Another England

Fred Sculthorp writes:

It was just after Midday at the start of Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally and a giant Carl Benjamin was holding forth in front of the Cenotaph. “Can you feeeeeel the winds of change blowing,” he crooned on a massive flat screen TV, trying to warm up the crowd for an afternoon of Katie Hopkins, Ant Middleton and a man who played the cello while covered in rashers of bacon.

Benjamin was a vastly different entity in the flesh compared to the trailblazing polemicist online. He had the seedy attire and haunted charisma of a gigging magician who carried the shame of one too many children’s birthday parties. Benjamin’s lacklustre overture set the tone for the afternoon’s official proceedings. A carnival of pride for the forgotten — one that sought to accommodate everyone from Elon Musk to the families of those who had been raped by hotel migrants, ended up coming across as incoherent and hammy.

During the Queen’s funeral, it was noted that this would be the last outing for Imperial London and all its pomp. Central London on a weekend now feels like a city that only really comes alive as a competing arena for protest and grievances. “Tommy Robinson is having one of his marches,” said one father to his child outside Charing Cross Station, as if this were now a fixture in league with the Changing of the Guard. Gormless statues of Nelson Mandela and Gandhi in Parliament Square were commandeered with St George’s flags and pensioners from Southend, Dagenham and Wigan picnicking and listening to Rikki Doolan, Robinson’s pastor dressed in a Union Jack three-piece as he belted his aspiring chart topper God’s Kingdom.

The smell of marijuana and lager was mixed with one of those fresh Spring mornings that made the world feel young and anything possible. One effete lady from Faversham, a retired social worker who resembled the late Victoria Wood, was nattering away to a pair of police officers about the Kalergi Plan, the conspiracy to depopulate the West’s white population. “Right, well I haven’t heard of that one” said the officer trying to be generous. Spanish schoolchildren were curiously milling about with a vanguard of motability scooters at the top of Whitehall, taking photos of their home made placards that read: Keir Starmer is a wanker.

Seen through the eyes of tourists and global onlookers, such scenes seem to have seamlessly blended into the “brilliant bonkers Britain” package. This mix of laboured quirkiness and iconic symbols has finally gone fittingly berserk: Paddington Bear, Morris Dancers, and now Unite the Kingdom with its processional danse macabre of dogs in Union Jack bunting and reformed football hooligans. Robinson lifers on their sixth cans were subdued by all the Christianity. One marcher resentfully described it as noticeably more “middle class and established” than September’s inaugural protest, as if this were some undiscovered festival that had been ruined now that word had got around.

One man, a construction manager in his forties from London, was one of the curious newcomers. He was hoping the lineup would include his YouTube favourites: Edward Dutton (aka “The Jolly Heretic”) and the Lotus Eaters who he reeled off like a lineup at a festival. “You see, people are more into their politics these days than their music, so these will end up becoming the new Glastonbury” he said with an air of resignation.

The Glastonbury analogy worked on many levels. Both events attract a certain demographic from a certain part of the country, who though not exactly united in their taste, are free to pursue their interests in a broadly sympathetic setting. Just as Elbow and new age crusties can co-exist in the fields of Worthy Farm, so too at the Unite the Kingdom can a belief in the restoration of the Shah of Iran and the hero worship of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

Britain’s media has yet to really catch up with this novel coming together, still relying on exhausted Brexit era-hermeneutics of the “somewheres” and “left behinds” to prop up interminable studio debates about whether the protestors are “far right” But this is less a political rally, more a coming together of all the burgeoning YouTube cults, community entrepreneurs and paranoid and conspiratorial civic networks that now thrive in the hinterlands of England. This is a subculture well articulated in a recent piece by Jonny Ball on Liverpool’s “Cosmic Scousers”. But they can be found across the country wherever there are steadily accumulating folk traumas of grooming gangs, migrant misdemeanours, murky HMOs and an increasingly surreal breakdown and malaise.

Contrary to a country wrongly bemoaned as “atomised”, those who have filled this vacuum represent a thriving and self-sufficient world virtually unknown to the public intellectuals who waffle away at conferences on how to reestablish a meaningful sense of top-down social cohesion. Another England, set well on course for the 21st century, is taking shape through this highly localised anti-establishment aesthetic of gaudy patriotism, community vigilantism and God-tinged spiritualism. These are anxieties unlikely to be assuaged by Westminster foibles like “Pride in Place” and even Reform’s pledge to teach a more “patriotic curriculum”. Labour’s Mike Tapp was recently lampooned for an AI video picturing him walking his dog amidst an AI generated blizzard of spitfires on the cliffs of Dover. But he was at least attempting to work inside the form.

