1. The Death of Art
The death of art has been proclaimed for at least a century, most loudly, perhaps, by Dada during the Great War in Europe; but its clarion call has been sounded with diminishing ferocity over the last few decades. Initially, under the neoliberal revolution and fiat economies of the 1980s, the corporate world set about devouring whatever critical capacities art retained, and by the 2000s had turned it into the ‘exclusive’ commodity to which that world had every interest in reducing art. More recently, art has become indistinguishable from the propaganda of the myriad ideologies justifying the enforcement of stakeholder capitalism as the new political economy of the West. Never before — certainly in my lifetime — has the absence of art from the culture industry been more apparent; and never has that absence — at least by me — been felt so strongly. Only with the final death of art has it become clear, to me and undoubtedly to many others, what role art played in our societies, despite its recuperation as commodity advertising, corporate art-washing and investment opportunities for oligarch-funded museums. It was rightly judged by the architects of the new totalitarianism into which we have stumbled blindly since March 2020 that the spaces in which the members of a cultured society can come together to think and speak, which are not exclusive to but include art in all its forms, had to be eradicated and transformed, instead, into the instruments of their propaganda.
We’ve seen this before, of course. The history of art in the Twentieth Century was inseparable from the history of totalitarian regimes, not only in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but also — though it took us a while to realise it — in the consumer culture of the United States that went on to conquer what the former ideologies could not, and which has brought us to where we are now, at the beginning of the second quarter of the Twenty-first Century. The articles collected in this volume, written between 2016 and 2024, four years either side of lockdown, have the benefit of straddling this watershed in both Western capitalism and the culture industry of neoliberalism. As such, they document — from the battlefields of the culture wars of this period — the shift from the corporate-funded illusions of the 2010s to the brutal reality that has been built around us since 2020. What they document is not only how art has been turned into propaganda to the exclusion of any other function, but also how much we, as a society, miss art now. Today, the space art once held open for thinking, expression and debate has been shut down with the force of a portcullis, with us trapped in a digital prison from which the freedoms we once associated with art — however naïvely, given the expansion of the culture industry into every aspect of our lives since the Second World War — have been banished, censored and criminalised as a threat to the security of the state and the safety of its citizens.
In its place has been imposed the ideology of woke, in which all the other ideological forms of neoliberal capitalism — post-colonialism, multiculturalism, political correctness, critical race theory, identity politics, environmental fundamentalism, transgenderism — found their corporate funding, their political promotion, their educational indoctrination, their cultural dissemination, their legislative entrenchment and their police enforcement. The death of art is both a condition and a consequence of the rise of woke as the official ideology of stakeholder capitalism; and so dominant has it become in this globalist coup that, even before I understood what was happening, few of the books I have published over the past decade have not engaged with the hegemony of woke in some way.
It is ironic, therefore, that in the year I publish this book, and in the wake of the re-election of Donald Trump as US President, there has been no shortage of declarations of the death of woke, including Ash Sarkar’s Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War and Piers Morgan’s Woke is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness. These have been two of the UK’s most vicious propagandists of woke, who have used their platforms to denounce millions of Britons as racist, anti-science and conspiracy theorists. But they also include jobbing journalists like Andrew Doyle, whose The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution has been greeted by conservatives as a new Council of Trent that announced the Counter-Reformation. It’s as if the ideology of woke was never anything more than the over-exuberance of middle-class students looking to assert their victimhood, and who have belatedly come to their senses — rather than what woke is: the ideology of the Great Reset, which is as good a name as any to describe the revolution of Western neoliberalism into stakeholder capitalism.
You have to be pretty divorced from reality, or firmly entrenched in your victimhood, not to see that the authoritarianism and dogma of woke — whether or not its Red Guard are losing the impetus of their own Cultural Revolution — have been written into the legislation of Western nations and the transnational technocracies to which they are signatories. The Cultural Revolution may be over — the no-platforming of dissenters and the destruction of the careers of those who were sent for courses in self-criticism, unconscious bias and other mandatory programmes of woke indoctrination; but where the students may have let up or at least grown up, the state has taken over. With the climate of mass hysteria, mob-rule and state censorship under which we have lived for five years now ingrained in our educational, cultural and media industries, the legal and political apparatuses of the state show no sign of stepping back from completing the revolution into digital totalitarianism that the ideology of woke has prepared us to accept so meekly and obediently.
Examples of woke as the ideology of stakeholder capitalism in the UK include the decolonisation of school and university curricula deemed to be Eurocentric and therefore guilty of White supremacism, even if that includes censoring the greatest poet-dramatist in the English language who is revered across the world for giving voice to the emergence of humanist man; the rewriting of books that may cause offence to someone, somewhere, and by doing so open the author, publisher, bookseller, library or university to charges of hate speech and arrest by our realisation of Orwell’s Thought Police; the instalment, under the Employment Rights Act 2025, of what are, in effect, police informants in pubs, offices, work places and other public venues encouraged to spy on and report the conversations of the British workforce and public; ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity’ training written into the employment contracts of UK businesses, obliging every employee to undergo indoctrination in what has thereby acquired the status of an official state ideology every citizen is required to embrace or face unemployment and worse; the daily arrests of anyone asserting English national or cultural identity or engaging in Christian practices of prayer or evangelism; the thirty people arrested every day in the UK for social media posts, under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988; the categorisation by our security services of opposition to mass immigration to these isles and concomitant fears for the future of the British people and British culture as forms of ‘extreme Right-wing terrorism’; and, most recently, the enactment of what are, in effect, unwritten blasphemy laws criminalising anything less than the total embrace of Islam as the ideology of our submission to the policy of replacement immigration.
