July 2026
The Long March to 2029 will be fuelled by incidents that ordinary people initially find so repulsive they struggle to process and quantify them.
The first response most normal people have to reading about a horrific crime and the consequent lack of matching punishment is not ideological. It is not “left” or “right”. It is much simpler: surely I am misunderstanding this. Surely this cannot be right. Surely the system has not looked at rape, coercion, filming, humiliation, fraud, murder, and abuse, and concluded that the consequence should appear so light. The same person will read of grooming gangs in deprived areas of England, or that Sierra Leone’s first lady was able to live in social housing in London whilst also staying in the presidential palace back home, and will — because they are British — tend to question if they themselves have misread the story. There must be a crucial detail missing here? Surely this can’t be accurate. That doesn’t seem fair at all. In isolation, they may be able to write off these moments. But these are not isolated incidents, and they build into a sense of fatigue, a sense that something isn’t right.
When the 2029 election result arrives, the same political and commentariat class that misread Brexit, that misread the economy, that misread Boris Johnson, that misread Keir Starmer, that continues to misread technological development, domestic security and international relations, will look backwards and try to identify the cause. They will find the wrong answer. They will blame misinformation, social media, prejudice, economic pain, racism, populism, foreign interference, “culture wars” or some vague national spasm. Some of that will be true in parts. But it will miss the central thing.
The British state is losing the FAIRNESS argument, and with it, its mandate on total power.
Writing around the time of the English Civil War halfway through the 17th century, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes penned ‘Leviathan’. This work argued that without a strong state, human beings fall into violent insecurity, or an existence Hobbes summarised as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape that, there must be a sovereign power: the Leviathan.
For the Leviathan to work, the state asks citizens to renounce private vengeance in exchange for protection and proportionate justice, and to renounce absolute freedom in return for a social contract that offers general community based on a set of shared beliefs. That is the basic bargain. You do not take revenge yourself because the state says: we will protect you, we will punish wrongdoing, and we will do so in a way that broadly maps onto the moral instincts of the people living under the system. In return for giving up absolute freedom, the state will protect you and others in your society from injustice, and ideally help create conditions for you to flourish.
When that contract looks broken — and that contract is, in British terms, a sense of FAIRNESS — state legitimacy rightly erodes.
This is the thing the British elite seems to have forgotten: a quintessential British value is FAIRNESS. Not abstract fairness as a slogan, but a sense of felt fairness evidenced across the social contract. Work hard? You should get paid more than those who do not, and have a higher quality of life as such. Follow the law? You should be protected by the law. Commit a grotesque crime? There should be an unmistakably serious consequence. Play by the rules? You should find yourself progressing through society. Just as the Greeks have Xenia and the Chinese have Confucianism, FAIRNESS married with liberal democratic values is an essential British trait.
You can observe a huge number of the issues currently wracking Britain as downstream of a collapse in perceived fairness. This is because, fundamentally, a British understanding of fairness is that it can be bad for everyone as long as it is a fairly distributed level of badness. People will tolerate difficulty if they think the burden is shared. They will tolerate austerity, or pressure, or scarcity, or trade-offs — of course complaining about them too, as is their God-given right — if the thing still feels morally legible.
Fairness works both ways.
The British sense of fairness is a centuries-old value that has led to widespread good in the world. Many of these have been grand outcomes: the abolition of slavery, the social campaigning of the Quakers and others on education and community health, the creation of the NHS as a means of giving healthcare to all, for free. Our entire political structure is built on this concept, underpinned by a belief in justice. But British fairness extends away from these huge historical moments, trickling down into everyday life across this country. You can see examples of the British sense of fairness in the smallest places, happening outside the glare of politics and demagogues.
Take just one recent example.
In the last days of 2025, two young men were rescued from Scafell Pike in the Lake District overnight, in what Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team described as an “avoidable” seven-hour rescue in treacherous winter conditions. They were found high on the mountain, wet and hungry, and brought safely down. After the rescue, the Wasdale Head Inn stayed open late, gave them snacks, and offered them a discounted room. The men apparently said their money was in their tent up on the fell near Green Gable and agreed to pay the £130 bill later. Three weeks on, they still had not paid, had not thanked the hotel, and the phone number they gave did not work. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the pair also failed to return two head torches lent by the rescue team, and one of them had used a hospital crutch to climb the mountain despite a previous leg injury, then left the crutch in the rescue vehicle. The rescue team said it felt obliged to reimburse the hotel itself, even though the inn was willing to absorb the loss. The story was picked up by the BBC.
Shortly after, a JustGiving page was launched, primarily to help the Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team cover their costs. Within hours, thousands and thousands of pounds had been raised by people from far beyond the boundaries of Wasdale. The comments left by donors speak to this issue of fairness: “A little donation towards the cost you incurred bringing two ungrateful persons off Scafell Pike. Hopefully someone who knows them will make them do the decent thing” “I’m so angry about the pair you rescued who didn’t pay their hotel bill. I hope this small donation helps replace the loaned kit they took. Us normals are very grateful and full of respect. Thank you,” “Great to know you guys are there if we ever need you & sorry to hear you were treated so disrespectfully. Thanks for everything you do.” Ultimately, the donations came to £38,000 — 290x the original loss.
It is easy to create a list of perceived violations of this social contract, point to them, and say here is yet ANOTHER example of the British state collapsing. Doing so is illuminating because it helps string together seemingly disconnected streams and provides quantifiable data in the process; but doing so without providing a coherent analysis is also the trade of demagogues, and should rightly be viewed and shunned as low intellectual behaviour. As Aristophanes noted nearly two and a half thousand years ago in his comedy Knights, demagogues “are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it’s only in troublous times that you line your pockets.”
