UK Special Coverage The Stakes of the Next UK General Election Britain’s dysfunctions are becoming insupportable in raw arithmetic terms.  UK Special Coverage (Photo by Martin Pope/Getty Images) Talk to anyone in the UK about the prospects for their country, and the mood could hardly be bleaker. The Britain many of us grew up with—with its relatively buoyant economy, its well-functioning services and its high-trust, cohesive society—feels like it is disintegrating at pace, if it has not already disappeared. This is why the next general election, which must be held at some point between now and August 2029, feels destined to be a hinge point in British history. Where most elections are fought between two sets of managerial technocrats, with minor variations in policy, the stakes this time could hardly be higher. Whichever party wins—whether one of the tired, old centrist parties like the Tories or Labour, or one of the resurgent, more radical outfits like Reform UK on the right or the Green Party on the left—will inherit a status quo that has simply run out of road. Keeping the same policies in place, letting things carry on as they are, is no longer an option for a nation that wants to avoid ruin. Indeed, each of the starkest problems facing Britain—mass immigration, welfare dependency, deindustrialization, and soaring public indebtedness—would be enough on its own to bankrupt the state and destabilize society. Yet these challenges are not only concurrent; they often intersect and reinforce each other. Take immigration. According to polling, immigration is the number-one issue facing the UK, and it has been for some time. What’s more, Britons are more likely than any other people on Earth to cite immigration as their nation’s leading problem. And rightly so. The rates of legal and illegal migration are fast becoming unsustainable.  Around 50,000 migrants flood into the UK each year on small boats via the English Channel. Few who arrive illegally are deported. Instead, they apply for asylum, at which point they are housed at the taxpayers’ expense, often in hotels that have been commandeered by the Home Office, and invited to make use of Britain’s public services. Those who gain refugee status (around 80 percent, after appeals) can then start claiming welfare payments (around 66 percent do). The few who fail to gain asylum are highly unlikely to be removed from the country; indeed, many are not even removed from the housing that’s provided to them. The most obvious and politically potent consequence of this endless flow of illegal migrants is the staggering levels of violent and sexual crime they are bringing to Britain. Open a newspaper any day of the week and you’ll be confronted with headlines such as: “Small-boat migrant guilty of Brighton beach rape ‘on run for murder’”; “Migrant who kidnapped girl, 7, and sexually assaulted her in asylum hotel arrived in UK after working for Taliban”; “Somali knifeman admits killing pensioner, 77, at Remembrance Sunday memorial service.” Such stories are now routine, although the existence of a pattern in migrant offending is vehemently denied by the left-of-center parties.  While illegal migration poses almost incalculable social costs, the greater cost to the taxpayer actually comes from legal migration. Under the current rules, anyone who is given “leave to remain” (ILR – the British term for permanent residency, a stage before full citizenship) can begin to claim welfare benefits, such as Universal Credit, either if they are unemployed or to top up their income or cover housing costs, if they are on low pay. This year, 2026, is when the first of the so-called Boriswave of migrants—that is, 1.6 million legal migrants who arrived between 2020 and 2024—will become eligible for ILR. The Centre for Policy Studies estimates that the lifetime net fiscal cost to the state of these mostly low-skilled, low-paid migrants could be a staggering £234 billion over the course of this cohort’s lifetime. Mass immigration could soon be adding to, rather than alleviating, Britain’s unsustainable growth in welfare spending.  To his credit, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is planning to radically restrict rules on entitlements to newcomers before the Boriswave can start accessing state funds, but he is facing opposition from his own MPs and a resurgent Green Party. Handing benefits to migrants may be as popular as asbestos with ordinary members of the public, but it has recently become a bizarre rallying cry for the left. The other major strain on the welfare state has been the sharp rise in incapacity claimants. One in 10 working-age people in Britain is now claiming a sickness or disability benefit. Bleaker still, claims are rising fastest among the young, surging by 69 percent among 25- to 34-year-olds in the past five years. Much of the increase in claims relates not to physical disabilities but to mental health. Indeed, 44 percent of newer claimants cite poor mental health as their primary condition. According to the Taxpayers’ Alliance think tank, an astonishing 