With the transformation of every aspect of our culture into a vehicle for state propaganda, the remaining vestiges of art and indigenous culture around which a national identity might be formed and, with it, a possible source of resistance to the ideology of woke is being violently suppressed and replaced. For not only have the institutions in which culture in the UK is officially funded, produced, overseen and disseminated been entirely colonised by woke, but those who call themselves artists have been too. There are few if any artists with a national profile in the UK who are not propagandists for the precepts of woke, no matter how absurd and obscene, opposition to which means not only a lack of financial support from those institutions but censorship by them, and now, even, arrest.
Following the incorporation of woke into our laws and politics, any speech that does not reaffirm its dogma, let alone oppose it, is now likely to be designated as hate speech, an offence that means arrest and detention. Even when deemed ‘non-criminal’, under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 offenders are placed on a record that can be accessed every time we apply for a job, bank account, loan, mortgage or visa. It is a measure of how far the UK has slid into totalitarianism that the police can now arrest us on the claim that someone else (whom they do not have to identity) has found something we have said or written (which they do not have to repeat) a cause of ‘anxiety’; not that we have said or written something that threatens their safety — for example, declaring that infidels of Islam should be killed, which once constituted a charge of incitement to violence — but something that, reportedly, makes them feel anxious. Moreover, the violence of the reaction to anything we say or write — for example, Muslims attacking us with knives for criticising their religion — is now cited by UK courts not as evidence of the criminality of the ideology we are criticising, but as evidence that in doing so we are guilty of a public order offence. In other words, the more violent are the enemies of free speech, the more their attack on it is protected by the law, and the more our defence of it is criminalised.
If the UK isn’t a police state, and indeed hasn’t been one since lockdown, I don’t know what is. Although we haven’t yet reached the brutality of Mussolini’s Organizzazione di Vigilanza e Repressione dell’Antifascismo, Hitler’s Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), Stalin’s Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del (NKVD), Franco’s Brigada Político-Social, Honecker’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stassi), Pinochet’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional or Mao’s Red Guards, the difference lies not in intent but in method, with the technologies of surveillance and control under which we live in the UK today many times more intrusive and powerful than any disposed of by the police states of the Twentieth Century. And yet — or, rather, and also — the response from our artists and institutions of culture has been silence: rigorously imposed, obediently maintained, complicit and cowardly, except — and this is the ultimate argument of this book — when art is not being placed, willingly, unreservedly and enthusiastically in the service of this police state.
2. The Culture Industry after Lockdown
Where does that leave art today in Europe and the West, and particularly in the UK? To answer that, let’s look at the example of the Scottish poet, Don Patterson, who in the first months of lockdown didn’t hesitate to lend his voice — amplified by his numerous awards and prizes, not least from the Queen, who in 2008 had awarded him an OBE — to the Great Lie (as I refer to the justifications for lockdown) and published ‘Easter 2020’. This poem repeated every cliché and falsehood about the so-called ‘pandemic’, Patterson’s knowledge of which appears to have been lifted entirely from the pages of the Guardian newspaper, perhaps the UK’s most virulent advocate of compulsory masking, the lockdown of citizens in their own homes and the injection of experimental gene therapies as a condition of the government returning out illegally removed freedoms.
Paterson had made himself famous not only with his poems, which I rather like, but for his description of the war poetry of the English playwright, Harold Pinter — for example, ‘American Football’ (1991) and ‘Death’ (1997) — as ‘inverted sentimentalism’ that ‘anyone can do’. It was a strange criticism from a poet who presents himself as a working-class man of the people. ‘Easter 2020’, as the British Left universally did, joined in the government’s apotheosis of NHS nurses as proletarian heroes when, in reality, the UK’s hospitals were largely empty under lockdown (which was one of the primary causes of the slight increase in death rates) and the nurses didn’t hesitate to inject the population with the experimental gene therapies that they, who witnessed their effects, largely refused. To quote T. S. Eliot — in the annual lecture in whose honour Paterson made his criticisms of Pinter: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ History will record that Pinter’s poetry spoke out against the lie that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, while Paterson’s poetry spoke in unison with the lie that a virus with the infection fatality rate of seasonal influenza constituted a pandemic. Not only could ‘anyone’ do what Paterson did, but almost everyone did.
Paterson isn’t the only poet or artist that has fallen silent as the truth behind his noisy lies has become apparent to all but the most faithful acolyte in the Church of Covid; but no mea culpa has come from him or the other 55 million fools and cowards who obediently queued to be injected when persons as worthy of trust as Bill Gates, Tedros Adhanom, Klaus Schwab, Ursula von der Leyen, Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock told them to. We shouldn’t, perhaps, go to our poets for our political opinions, and I most certainly do not; but can someone so easily duped by such a cabal of crooks have anything to tell me about a world whose future, as never before, will depend upon our ability to recognise and separate such obvious and stupid lies from the difficult and unpleasant truths to whose telling poetry and art should be dedicated? In confirmation of his total lack of ability (or courage) to make this distinction, Paterson didn’t hesitate, once again, to lend his voice to the choir of angels singing the apotheosis of the Ukrainian cock-joke comedian into the great defender of Western democracy when, two years later and on cue, he published ‘Spring Letter — 25/3/22’, which alternates between the Left’s rabid loathing of Vladimir Putin and its lachrymose worship of Volodmyr Zelenskyy (‘I just start crying when I think of him’). Perhaps it’s no more than confirmation that if you scratch a self-professed hardman of the North he’ll bleed whisky and self-pity; but I look for more than the tears of the establishment when I read a poet.