Something barmier and more metaphysical has awakened in the English psyche. You could watch this tension play out as journalists tried to interview its denizens. DJ Mike, a man who had turned his Brompton bike into a portable karaoke machine was singing a doozy about the “enemy within”. DJ Bob was trying to politely imply he was too eccentric and mentally unwell to parley with a vox popping YouTuber about whether woke had gone too far. He was too preoccupied with a grander battle unfolding between the forces of Good and Evil.

A novel study in what this New England does to the soul was Brian, a thirty year old post-graduate student from Suzhou who had turned up with all the latest Restore merchandise: a tasteful chrome water bottle and a navy hat that read: Make Britain Great Again. Just a year of living in Wembley had driven him to the streets in protests. Modelling the rhetorical turn of his idol Rupert Lowe, he was upset to discover the England he had grown up watching in China — of James Bond and Paddington Bear — did not really exist.

By the late afternoon, even Robinson seemed unable to contain these multitudes. Yaxley Lennon, who in his born again reinvention, has taken on the tedious emoting of a theatrical old ham. It’s now possible to imagine a Stephen Frears or even a Ken Loach, lurking off stage, directing him in some dirge about a reformed far-right football hooligan. There was plenty of ripe material on stage: the parents of Rhiannon White, the hotel worker who was stabbed to death with a screwdriver by a Sudanese migrant gave a speech that drew tears.

By late afternoon an apocalyptic exodus of crowds was taking place across London. Helicopters were lurking in the sky and there was a roving, unsatisfied mood that recalled the ending of Nathanael West’s The Day of The Locust. The finale is a Hollywood premiere sunk by a vengeful crowd that comes to realise they have been played along. “Their boredom became more and more terrible,” wrote West, “If only a plane would crash once in a while (like in the newspapers and movies)… But the planes never crash.” The rumoured Civil War, the 2nd coming of Christ might not come after all. And all they will be left with is the England that now exists beyond Unite the Kingdom.

As Jonny Ball does indeed write:

“The magic of Liverpool is that it isn’t England,” the leading Left-wing campaigner Margaret Simey said in the late Nineties. She was expressing a mood that had become pervasive in the city by that time. Liverpool has long seen itself as exceptional, set apart from the country proper: a bolshie, rebel city, so the legend goes, defined by its Labour politics, its working-class culture, its port and Celtic air. An only semi-ironic separatist ethos still shapes Scouse identity today. It’s the reason why crowds at Anfield stadium chant “Scouse not English” and “Fuck the Tories” (the Anglo party par excellence), while at Wembley Liverpudlian hordes boo when they hear “God Save the King”. The militant city, by its own mythology, bravely fought the “managed decline” of Margaret Thatcher while the rest of the industrial North swallowed her iatrogenic medicine whole.

As with any founding myth, a kernel of truth lies within the layers of hyperbole and self-aggrandisement. But it is hard to square Liverpool’s self-referential and pre-supposed Leftism with some of the results from this week’s local elections in neighbouring boroughs within Liverpool City Region (the city of Liverpool proper doesn’t go to the polls until next May). In Halton, just a stone’s throw away from Liverpool John Lennon Airport and Halewood car factories that were once the sites of legendary strikes, Reform has just swept the board. To the north, Sefton council has swayed towards Nigel Farage’s barmy army, reducing Labour’s once-mammoth majority, with Reform taking five seats and missing out on many more by a whisker. Three years ago, this Merseyside enclave, the birthplace of Jamie Carragher, was home to 51 Labour councillors. Today, the streets that Carragher – a Labour donor – once played football in as a boy are represented by a Holocaust-denying Reform councillor. Then there’s Knowsley, which in 2023 experienced some of the first violent anti-migrant hotel riots in England. This week, the Labour seats that were up for grabs were decimated, with Independents and Reform benefiting from the Left’s collapse.

Liverpool, then, the quintessential “Red City”, currently stands within a soft, mushy doughnut of turquoise populism. Today’s results could well portend those of Liverpool City Council next May: Labour activists and councillors tell me that their once-solid wards in the north of the city are being dragged rightwards.

