government that cannot keep the lights on, cannot keep the streets orderly, and cannot tell the truth about why, should not be surprised when the public stops asking nicely.

The state will call this extremism. It always does, usually around the time it has run out of other explanations. It will try to shrink the thing back into a cast of familiar villains, because a few named men are easier to police than a public mood. That trick works on a small activist scene. It works less well when the same mood appears in towns that never had one.

By then nobody will be in the mood for a Tommy Robinson franchise rattling a collection tin. The current faces will either be swept aside or dragged along as mascots. The movement itself will still widen. It will simply grow nastier, less steerable, and less interested in being liked. Whether that becomes a force that changes policy, or just a running fight the state uses to justify itself, will depend on who gets there first.

When it happens it is likely to throw up its own leaders, and from them arises a new politics. It is a mistake to assume they will come from the familiar quarters. Given what we have to work with presently, we’d better hope so.