In the wake of the betrayals and collusions not only of poets but also of writers, artists, playwrights, actors, directors, film-makers, photographers, musicians, dancers, comedians and architects over the last five years, the first thing I ask myself when introduced to the work of a new artist is: what did they do under lockdown? Lockdown was the watershed of this century: a dividing line within what’s left of our politics, as well as between what is past and the future that remains to us. The Great Lie that it was, undoubtedly, it was also the Great Test — of nerve, of intelligence, of belief, of courage, of ethics, of morality, of community, of our humanity. And although the exact figures are contested of how many of us injected ourselves and our children with an experimental gene therapy for whose ‘side effects’ the government had indemnified its manufacturers, over 90 percent of us failed the test.
More importantly for our culture, with one or two honourable exceptions every artist and the entirety of the culture industry placed themselves and it unreservedly in the service of disseminating this lie, just as they and it continue to do with every subsequent lie told on the proven basis of the stupidity, the credulity, the cowardice and the compliance of the British people. Whether it’s that the proxy war in the Ukraine is a defence of European democracy that was dismantled in March 2020; that environmental catastrophe caused by man-made climate change is imminent and has been since the 1960s; that men with a fetish for dresses and cosmetic surgery are women and anyone saying otherwise should be arrested; that children can be born in the wrong body, which should be mutilated with drugs and surgery; or that Britain has always been a nation of immigrants: today, there is, quite literally, nothing the British public won’t believe or do if told to by our government and media, to which the culture industry and all its workers are now nothing more than a department for propaganda. Art may be dead, but culture has found its greatly expanded function under stakeholder capitalism, and there are few if any artists that have not signed up to their servile but well-renumerated roles as its cheerleaders.
3. Ideology as a Weapon
These articles take, as their method of analysis, the principles of historical materialism. That is to say, their critique of art and the culture in which it is produced is founded on the understanding that the superstructure of a given society, which includes not just its political and legal institutions but also its cultural ones, are ultimately determined by — while also having a reciprocal influence on — the economic structure of that society. Academics incorrectly call this ‘Marxism’, a term that, ever since intellectuals in that security alliance we call the West abandoned the working class to the judgement of capital, allows them to regard their purely theoretical productions as a form of social practice. As I wrote in the preface to the first volume in this series, Architecture is Always Political, what distinguishes these articles from such academic exercises in bad faith is the work of Architects for Social Housing, the community interest company I co-founded with the architect, Geraldine Dening, in 2015, and for which I am Head of Research. This has given me a practical understanding of the relations between the political, legal and cultural forms of finance capitalism in the UK that is largely and demonstrably absent from the writings of UK academics, journalists and intellectuals who variously describe themselves as socialists, anarchists, Leftists, Marxists or even communists. It is a principle of historical materialism — perhaps the founding principle — that knowledge emerges from practice, and that, in order to avoid becoming the idealism to which contemporary ‘theory’ has largely confined itself for the past fifty years, it must be founded in social and political practice. This is as far as possible from the works of ‘Leftist’ intellectuals of every political and ideological stripe, who think that citing other, equally academic works of research gives their own theoretical lucubrations some founding in social practice outside the halls of academe or the publishing industry for political commentary. It doesn’t.
I raise this issue here, therefore, not to qualify the rigour of this methodological principle but rather to reconsider to what extent the ideological superstructure of Western capitalism in the Twenty-first Century has increased its influence over the rapidly changing economic infrastructure. This isn’t to say I withdraw the materialist basis to the cultural critiques I make in these articles about the ideological forms of Western culture — multiculturalism and all the other products of neoliberalism. Multiculturalism was, first and foremost, the ideology of the unregulated movement of capital and labour between financial jurisdictions and nation states free of the tax regimes and laws of the markets and countries from which the profits of multinational companies are extracted. But the past five years, in particular, have made me rethink the relationship between the culture industry and the economy.
It’s taken me longer than it should have to realise it, but the end-game of the Great Reset of Western capitalism that was implemented in September 2019 to avert a second Global Financial Crisis in 12 years — and one, moreover, that threatened to dwarf that in 2007 — is not only the digital totalitarianism of the Global Biosecurity State monitored and controlled by a system of Digital Identity, Central Bank Digital Currency, Quick Response codes, facial recognition cameras, smartphones and all the other new technologies of surveillance by which we are threatened or already controlled. It is not even the digital camp that is being constructed around, between and within us, which I first described, three years ago, in The Road to Fascism. The end-game of the Great Reset is the ethnic cleansing and, eventually, the demographic replacement of Europeans from our homelands.
When did this begin? In the UK, undoubtedly, in the 1990s under the governments of Tony Blair, who first weaponised mass immigration not only, as it had been used since the Second World War, as a means to undermine the industrial action of the British working class, but as an instrument of ethnic cleansing. To be sure, the governments of Margaret Thatcher had relentlessly attacked both the economic and cultural foundations of the British working class, which she infamously described as the ‘enemy within’. But what Blair’s governments set in motion was the demographic replacement of the indigenous people of these isles, who in 1951 made up 91 percent of the population, in 2025 make up 71 percent, and who are predicted to be a minority in the UK by 2063. Whatever the exact date, the governance of the UK is already in the hands of a political class intent on destroying Britain by replacing not only its native population but also our culture, history, memory, freedoms, laws, behaviour, attitudes, beliefs and the national identity these constitute. As more and more Britons are beginning to realise, without the cultural, educational and civil institutions in which awareness of this programme could have been disseminated and resistance to it formed, we are being reduced to an impoverished nation of immigrants, little different from the USA or the developing countries from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent whose vast populations are the source of our demographic replacement.