Merseyside’s political culture is clearly in a state of flux. And this is in no small part down to the emergence of a new, peculiarly Liverpudlian subculture: the Cosmic Scallies. “Scally” for their roots in Scouse working-class street culture, and “Cosmic” for their predilection for bizarre, New Age-coded, anti-systemic worldviews and lifestyles. These track-suited eccentrics don’t conform to the stereotype of the Leftist Scouser, backing Labour come what may. But they’re certainly not Tories either. Rather, the Cosmic Scallies are Liverpool’s own manifestation of the very online reactionary Right.

This is a broad church without a single, well-defined school of thought — a diffuse medley of influencers and their followers. But, generally speaking, the Cosmic Scally combines a devotion to deranged conspiracy theory, alternative medicine, gym culture, self-help, and men’s mental health discourse, with a side-helping of anti-migrant hostility and “common sense” anti-wokism. Some advocate for the use of psychedelics. Others swear by meditation. Still more are ex-addicts celebrating their sobriety on socials. And their rise, in the streets and online, is part of what’s driving a slow divorce between Liverpool and its Labour traditions.

The Cosmic Scallies were born out of the city’s distinctively proletarian customs. Think not of what tabloid Britain might have called the “chav” — an archetype that was rarely found in Liverpool — but of young(ish) lads in head-to-toe sportswear, Under Armour tracksuits and Nike Air Max trainers. In many cases, the short back-and-sides of yesteryear have been replaced by the “ketwig” — a huge mop of curly, unkempt locks, so-named because of many of its wearers’ enthusiasm for ketamine. Many of these Scouse denizens will be footsoldiers of the Cosmic Scally multiverse.

A typical Cosmic Scally is the lad in North Face with a joint behind his ear who insists on regaling you with muddled tales of Masonic control, chemtrails, corrupt police and the Great Replacement theory at a pub on North Liverpool’s Country Road. Or the taxi driver I met not long ago who turned down the TalkSport phone-in to tell me that the Labour Party was a thinly disguised front for paedophile elites intent on “importing the Third World”, before warning me not to “pump shit” into my body via vaccination.

Their dubious intellectual gurus can mostly be found on social media, where Cosmic Scally influencers push a bewildering range of insidious political messages. Rescuing children from unnamed malcontents is a common theme. After the Southport murders in 2024, it was a “Save Our Kids” protest promoted by the Cosmic Scally cyberspace network that descended into a riot that spread across the country. Other political themes include Stop the Boats, Islam, and migration.

One of the most well known of the bunch is the former Olympic boxer Anthony Fowler, who has built a solid fanbase of more than 200,000 followers selling CBD oil alongside Kerry Katona and Katie Price. He extols the benefits of staring at the sun to avoid sunburn and claims he cured his infant daughter’s cancer with his own CBD oil and an organic diet. Peppering his endless face-to-camera sales pitches are nods to stories of migrants attacking children: “Dont [sic] touch my little sister she’s 12,” he posted, after footage emerged of a Scottish girl brandishing knives, apparently to protect her sister from a migrant attack. “If her parents or legal team can be contacted I am happy to help cover any legal fees,” Fowler said. He implores followers to “Protects [sic] your children”. “If your daughters in the bathroom you see who’s in there [sic],” he once posted, alongside an AI image of a sturdy MAGA man blocking a trans activist from a toilet.

Then there’s the former crystal-meth addict, Muay Thai fighter and stuntman Billy Moore, who makes a tidy living documenting “raise the flag” street protests, talking to the residents of homeless encampments and making fun of the people on Liverpool’s Antifa demos. Last month, he posted footage of a man confronting him and calling him a “little Rightwing piece of filth, taking advantage of homeless left, right and centre”. Moore said that his accuser was “a Leftwing bigot” who “voted the Green Party, loves LGBT stuff” and was “probably gay”. His videos regularly garner several hundred thousand views — the stuff of dreams for any beleaguered local Labour politician.

The unofficial King of the Cosmic Scallies is perhaps Sine Missione, an elusive, Banksy-style local graffiti artist. He played a central role in anti-lockdown protests, pushing QAnon, flat-Earth theories and “sacred geometry” psychedelia on his socials. He has since been overtaken by newer, self-styled gurus and accounts, and has deleted his socials. But his message lives on.