A harder challenge — and therefore one which should be aimed for — is moving past the slime and asking why and how it got to this point, and then suggesting a direct action in response. Again — we should assume that most British people are not malign actors, nor are most of our institutions — and so one of the more likely causes is perverse incentives, for example a sometimes effort to cater to people at the margins who are perceived to be treated unfairly. The perversion of FAIRNESS therefore tends to arrive through a thousand well-intentioned stakeholder engagements, forming a Frankensteinian beast which no one set out to create.
Why is it necessary to understand FAIRNESS? To come back to the same point made repeatedly: by not treating these situations with the utmost seriousness, the state is creating the conditions for degraded national security and weakened societal fabric. It becomes a breeding ground for demagogues, vigilantism, fear and apathy. Fairness, which we codified into law and called justice, matters immensely. This is before we see potentially significant changes downstream of the arrival of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics.
Populists are detecting that the Hobbesian social contract is not working and that the Leviathan is losing its mandate. The state says “do not take matters into your own hands”, but then often seems unable to protect people, unable to punish proportionately, unable to control its borders, unable to integrate newcomers properly, and unable to explain why ordinary people should continue trusting it.
Immigration is part of this, whether Westminster likes it or not.
Many on the right, and sometimes on the left too, note that the British public has voted at successive elections to reduce immigration in the general sense of that term. Instead, immigration went up. Politicians engaged in a form of human quantitative easing: adding more and more people into the system to plug holes in labour markets, universities, care homes, rental demand, GDP figures and fiscal projections.
The public often gets the wording wrong here, mixing asylum, illegal migration, legal migration, small boats, students, dependents and everything else interchangeably. This gives politicians and commentators an easy way out, as they can shrug and say: “Well, you do not understand the categories, see? You have mixed up asylum seekers with illegal immigrants. These are different things!” But directionally, people can see what is happening.
They can see that the country changed faster than they were told it would. They can see that the state did not ask for consent and they can see that politicians promised one thing and delivered another — they watch their towns changing, they read the headlines of sexual acts of violence committed on the streets by men who were already on various lists. And they can see that when they object, the response is often not to address the concern but to correct their terminology. They are told off for failing to articulate their underlying concerns properly, and the driving emotions behind those concerns are consequently written off by quangos, Government influence groups, and journalists who would rather not ask the deeper questions.
That is a fatal mistake and undermines the foundation of our democracy.
At the same time, it has become a lazy crutch for those on the right to point towards immigration and asylum and lay the bulk of the broken social contract at their feet. It is a point worth noting again — most people do not instinctively understand issues as ‘right’ or ‘left’. They — correctly — process the world through tangible situations and outcomes. They can feel they are worse off, they can see their high streets deteriorating, and they care little for abstract arguments over taxing those on £100,000 a year. To rebuild a sense of FAIRNESS will require a new framework and contract that neither the right nor left of British politics have really been able to articulate to date.
A second mistake Westminster makes is continually fooling itself into treating all humans as economic units, ready to be swapped in here to plug one hole, swapped in there to revive some old part of England, sprung into an area in need of revival in the form of a lone sentence in some government press release. Humans are obviously much more complex than this. They are shaped by culture, society, religion, family, national memory, inherited norms and moral expectations.
Both the right and left get this wrong, but your average British person understands it perfectly well. This is why integration can work, and often does work, when there is adherence to the state’s norms and values, and to wider centuries-old societal values too. No one has meaningful issues with the Japanese, French or American diaspora in Britain. As The Economist has noted before, few complaints are meaningfully levied against the “Bossman” who runs the corner shop. But integration cannot be assumed. It has to be taught, and critically, it has to be enforced with maximum strength and punishment if you want to reap its rewards, with specific efforts made to reduce clanism and low level corruption. It is fundamentally obvious to British people that we should not allow Female Genital Mutilation to take place in our society. Nor should we allow the extreme concentration of power in the hands of a very small number of people who then use it to subvert our ageing democracy. These are not British cultural traits in the 21st century, and we are under no obligation to make concessions on this front.
The Leviathan does not need to be cruel, but at this stage it does need to be utterly brutal in its seriousness: clear rules, visible consequences, no embarrassment about national norms.
This is the framework and feeling Westminster keeps missing, because as I've noted before, the public is not asking for random harshness — it is asking for proportion. It is asking for the state to mean what it says and to hold all its members to account equally, not giving certain groups at the fringes more rights than others depending on their power, politics, or position in society. It is asking for FAIRNESS. Consider the simple thought experiment I've informally proposed before: would calls for capital punishment or mass remigration have any power whatsoever if the current system were viewed as fair and proportionate?
If the answer is yes, then fine, we need to dig deeper.
But if the answer is no, then you have your answer. People are not drifting towards harder politics because they have suddenly become monsters; rather they are doing so because they believe the current system is not keeping up its side of the bargain. Hard men create good times, weak men create hard times.
This is why FAIRNESS matters. They incidents are not isolated. They accumulate, they breed fatigue, they become evidence in the public mind. Ultimately, they lower the value of engaging in the social contract. And eventually that pattern becomes a political movement, often primed and led by demagogues on the extreme right and left.
Their politics will not be pretty nor will it be polite. It will be violent in its spasms, emotional in its delivery, and foundationally reshaping of our political system — - if left to fester.
That is the road to 2029.