How, in the space of a mere thirty years, has this been achieved? The answer cannot only be attributed to the UK’s economic decline under forty-five years of neoliberalism, de-industralisation, privatisation of state assets and public services, banking deregulation, fiscal austerity, quantitative easing, spiralling inflation and a resulting public sector net debt, in July 2025, of £2.8 trillion, equivalent to 96.3 percent of GDP — although these all, undoubtedly, laid the ground for the destruction of the British people. But there has been something else at work, something without which I believe we might, still, have saved the UK from its current state and future fate. And that something is ideology, and specifically the ideology that, through a myriad of forms, movements and beliefs and with immense corporate funding, has infiltrated and infected every cultural, political, legal, educational and medical institution in the UK, and by doing so has indoctrinated our entire professional and administrative classes into embracing its inane and obscene orthodoxies.
Where is the politician who won’t proclaim, against all the historical evidence, that Britain has always been a country of immigrants? Where is the judge who won’t sentence us to years in prison for expressing our opposition to the effects of mass immigration? Where is the doctor who won’t obediently repeat that male transvestites are biological women? Where is the priest who won’t hang the ‘Trans’ flag from her church? Where is the academic who won’t affirm the racist concept of ‘White privilege’? Where is the artist whose work doesn’t repeat every cliché about lockdown, the imminence of climate catastrophe or the proxy war in the Ukraine? There aren’t any; or, if there are, they have no support from government grants or patronage by the business sector, and risk being deplatformed, censored, slandered, fired by their employers and even arrested for saying otherwise.
Only the hegemony of the ideology of woke, whose predecessors — multiculturalism, political correctness, identity politics, etc. — date back to years before the term itself was coined, can account for the ongoing destruction of everything resembling a British or English identity in just three decades. Indeed, under the impact of woke on every aspect of culture, even the hitherto celebrated because so-called ‘minority’ identities of the Welsh, Scottish and Irish are now under attack. The Taoiseach of Ireland recently declared that the Irish are a ‘mongrel’ people and that anyone opposed to the colonisation of their country by millions of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa is a far-Right thug and racist. A Member of the Welsh Parliament argued on national television that Wales should welcome the entire male population of Afghanistan as ‘refugees’. And Scotland has a choice of equally racist Pakistani politicians who openly use ‘White’ as a pejorative in Holyrood.
As for the English, who have been the target of this colonialist ideology for far longer than our Celtic cousins — the latter of whom never hesitated in jumping on the bandwagon of identity politics to denounce us as ‘British imperialists’ for daring to celebrate a national identity — England is the only country in the world where a member of the native population can be arrested by his own police service for displaying the flag of his own country, and then be accused of racism for doing so by millions of foreign nationals and second-generation immigrants living in his country and largely on the taxes of the English people, and then to have that accusation repeated by every politician in our Parliament and disseminated across every media outlet by every political and cultural commentator. Indeed, according to the UK’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, modern Britain was built by West Indians after the Second World War, which rather puts the Industrial Revolution in its place, and is another attempt to erase the White British working class from our own history.
These are only a few examples of the looking-glass world in which we live today, which is mirrored, with varying degrees of distortion, in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA — in other words, across most of the Western world — but which is, perhaps, nowhere further down the rabbit-hole of ideology than in the UK. The evidence of this requires us — or, at least, it has forced me — to rethink the independence and power of ideology to change not only the economic structure of society — and under its destructive influence the standard of living in the UK economy is in freefall — but also the peoples who constitute that society.
For what the ideology of woke wants us to forget and punishes us for saying is that Europe, which includes the UK, is not a continent or a political alliance but a civilisation composed of many national cultures formed over hundreds and even thousands of years, and its incomparable achievements since the Renaissance, without which the modern world would not exist, are those of European peoples. Although we are a shadow of our former selves, and nowhere more so than in Britain, European culture does not exist in the abstract realm of nomination (woke’s reductive equation of national identity with the legal status of citizenship) but in the habits, lives, histories, languages, beliefs, behaviours and values of the peoples of Europe. Immigrants from the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the other regions of the former Third World with which Europe and the UK have been flooded by the policy of replacement immigration do not magically turn into Europeans or Britons or Englishmen the moment they enter our countries or receive citizenship of our states. That is a fabrication of the ideology of woke, in particular of the idea that began with the concept of multiculturalism — itself a misnomer designed to erase national cultures — and which European peoples have been bullied into believing or at least accepting by such academic inventions as ‘post-colonialism’.
What started as an academic field of study, however, was quickly turned into the ideology of critical race theory, which formulated the racist concept of White privilege, which justified corporate-funded movements like Black Lives Matter, which lobbied to change UK law so that English people are now arrested for flying their own flag by their own police, or banned from applying for jobs in their own country by DEI quotas. It is the role of a historical materialist understanding of culture not to pass judgement on the political ‘correctness’ of post-colonialism as an academic subject but, rather, to document and explain how it has been funded by corporate investment, lobbied into political discourse, written into legislation, and enforced by the police forces and courts of a nation. It is only following such documentation that I can say, and have argued in this book and in several others, that woke is not the overexuberance of White middle-class students inculcated into guilt and self-loathing, but rather the ideology of the new political economy of the West, stakeholder capitalism.