When the digital crosses into the real, it can take strange forms. In a Liverpool park, Cosmic Scally-coded “We Stand for Freedom” protests push every slogan and conspiracy under the sun: from “Stop the Boats” to dire warnings of man-made weather, mind-control techniques, and government planes spraying unknowing citizens from grey skies overhead.

The local poet and author PJ Smith (aka Roy) lamented the rise of the Cosmic Scallies in his hip-hop track, “Loss is not infinite”, listing, in doleful resignation, some of the core features of the subculture: “5G conspiracy scalls/ Ayahuasca nuts in Mammut kecks…/ Meditation meatheads/ Anti-vaccine stoners.”

Antonio Gramsci might have described these influencers as the “organic intellectuals” of the Cosmic Scally movement. Not intellectuals in the sense of their academic credentials, of course, but in their bottom-up articulation of a “new social type”, giving a “homogeneity”, a kind of collective consciousness and projected voice to the Cosmic Scally strata. Theirs is a diffuse and hybrid identity, combining the solidly plebeian traditions of the modern Scouser with an incredulity towards any-and-all established authority and an unusual blend of back-to-nature hippydom, individual self-empowerment and blood-and-soil nationalism.

The Cosmic Scally influencer is what Alan Finlayson, a Professor of Political & Social Theory at the University of East Anglia and researcher into the digital Right, calls “a new kind of ideological entrepreneur”. No longer constrained by the “old institutions” that once defined the city’s politics — political parties, newspapers, broadcasters, the Church, the trade unions, working men’s clubs — these online influencers act as “independent operators producing new ways of thinking about the world”, creating novel, unconventional political thought.

Social media, the great leveller, has been the driving force behind this. No longer do the gatekeepers of traditional broadcasting keep the Overton window narrow. Where once the realms of political debate were kept focused and respectable, today all sorts of ideas and symbols compete for likes and subscribers in the infinite nexus of “content”. The Cosmic Scallies are a product of the evolution from top-down, one-to-many media communications to a schizophrenic, many-to-many mesh of ideas, poses and products.

This isn’t a self-conscious political tribe: there is no coherent ideology, leader, or formal organisation. There’s no Tommy Robinson-type at the top giving orders, nor are there ageing National Front or BNP hard men talking about white supremacy over warm beer in flat-roof pubs. Instead, the Cosmic Scallies constitute what the Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams referred to as a “structure of feeling”: an ephemeral collective imaginary, a shared vibe or atmosphere.

But while the movement may be amorphous, it is influencing the reconstitution of the politics of Liverpool. While voting for the Conservatives is still anathema to most Scousers, the Reform brand is untainted enough to satisfy the very real anti-establishment culture of the city’s popular classes, particularly in the poorer North End.

“We’re going to get torn apart in the locals next year,” a door-knocking Labour activist tells me over text. “We’re fucked. Bricking it.” Every ward in Liverpool goes to the polls in May 2027. In traditionally solid Labour areas, where “Tory” is used as an insult spat out by contorted faces, many voters are likely to join the Faragist insurgency, just as some of their neighbours have in Knowsley, Sefton and Halton. The demographic here, the miserable Labourite tells me, includes a lot of “very young, semi-drug dealing, or make-up artist-y, Cosmic Scousery renters”. Their fuck-off Scouse animus that once found expression through the labour movement and militant trade unionism could now be set to banish Labour entirely: “The issue will be Reform, or independents,” the campaigner tells me. After several seats in nearby Knowsley fell to Reform, including the home ward of the Corbynite Labour MP Ian Byrne, the activist texts again: “I never thought it would be this bad.”

Part of the problem, they tell me, is that the contemporary Labour Party has alienated so many on Merseyside. Liverpool’s brand of Leftism was once solidly workerist, rooted in industrial struggles and class warfare. Now, the Cosmic Scallies are uniting in opposition to what the US Right have called “gay race communism” — a New Left degradation of the labour movement tradition, dominated by studenty, middle-class cohorts and rooted in politically-correct discourses and the pained language of the perma-activist class. If this is what the modern Left is, says the weary door-knocker, then it’s driving a wedge between itself and many Scousers.

Then there’s the fact that nobody in Liverpool is listening to Labour HQ’s increasingly desperate comms. Labour politicians have no idea how to adapt to a world of short-form vertical video in which the currency is outrage and eyeballs-at-all-costs extremity. They’re still giving speeches and hoping to be featured on the Today programme, while the old bastions on the Mersey are being dragged towards an outfit that does understand the new times — perhaps aided by the mad, anti-systemic obsessions of the Cosmic Scally ecosystem. Finlayson’s “ideological entrepreneurs” have filled the void left by the collapse of Christianity, socialism, and syndicalism, channeling the combative spirit of the city towards paranoiac fantasy and Right-wing populists.