110,000 adults in England are now claiming “personal independence payments” for anxiety and depression, up from 24,000 in 2019. The British fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), estimates that disability benefits cost around £76 billion in 2024, which could rise to nearly £100 billion per year by the end of the decade. Starmer’s modest attempts at reform were defeated by his party’s left, meaning that any hope of bringing this spending under control will need a change of government. Those claiming disability benefits are responding to two things. First, the incentives offered by the system, the ease with which one can be classified as “disabled” by claiming to have mental-health troubles. Second, a genuine lack of jobs and opportunities, especially for the young, in an era of economic stagnation and deindustrialization. This, too, is like a problem that will never be resolved by the current party in power. After all, the Labour Party, especially in the form of Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, is fanatically devoted to the economy-destroying “net zero” at seemingly any cost. Thanks to more than a decade of governments deliberately throttling domestic oil and gas production while rushing to embrace renewable energy, the UK is burdened with some of the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world. The consequences have been catastrophic, leading to the closure in just the past few years of Scotland’s last oil refinery, Britain’s last blast furnaces capable of producing virgin steel, a 120-year-old minivan factory, and much more. The nation that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution will be the first to reverse it.  Yet even as the economy has stalled, government spending has skyrocketed. The result is an ever-growing debt burden and rising borrowing costs. The UK currently pays an interest rate of 4.8 per cent on 10-year bonds, the highest in the G7. Of the world’s top economies, Britain has also suffered the biggest jump in borrowing costs after the war in Iran broke out. To put this in a domestic context, the cost of servicing Britain’s debt is now £114 billion a year—more than is spent on defense, transport, and housing combined. Alarmingly, the cost of borrowing is so high that it cannot even be offset by large tax rises. The highest tax burden since the Second World War is not enough to cover what the Labour government wants to spend. The result is a fiscal doom loop, where the government is forced to borrow to cover its borrowing costs. All of this is why Britain increasingly feels like a ticking time bomb. Illegal immigration is already tearing society apart, while mass legal migration, welfare dependency and deindustrialization are adding to the looming economic crisis. Britain is not unsalvageable, but it does require leaders who are prepared to treat its problems with the urgency they warrant. Whatever political party voters opt for in the next general election, they know in their bones that this is almost certainly the last chance to stop their country’s slide into terminal decline. The post The Stakes of the Next UK General Election appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Weirdos Want to Kill the President Are Americans losing their grip? (Photo by US President Trump via Truth Social/Anadolu via Getty Images) Three makes a trend, as journalists say, and by that standard, America faces a disturbing trend in its civic life: Weirdos keep trying to kill the president. The trend-making number three was Cole Tomas Allen of California. Strapped up with guns and knives, Allen bum-rushed some metal detectors last week at the Washington Hilton, where President Donald Trump, for the first time as president, was attending the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Ryan Wesley Routh, a career criminal and serial fabulist from North Carolina, was the number-two weirdo. In September 2024, Routh was found armed with a semiautomatic rifle and hiding in some bushes not far from a Florida golf course where Trump, then a presidential candidate, was hitting balls. Just two months before that, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a Pennsylvanian, became the inaugural weirdo-would-be assassin. A 20-year-old nursing home aide, Crooks fired on Trump with an AR-15 at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania and was shot dead by Secret Service agents. Another incident, strangely forgotten and rarely tallied among the assassination attempts, deserves mention. This February, one Austin Tucker Martin of North Carolina, brandishing a shotgun and gasoline canister, met the same fate as Crooks after trespassing on Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago. (The president was in DC at the time.) The attempt in Butler was by far the most serious, with a bullet from Crooks missing Trump’s skull by an inch or so. Last week’s incident, by contrast, has been overhyped—perhaps because media figures at the dinner spotted a chance to present themselves as survivors of a harrowing attack. Many commentators have alleged major security failures at the Washington Hilton, but Allen didn’t make it to the ballroom where the dinner was hosted before police tackled him. While the attempts on Trump’s life vary in level of seriousness, they share a couple salient features. In each case, the failed killer was a whackjob. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that the men who tried gunning down the president weren’t playing with a full deck. But what most bothers me is that the unhealthy fixations and bizarro beliefs that ostensibly motivated their extreme acts are shared by sizable chunks of the U.S. population. For example, Cole Allen appears to believe that the assassination attempt in Butler was staged. That’s like if Pete Conrad, commander of the Apollo 12 lunar mission, had concluded the first moon landing was a fraud. Conspiratorial thinking about Butler is shockingly prevalent. According to a study published this March by the Manhattan Institute, nearly half of Democratic voters believe “the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July 2024 was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him.” Naturally, conspiracy theories about Allen’s own pitiful attempt proliferated online within hours, if not minutes, of the event. Allen holds other strange beliefs that have gained prominence the past couple years. In an anti-Trump manifesto—signed “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen”—he wrote, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Evidently, Allen indulges in wild speculation about Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker with whom Trump was friends decades ago. Austin Martin, the gas-can-wielding Mar-a-Lago intruder, was also an apparent Epstein obsessive. Days before he carried out the failed attack, Martin texted a friend: I don’t know if you read up on the Epstein Files, but evil is real and unmistakable. The best people like you and I can do is use what little influence we have. Tell other people about what you hear about the Epstein files and what the government is doing about it. Raise awareness. The theory that Trump and other powerful men conspired with Epstein to rape children has become perhaps the most all-consuming moral panic of our time. Iranian propaganda videos routinely reference it, and influential podcasters relentlessly promote it. And yet, as the independent reporter Michael Tracey has shown, the evidence for this theory is scanty. That Tracey has become a beacon of clear-eyed reasonableness in a sea of phantasmagoria is itself humorous: This week, the disheveled and intemperate shoe-leather journalist challenged critics to come fight him outside the Hampton Inn where he was staying.  Americans have always been oddballs. Even before the Founding, pilgrims and Puritans—the “hotter sort of Protestants,” as they were then known—fled England and its established church to worship freely in North America. Subsequent migration waves comprised other religious extremists, like the German Mennonites and Amish, as well as rugged adventurers drawn to the western frontier. For most of America’s history, its newcomers disproportionately comprised the misfits and radicals of the Old World. Until recently, America’s freak streak mostly expressed itself in relatively benign fixations like extraterrestrials and Christian fundamentalism. That’s why most of the world’s UFO sightings have occurred in these United States, and it’s why the world’s largest “creation science” museum sits in Petersburg, Kentucky. (Fun fact: The English Puritan and Massachusetts settler John Winthrop in 1639 recorded the country’s first known encounter with an unidentified flying object.) Of course, you still find UFO obsessives and Biblical literalists in America, sometimes in combination—Vice President J.D. Vance recently speculated that UFOs weren’t little green men, but demons. But the innate strangeness of Americans increasingly leads to a morally self-righteous, uber-skeptical, ultra-cynical, often confused, and sometimes violent form of political fanaticism. Thus, in 2023 a white, trans-identified biological woman shot up a Christian elementary school in Nashville to “kill all you little crackers” as punishment for the kids’ “white privilege.” Two years later, a young black man inspired by white supremacist ideas killed a Guatemalan girl in another school shooting in the same city. Routh—the armed man in the bushes, i.e., weirdo number two—fancied himself a brave defender of Ukraine in its war with Russia. He even traveled to the country hoping to join the fight, but the Ukrainians whom Routh met say he was afflicted by delusions of grandeur and, for that reason, most unhelpful. His exact reason for trying to kill Trump isn’t known, but he likely bought into the common liberal view that Trump serves Russian interests and colluded with President Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election—another conspiracy theory unsupported by the facts. The motive of Thomas Crooks also remains unknown. But thanks to an investigation by the conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, who is himself not exactly allergic to conspiracism, we have a clearer picture: During the Covid pandemic, Crooks’ political ideology seems to have evolved, dramatically, from pro-Trump nativism to anti-Trump leftism. His online accounts suggest he identified as non-binary, a novel gender category claimed by 1 in 14 Americans of Crooks’ generation. In the months before he almost killed Trump, Crooks descended into madness. Every society has its quotient of the mentally unbalanced, of course, but it seems to me that lately America’s political assassins have been inspired by views that are, though detached from reality, alarmingly popular. Might that not be cause for significant concern? Are we Americans collectively losing it?  Sometimes I feel like the last one who has managed to keep my wits. Then again, that sounds like something a madman would believe. The post Weirdos Want to Kill the President appeared first on The American Conservative.

There are certain artists who are endlessly and essentially tied to their point of origin. You can’t think of The Smiths without thinking of gloomy Manchester, you can’t listen to Sam Fender without considering the context of the North East, or, as perhaps the ultimate example, there is no Pulp without the odd culture of Sheffield. I say ‘odd’, and I mean it, because Sheffield has to be one of the most complex and conflicting hotbeds of history. Within a relatively small patch of land, you have so many merging legacies. There is the industry of the place and the looming remembrance of the miners’ strikes and the violent clashes involved. There is rock history with bands like Def Leppard and Arctic Monkeys, but there is also a huge history of electronic and new wave acts from the area, as in the 1980s, especially, the city buzzed with basement venues pioneering the sound. There’s nature and city, peaks and troughs, posh parts and impoverished parts, and all of it is smushed together in both land mass and, reflectively, in the world of Pulp. Add on top of that the straight-up call-outs to local areas, streets and hot spots, and there can be no separation of the band from their hometown. You could do a whole tour of the city purely based on areas given a shout out by Jarvis Cocker in one or other tune, hitting up the place where he fell out of a window or the music heritage sign that sits on the outside of what was once The Leadmill. Overwhelmingly, that tends to be the venue people associate with the band, as the group first performed there back in August 1980 and has been loud, proud supporters of it ever since, especially during its recent landlord battle. But, if there’s one venue that truly launched Pulp, it’s another lost spot, although this one is long since buried.  While Leadmill might have hosted the band’s first show, it was The Limit club down on West Street that saw them evolve. Opening in 1978, it was there right as Cocker and co were beginning to form into a group, and it was on the dance floor there where their musical horizons were broadened through the club’s early obsession with synth music. As the spiritual home of another Sheffield act, The Human League, The Limit came to represent exactly the lines between pop, rock and alternative sounds that Pulp would capture throughout their career. When they first started out, it all lay far more on the classic side with Cocker openly admitting that he was busy trying to be a Morrissey-type figure, writing gloomy guitar tunes. But as they began playing at The Limit regularly throughout the early 1980s, also becoming the first place they gained any real press attention, you can hear their sound evolving. Through their first three albums, you can hear the impact of the venue creeping in more and more. It also seemed to undeniably lead to a point in 1984 where Candida Doyle was brought in, now found on their stages, manning a huge keyboard and synth set-up. While they had keyboard players before, bringing Doyle in felt like a commitment to their sound remaining more than just that of your standard rock band, and after years of seeing more interesting stuff than just guitars at The Limit, the venue left an impression. On the band’s latest album, The Limit is immortalised. Inspiring the sleazy scenes on ‘Slow Jam’, the band put a big image of the club’s door up on their screens when they play the track live. “This is a photo of a very, very important place in my development and a lot of the people on this stage,” Cocker said to introduce the track at the O2 in London, “You have to pretend it’s almost ten o’clock on a Monday evening, because you have to get in before ten to get in for free. Down there, you’re gonna hear some music that will change your life,” painting the scene that changed his as Pulp evolved to greatness in the club’s image. ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE The post The long-lost Sheffield club that launched Pulp first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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