4. The Indoctrination of the Middle Classes
But did the ideology of what has come to be called woke really convince an entire people — and in the case of Europe an entire civilisation, and perhaps the greatest civilisation ever to have existed — to wish for its own destruction, and even to welcome that destruction, in the woke nomenclature of our day, as ‘a good thing’? The answer to that is: no. Even today, after thirty years of relentless propaganda, few members of the English working class share woke’s hatred of White people. The object of this ideological campaign has been, almost exclusively, the middle classes — of England, of Britain, of Europe, of the West. It is the middle classes, who exist as a transnational identity as homogeneous in their personal beliefs, racial prejudices and class hatreds in London as in Hong Kong, Vancouver or Berlin, who have been indoctrinated by the ideology of woke.
This has been achieved partly through the education industry, which has expanded to ensure that almost every child of the middle classes passes through its courses of higher indoctrination, inserted the ideology of woke into every aspect of what was once called a liberal arts education, and of which I have experience as both a student and a university lecturer. But, in addition, and with far greater reach, it has been enforced, through positive discrimination and other woke policy, on our media and culture industries. There is no advertisement, no television series, no mainstream film, no pop song, no genre novel, no theatrical production, no art exhibition, no sports event, no form of mass entertainment, no product of UK culture today that is not a vehicle for the dissemination of woke.
Examples are too numerous to list here, but one of the most risible recent productions of woke is the film Conclave (2022), in which the new Pope (elected 9 months, upon release of the film in August 2024, before the election of the actual Pope in May 2025) is a hermaphrodite. If you want to see how globalism combines the apparently incompatible ideologies of woke with Islamic fundamentalism — whose alliance is one of the keys to our present — watch this film. Christianity being one of the barriers to the Islamification of Europe, this film sets out to dismantle its fundamental tenets, with the new Pope being both pro-Islam and ‘Trans’. Of course, the Vatican hasn’t hesitated to add its voice to every obscenity of woke, from mRNA injections and transgenderism to the proxy war in the Ukraine; but it’s not by chance that every church in the UK has embraced the dogma of this ideology, which has effectively replaced the crucifix with its flag. Indeed, woke has become so ubiquitous in the culture industry that most people in the UK, and particularly among the younger generation, are unaware of the propaganda that is targeting them at every moment of every day in the online world into which they have been born and live out their smartphone-addicted lives.
When ‘cultural studies’ took off as an academic discipline in the 1980s, one of the objects of its critique were the unrealistic because supposedly ideal depictions of the lives and bodies of the actors and models who adorned the commodities we were seduced into purchasing in the greatly expanded marketing industry of television commercials, MTV and lifestyle magazines. In the 1990s there was an apparent backlash, as actors and models, like the dressed-down popstars of Britpop, presented themselves as ‘everyman’ in T-shirts, jeans and trainers. This was the uniform of what became known as ‘lad-culture’, a drawn-out adolescence of drunkenness, singledom and irresponsibility that normalised the representation of the British working class as unworthy of our own culture and, although we didn’t know it yet, of our own country.
Today, the wheel has turned full circle, and advertising, on the justification of meeting woke’s quotas for ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity’, is a freak show of grossly obese underwear models, pregnant bearded women proudly displaying the scars of cosmetic mastectomies, the relentless promotion of gay and other non-reproductive sexualities as desirable for our children, couples and families always and without exception composed of different races, and, on the few occasions when we are allowed on screens dominated by Black and Asian actors, the depiction of White Britons as stupid, childish, lazy, work-shy, submissive, unsuccessful, sexually abusive, drunk, violent and racist. Above all, this post-human menagerie is depicted as utterly subservient to technology, which we are shown ecstatically embracing, no longer as the accoutrements of success but as the solace to our socially atomised lives in a surveillance state in which our only remaining pleasure is to be watched over, controlled and rewarded by Big Brother. A long way from the idealised lifestyle of neoliberalism’s consumer of luxury commodities, our aspiration, now, is our degradation, our pleasure our punishment, our addiction elevated to the status of a credo whose god is the commodity brand, our desires indistinguishable from the will of the state, the apologies for our past history and present existence continuous and abject, the expiation of our guilt a public spectacle willingly participated-in by a new order of middle-class flagellants, the requirement to prove the lawfulness of our identity obediently complied with at every interaction and exchange in the online world. This has been the task of woke in the culture wars, and its victory has been so complete that few now can remember when it was otherwise.
As I’ve written before, the measure of the extent to which an ideology has penetrated and colonised a culture is how invisible it has become to the consumers of that culture, how normalised in an order of things that appears to us as natural rather than contingent, and therefore how transparent it is to both individual perception and cultural awareness. Ironically — if we can still speak of irony given the catastrophic consequences this has had for the British people — a generation trained to worship at the altar of ‘critical theory’ has been entirely stripped of critical faculties, the exercise of which it has been trained to believe consists entirely of the baying repetition of the dogma of their indoctrination. We are all wearily familiar with what these are: ‘White privilege’, ‘anti-vaxxer’, ‘global boiling’, ‘trans-rights’, ‘refugees are welcome’, ‘Putin apologist’, etc.