Further fuelling Liverpool’s collective disenchantment are the usual culprits of economic decline and rapid demographic change. Merseyside has never truly recovered from the containerisation of global shipping, which mechanised the loading and unloading of merchant ships, obviating the need for a city full of raucous dock-labourers. That occurred in tandem with the rapid collapse of the commercial trade routes of the British Empire, as well as with the painful move from goods-producing heavy manufacturing to a local hodgepodge of public service behemoths, hospitality, tourism and the culture industry. Add to the mix an inward flux of mainly poor migrants requiring housing, jobs and services, and you have a recipe for political convulsions.

This sense of political despair was accelerated by the pandemic, when locked-down Liverpudlians found themselves travelling deep into online rabbit holes. Rumour, half-truth, and hearsay proliferated as the city’s common culture gave way to the addictions, neuroses, and alienated hyper-individualism of the tailored feed. Liverpool emerged from the crisis with an economy defined by uncertainty and a postmodern epistemological model to mirror it: nothing works, trust no-one, anything is possible. It was the ideal breeding ground for would-be gurus, mini-Caesars and quasi-political entrepreneurs on the make — boom time for the Cosmic Scallies.

During the anti-migrant riots in Liverpool in 2024, a library was burnt down only a few miles from the gleaming city centre waterfront. Minority-owned businesses were attacked. The severity of the disturbances here surprised some — though none of it shocked those who had glimpsed the new Cosmic Scally phenomenon percolating through cyberspace.

The result of all this is a city with a very different complexion to the one it had not long ago — a city that imagines itself as a Labour citadel, but in fact looks rather different. No doubt, Liverpool is still a bastion of anti-Toryism. You’ll still find MMA fighters and sportsmen here indulging in popular scorn against established conservatism. That kind of default anti-Tory politics is as much a marker of local identity as the accent — the only English dialect that is strengthening rather than being subject to slow homogenisation into “estuary English”. But anti-Toryism won’t stop the populist Right. Reform seems to be emerging as the vehicle of choice for those Liverpolitans who swim in the broad waters of counter-cultural conspiracy and nativism.

This is no aberration. Set aside the myth of Scouse exceptionalism for a minute — that familiar story of class struggle, with Scousers as the plucky subalterns and everyone else the effete bourgeois — and you’ll see that Reform’s insurgency is fully compatible with Liverpool’s history and character. For while its recent civic story is replete with political and industrial militancy, Liverpool was never really a socialist or progressive urban area; that was always a myth. Right up until the Seventies, when religious sectarianism was alive and well, a local “Protestant party” fought against Irish immigration and apparent papal influence, with an effective Tory operation keeping Labour out of power for decades while other Northern cities became Left-wing heartlands. For every famous historical Liverpool strike or uprising, there’s a local race riot or an Orange Lodge firebrand successfully mobilising working-class Protestants against their Catholic neighbours. We may not like to admit it, but the Left-aligned “Rebel City” origin story is a recent invention.

In fact, John Belchem, a local historian and specialist in so-called “Liverpool exceptionalism”, tells me that many of the wards flirting with Reform today would have had a strong Protestant Party presence in the mid-20th century. There is, then, nothing new about Right-wing populism here. Indeed, the plague-on-all-your-houses symbolism of a populist protest vote sits well with Liverpool’s innate us-against-the-world mentality.

The Cosmic Scally is not, then, an imposter bringing alien politics into a Leftist heartland; on the contrary, he is a product of Scouse culture. He is as much an outgrowth of Liverpool’s supposed exceptionalism as the striking docker, the loud Scouse separatist, or the footballer decrying Thatcherism more than 30 years after her downfall. There’s a spirit of communitarian togetherness in Liverpool that gives the city an unusual sense of cohesion for a large urban area. But that same spirit also creates a punishing environment for those who get “too big for their boots”. Labour may have become too establishment, too arrogant, too complacent, too middle class, too metropolitan to fit in with that all-in-it-together plebeian Scouse pneuma. The Cosmic Scally is merely the strange, Scouse reification of national trends. Perhaps “the magic of Liverpool”, is that it is England, after all.