As someone who was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, a postgraduate in the early 1990s, who received his doctorate in 2001, and who taught in universities for 10 years, I have witnessed with growing horror this radicalisation of the children of the UK’s middle classes by the ideology of woke. Indeed, however incompetent and easily-led is the post-Global Financial Crisis generation that was raised on fiscal austerity, national decline and self-loathing, and which currently holds office in our councils, civil institutions, human resources departments and parliament with already disastrous consequences, I fear their impact will be nothing compared to that of the children of lockdown, environmental fundamentalism, transgenderism and replacement immigration, who have been programmed since birth to be the unquestioning administrators of stakeholder capitalism for the globalist elite. As for my generation, which handed over the socialisation and education of our children to the internet, social media, smartphones and the privatisation of every aspect of the public sphere by the political economy of neoliberalism, we have failed both these generations at every level and to a degree for which history, should any be written in the future, will rightly damn us.
5. The End of the Nation State
But why now? If the primary goal of stakeholder capitalism is the destruction of the nation state and the rule of Europe by a transnational elite constituting a European — if not yet World — Government modelled on the European Commission, the G7, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations, controlled by corporate bodies like the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum and the Group of Thirty, and ultimately answerable to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the US Federal Reserve, the European Bank and the Bank for International Settlements — why, then, is this happening now? To answer this question, and in doing so understand the current revolution from neoliberalism into stakeholder capitalism, we need to look at the history of the nation state; for although it has long been accepted as the natural model and final form of the state, it is, of course, historically contingent, and the conclusion of that history and its supersession by a very different model of governance explains much of what is happening now across the West, and nowhere more so than in Europe.
The birth of the nation state is usually dated to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that concluded the Thirty Years War in Europe and established the principle of the sovereignty of states and their right to govern both their territories and their populations; but the turning point was the French Revolution of 1789, which gave rise to nationalism as a political force. Nationalism, certainly, goes back further than that, and has been the refuge of the scoundrels that rule over us as far back as the Hundred Years War waged between England and France between 1337 and 1453. Shakespeare, who wrote Henry V around 1599 during England’s twenty-year war with Spain, didn’t shrink from citing nationhood, and not merely the divine right of kings, as justification for the war with France, just as he had in Richard II. It is not for nothing that the reading of these plays has been identified by Prevent, the Thought Police of the UK, as indicators of what it calls ‘Right-wing extremism’.
But nationalism first became a political and not only a military force in response to Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of much of Europe in the early Nineteenth Century. And while Britain managed to keep its soldiers and sailors in indentured servitude under a rigorously maintained class system that survives to this day, the sovereigns of Austria, Russia and Prussia were all wary of drawing on a force that, after defeating the French Empire in 1815, would threaten their own positions as hereditary monarchs. This was particularly the case among Europe’s burgeoning middle classes, who had been inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, tempered though this had been by the imperial ambitions of Napoleon I. The subsequent rise of Prussia and unification of Germany in 1871 as the dominant force in Europe it remains to this day, the overthrow of the Russian Empire by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919 after the Great War, and the destruction reaped on Europe by the Third German Reich between 1939 and 1945, proved them largely correct in their fears; and the formation of the European Union after the Second World War, ostensibly in order to stop a Third World War between nations, was the attempt of Europe’s ruling class to draw power back into its hands.
The last 80 years have witnessed the uninterrupted tale of the consequent destruction of the nation state as the European Union evolved from a trading block into a transnational technocracy that has sought to salt the seedbeds of nationalism by equating both with fascism, racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, etc. Partly this was the response to the division of Europe into Western and Eastern blocs after the Second World War and the subordination of its nations to the United States and the Soviet Union in the second half of the Twentieth Century; and also, under the neoliberal revolution, to the rise of China and, to a lesser extent, India as superstates that threaten the West’s hegemony in the Twenty-first Century.
What the European Union has produced, however, as Europeans are experiencing in the daily terrorist attacks, mass rape of women, unchecked street crime and our collapsing standard of living today, is not the multicultural utopia of ‘Europa’ we were sold by the globalists but an authoritarian, unaccountable, anti-democratic, systemically corrupt and increasingly totalitarian system of centralised governance for which the national governments elected by the increasingly heterogenous populations of what is left of Europe’s nations are little more than administrators of police states. Not only that, but under the dictates of the European Commission and the United Nations, Europe itself, as a civilisation, is being destroyed: its industrial infrastructure dismantled by the Lysenkoism of Net Zero; the ethnic unity of its people diluted by tens of millions of economic immigrants from incompatible and hostile countries and cultures; and our cultural, religious and national identities relentlessly attacked and now criminalised by the globalists intent on dismantling what source of resistance the nation state presents to their rule.
But are the acolytes of woke aware of this globalist programme and their role in implementing it, whether as politicians, civil servants, judges, lawyers, police officers, bankers, employers, editors, journalists, academics, teachers, priests, doctors, nurses, curators or artists? Undoubtedly, many are, and the more senior their position in our political, legal, financial, religious, civil, educational and cultural institutions, the more complicit they are in its implementation. But as we have seen in scandal after scandal — whether that is two years of government-imposed lockdown of the British people in contravention of UK, European and international law, the experimental gene therapies injected into millions of Britons by our National Health Service in violation of the same, the laundering of billions of pounds of British taxpayer’s money through the proxy-war in the Ukraine, the London Mayor’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone, the enforcement of 15-minute cities and 30-miles per hour speed limits, the use of facial recognition technology by our police forces, the indoctrination of our children into the dogma of transgenderism by our education system, the advertisement of jobs in the UK according to the skin colour, sexuality or gender dysphoria of the applicant, or the government, local authority and police cover-up of the Muslim rape gang network — the UK state is staffed in every department and at every level by zealots as indoctrinated into the dogma of woke as any Brown Shirt or Red Guard. History has demonstrated, and the last five years have reminded us, that religious zealots — and woke, before it is anything else, is a neo-Puritan movement of religious reformation — will enthusiastically and ecstatically burn the world to the ground in order to see the realisation of their religious dogma. As Kierkegaard wrote of the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, and which he saw not, as they are now remembered, as the merger of middle-class liberalism with working-class socialism that today serves as a cloak for woke’s globalist coup, but as the attempt to assume unconditional power in a state in which politics and religion would speak as one: ‘The movements of our time, which look to be merely political, will one day reveal themselves to be religious movements.’ That day is now.
6. Art and Politics
It is, in many respects, to demonstrate that there is another way to think about the world, that the totalitarianism under which we live today is of recent invention and illegal implementation, and that abject obedience to a rule over which we have no say is not the only social contract available to us in the second quarter of the Twenty-first Century, that I am publishing this book. For this reason, the articles it collects, by and large, are about those artists and critical practices that have brushed the terror of our recent history against the grain of compliance. They address many aspects of art and culture in Britain over the past decade, including independent film both before and after lockdown, the politics of mural and banner painting, the contested role of documentary photography, the exhibition strategies of our art institutions, the culture industry as a vehicle for corporate public relations, what remains of protest as a form of political expression, the duties of poetry today, the political function of digital ‘selfies’, and changes in the English language itself.
In addition to this cultural critique, however, these articles also discuss the changing forms our politics have taken, as well as the changing politics of those forms. These include the appropriation of popular protest by parliamentary parties on the Left, the replacement of working-class revolution as a model of political change by the spectacle of middle-class rebellion, strategies of collective resistance, the expansion and reach of state censorship, the politics of aesthetic catharsis, the bad faith of workers in the culture industry, the political hegemony of finance capitalism, the supersession of our Parliament by social media and the transformation of the latter into a new Inquisition, and the discourse of conspiracy theory as a political strategy. This, again, is founded on another principle of historical materialism, that it is impossible to understand the changing roles of art and culture under capitalism without also understanding the different politics they serve, unwittingly or otherwise.
Since they were originally published on the website of Architects for Social Housing, these articles were — and strictly speaking remain — outside the aims of our organisation, which are to analyse the causes and document the effects of the UK housing crisis and propose design alternatives to the demolition of our council and social housing. These articles were written, however, not only as a sort of hangover from my previous career as an art historian, but also because the housing crisis — according to the concept formulated by the French sociologist, Marcel Mauss — is a ‘total social phenomenon’. By this he meant a social phenomenon in which not only the economic, political and legal institutions of finance capitalism are simultaneously expressed, but also its cultural institutions.
Were it not, I wouldn’t have devoted much of the last decade to writing about its causes and the ends it serves. Indeed, there are few more illuminating ways to study the revolutions in late capitalism than through the lens of housing. And strange though it may seem to those who remain within the artificially imposed boundaries of their profession — and architects, like art historians and artists, are as blinkered as carthorses in beating the bounds of their shrinking duties — these articles came out of my thoughts about the decline of architecture into a marketing arm of the building industry, the manufacture of the housing crisis in UK legislation and policy, and the role of the housing estate regeneration programme in expanding its effects — which constitute, respectively, the focus of the first three volumes of the ASH Papers. As the fourth volume in this series, Culture Wars focuses on the cultural contexts in which these phenomena assumed such prominent places in the UK in the first quarter of the Twenty-first Century.
The decade in which I wrote these articles, however, has seen the most rapid and far-reaching changes in the UK since at least the Second World War — I would argue since the First Industrial Revolution — and they have the potential to bring about the greatest change to how we conceive of ourselves and our relation to the state since the Renaissance. So, although my meditations, if I can call them that, on the possibility of a working-class uprising between 2015 and 2020 were always written with an ear on what I wanted my readership (which included council estate residents) to think was possible rather than what I believed would happen, the last five years have forced me to confront the extent of what the working class of Britain will accept rather than rise up in anything more than brief and ineffectual protests.
There is a reason that our political class, in whatever parliamentary party they have membership, treat UK citizens with such unconcealed contempt, and that is that the vast majority of the British people will believe almost anything they’re told and obediently follow everything they’re told to do. Under the seamless succession, absurdity and disastrous consequences of the lies with which we’ve been inundated since March 2020, more and more of us have come to believe — correctly, in my opinion — that the UK state and its institutions, including our Government and Parliament, judiciary and police forces, civil and security services, medical and religious institutions, educational and cultural industries, are waging a war against the people of Britain with the intention of destroying both it and us. What model of the state they intend to subject us to is the subject of some of my other books, but the final goal of these relentless attacks remains, still, unclear to me. What I do know is that, as part of our demographic replacement, not only the art and culture of Britain but culture itself has been erased as a space for thinking, expression and debate, and turned, instead, into a vehicle for propaganda, censorship and the repetition of the dogma of woke to the exclusion of any other opinion, the pathologisation of all non-compliant speech, the silencing of every dissident voice. Not only does art no longer speak truth to power, but it has become the voice through which power speaks to us.
7. The Archer and the Piper
How to describe this moment that is ours? Today, we have non-legally-binding but in practice internationally agreed definitions that punish criticism of the genocidal actions of the apartheid State of Israel as ‘anti-Semitic’. In the UK, parliament is threatening to bring in laws that will punish criticism of the followers of religious dictates written by an Arab warlord in the Seventh Century, no matter how criminal or antithetical to the values of the European Enlightenment their actions may be, as ‘Islamophobia’. We already have laws that punish adherence to everything we know about human biology from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry when it contradicts the mental disorders of adolescents and the sexual fetishes of adults as ‘transphobia’. We have the Home Office of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland categorising any expression of cultural nationalism as a form of ‘extreme right-wing terrorism.’ We have the World Health Organization, a transnational technocracy funded and lobbied by some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, recently granted the power to declare a pandemic in 124 countries across the world. We have another unelected technocracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, denouncing scientists who publish data showing that global temperatures are independent of CO2 levels in the atmosphere as ‘climate-change deniers’. We have unelected technocrats in the European Commission describing anyone who recalls the CIA-engineered coup in the Ukraine and the broken promises by NATO not to expand east as a ‘Putin apologist’. And we have all this enforced by the qualitative advances in the digital technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that enable a transnational surveillance apparatus outsourced to global corporate contractors to identify and punish whoever refuses to comply.
To adapt a fragment from the never completed theory of knowledge drafted by the German cultural critic, Walter Benjamin: to encompass such contradictions would mean drawing the political economy of stakeholder capitalism like a bow, and knowledge shooting its arrow to the heart of the present. This, in short, is what this book tries to do, even while acknowledging that its arrows, shot as they were in the midst of battle, have sometimes fallen both short and wide of their target. Sometimes, undoubtedly, I have overshot what I hoped, in both my exuberance and my despair, to slay with one arrow. Whatever marks I have hit over the past decade are a result not just of one book but of the dozen or so I have published on the different aspects of and moments in this revolution. This collection, nonetheless, is my best effort at what is, perhaps, the most complex, inexplicable and appalling change effected by the political economy of stakeholder capitalism, the surveillance technology of the Global Biosecurity State, and what I have described as the return of fascism to Europe. For the change that has already occurred did not come about through historical forces blindly producing the ideological forms of their realisation in given societies at different moments in their economic development, but rather through the plans of the agencies of Western capitalism, its financial institutions, central banks, information technology companies, international technocracies and more covert organisations of the deep state. These anticipated that any resistance to the enforcement of the new social contract of willing compliance with stakeholder capitalism would form within the sphere of community politics, civil society and national culture, and that all three, therefore, had to be transformed, deliberately, before the new economic relations were imposed.
This — though few of its combatants were or are aware of it even now — is what was at stake in the culture wars that superseded the Cold War, and which have relegated debates about economic models and the politics of class to the past even as the transformation of Western capitalism into neo-feudalism and the class war between a transnational elite and a global precariat has never been more of a threat to our freedoms and prosperity in the West. The culture wars, in other words, whose apotheosis is the hegemony of woke today, were a product of power: not of the politics of tribal identities, not of the multiplicity of cultures in a single state, not of the critical theories of race, not of the political correctness of our speech, not of the ethnic diversity of our national populations, not of the inclusivity of our societies or the choice of our genders from the shopping mall of psychological warfare, but the good old-fashioned politics of power.
While the children have followed their pied pipers into the river of woke, our mayors, councillors, burghers, priests and soldiers have burned the town hall to the ground, stolen our food and salted our fields, turned our council into a police barracks and our church into a brothel, sold the market place in which we traded to a foreign monopoly and built a wall around the town square where once we met and spoke. And the artists? It would seem that, no matter how many generations are drowned, our children follow an always new and different tune to the same river, and the artists, for their thousand gilders, are happy to play its music. Artists, as Browning’s parable portrays them, like to see themselves as the outsiders who punish the bourgeoisie for their greed and lies; but the last five years and more have shown that they are now, and have been for some time, in the pay of the council, employees of the burghers, evangelists for the church, agents of the state, and they will play whatever tune they are paid to.
This isn’t to say that I no longer see art as a source of resistance to the totalitarianism into which we have been led. On the contrary, art is, perhaps, one of the last fields of practice in which resistance might be mounted. But to do so, art must sever all ties with state and capital, not in order to bury its head in the illusions and vanity of ‘self-expression’ in which it languished for so long, but to return to what it once was and must become again if it is to survive: the space where community comes together and speaks its common tongue, shares its stories and histories, sings the songs of its past and future, dances to the tune that it has written, passes on its knowledge and values to its children. Without that space, what’s left of our communities will die. What we’ve forgotten, as culture has been turned into the sharpest weapon in woke’s armoury, is that art and community are interdependent, and when the one dies so does the other.
I can’t pretend that the articles in this book are an exhaustive guide to how this community might form again, but they do, I hope, show where art went wrong and the paths it must not take again if we are to survive this moment in history and live, with our culture and our memories intact, long enough to write the story of our triumph over the enemies of humanity.
Simon Elmer is the author of Culture Wars: Art, Politics and Capitalism (2025), from whose preface this article is taken. His recent books include Case Studies in Estate Regeneration: Demolition, Privatisation and Social Cleansing (2025), The Housing Crisis: Finance, Legislation, Policy, Resistance (2025), Architecture is Always Political: A Communist History (2024), The Great Replacement: Conspiracy Theory or Immigration Policy? (2024), The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism (2023), The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022), two collections of articles on the UK lockdown, Virtue and Terror: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 1 (2020) and The New Normal: Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State, Vol. 2 (2020-21); and with Geraldine Dening, Saving St. Raphael’s Estate: The Alternative to Demolition (2022), For a Socialist Architecture: Under Socialism (2021) and Central Hill: A Case Study in Estate Regeneration (2018).
A Communist in Hong Kong 