In 1990, shortly before the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Serb cartoonist “Corax” drew an image that summed up the prevailing mood.
A man is seated in his home at night, watching television news. Above him, a missile is about to penetrate his roof. On the screen, the very same scene plays out: the identical house, the same descending missile. As one anthropologist interpreting this depiction for a post-conflict audience notes, “The paradox is made up of two apparent contradictions. The falling bomb is dynamic, the man is static. Nothing can stop the bomb from reaching its target; nothing can prevent the destruction of the house representing the common Yugoslav state and the death of the man representing the shared Yugoslav identity.” This underscores the inevitability of fate. Apparently, the only option is passive observation, awaiting the unfolding of events.”
It is unnecessary to endorse the grim predictions about Britain’s imminent future animating much of the Right to recognize a similar, almost dreamlike immobility confronting our own national fragmentation. The reality, when outlined, is discouraging. Elected on a platform promising renewal for Britain, Keir Starmer has become the least favored prime minister in British history, with his party’s overwhelming victory possibly marking a high point rather than a beginning. Should his premiership be nearing its conclusion, it is notable that it began and is likely to end with him being jeered by angry crowds at sites of two stabbings: first in Southport, then in Golders Green. Video from North London displaying Union Flags on lampposts — a phenomenon that spread nationally following Southport and subsequent ethnic riots — reveals how rapidly suburban British Jewish communities have echoed the tensions once confined to areas like the Shankill Road. Neither assault was Starmer’s direct responsibility; instead, his political fate is to personify a Westminster government widely despised by its populace.
From the outset seemingly ill-fated, it’s difficult not to harbor some reluctant empathy for the “Two-Year Kier.” While he lacks the ideological and personal qualities to hold a divided country intact, it’s unclear who else might perform better. Every news headline seems extracted from a future documentary detailing state collapse. Just weeks before election day, Starmer’s St George’s Day video message carried the hallmarks of a late-imperial official attempting to quell impending ethnic unrest beyond the capital. This is understandable: the newfound political significance of St George’s Day marks a symbolic break between the English population and Westminster’s form of governance.
This division aligns more closely with revived Celtic nationalisms than against them and forms part of the broader trend in which devolved nation governments are led by parties eager to end the Union. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Greens’ support for Irish, Scottish, and Welsh nationalism positions them as Westminster’s only party effectively endorsing an independent England: technically, they can be viewed as an English nationalist entity, arguably more so than Reform, the ambivalent standard-bearers of Unionism, whose voter base is nonetheless comprised largely of English dissatisfaction with Westminster. This fragmentation of parties reflects, knowingly or not, the fracturing of the nation itself.
The established parties of British democracy have declined into regional London-centric entities within the Westminster apparatus. Conservatives have ceded their traditional rural strongholds to Liberal Democrats and suburbs to Reform, now representing Metroland Hindus, socially conservative West Africans, and Clapham Yimbys. Labour, no longer a national party, functions as a London-based union for those running the Westminster state—the civil servants, lawyers, and thinktank workers constituting its electoral core—and the social housing tenants benefiting from its patronage, barring those swayed by ethnic parties either overtly, as in Tower Hamlets, or under the Green banner, as in Waltham Forest. Westminster’s center of governance has ironically become a peripheral entity, buffeted by forces beyond its control.
Further removed from London than experienced in centuries, the peripheries now embody Westminsterism’s twilight and shape the country’s future. Northern Ireland, awaiting devolved elections, remains an enigma to British observers—historically isolated since its fraught inception—and considered with fear and disdain by the Republic’s elites. The apprehension within Ireland’s coalition that Farage might “bounce Ireland into a referendum it is not ready for” appears more like dread of a successful border poll than a failed one. Sinn Féin’s jubilance over the Scottish and Welsh election outcomes—which, as my abstentionist MP notes, suggests “people are looking beyond Westminster towards a brighter, more positive future, free from the shackles of the British government”—is difficult to contest.
Despite its internal conflicts and governance challenges, the SNP’s triumph in Scotland affirms a solid core of independence supporters, though a narrow unionist majority remains, split as in Northern Ireland. In Wales, once hesitant about devolution, Plaid Cymru now leads the government with a slim advantage over Reform, which has taken up the defense of the Union.
However, the major takeaway—that both nations now have pro-independence governments—masks the deeper reality that Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are nearly evenly split between those seeking to maintain the Union and those aiming to dismantle it. Absent immediate paths to independence, deadlock resembling the Stormont fiasco is probable, where governance takes a backseat to symbolic national identity politics. Political stagnation and polarization into two opposing identities seem inevitable. Celtic nationalists hope to frame a prospective Reform government as an English nationalist force, thereby reducing Westminster to its most simplistic, caricatured form.
Reform, meanwhile, counts on increasing immigration in Wales and Scotland—endorsed by Plaid and the SNP respectively—to provoke defections among ethnic-nationalist Celtic voters, leading to a political echo of England’s demographic shifts. Notably, 12% of Reform’s Scottish votes now seem to come from former SNP supporters. Yet in Northern Ireland, the dynamic reverses: immigration celebrated by Sinn Féin bolsters the Unionist vote by increasing populations with limited ties to Irish nationalism, often assigned there by Whitehall bureaucrats rather than personal choice. Across the UK, the interplay between traditional and newly formed nationalisms—shaped by mass immigration—produces unpredictable, conflicting outcomes marked by deep polarization and nationalist ambiguities beyond the superficial harmony in recent electoral results.
Reform, a personality-driven movement led by a leader uncertain about the Union, ironically champions a similar message to Sinn Féin’s South Down MP Chris Hazzard: “Westminster does not serve our people.” Few English voters would disagree. The enthusiasm with which Reform’s new English supporters display their ethnic enclaves exemplifies the collapse of England’s post-industrial Labour coalition into competing ethnic factions. Pollster Luke Tryl notes: “We are seeing some of the most fragmented results in councils combining white working-class voters with large ethnic minorities.” The political division reshaping Britain reflects a social split longstanding Westminster inaction failed to address.
In England, Reform’s gains in Bradford, Birmingham, and Greater Manchester, alongside the rise of South Asian Muslim identitarian candidates—or temporarily the Greens, where demographics demand—illustrate this binary ethnic self-segregation. Liberal commentators’ late alarm at the predictable results of their worldview comes too late to halt this momentum. Currently, the Greens benefit from a coalition of radical young women, aged millennials seeking lifelines from the wreckage of the Corbyn era, and Muslim identitarians, yet this coalition remains no more stable than the fractured Labour base it replaces.
Similar instability applies to Reform, whose alliance of working-class and middle-class voters diverges on economic policies, temporarily united by a renewed identity focus. There is no inherent reason why the structural forces dismantling traditional parties would spare Reform if it achieves government. England’s dedicated ethnonationalists, currently emboldened by Rupert Lowe’s victory in Great Yarmouth, are more likely to capitalize on any Reform government’s failure than immediately usurp the party’s leadership of the Right. If there will still be a Britain to restore is another question.
Though Reform’s rise seems almost inevitable, Britain’s political landscape remains profoundly unstable. Reform’s support has waned from its peak; without fully overtaking the Conservatives or forming coalitions, it cannot secure a strong majority. Equally plausible is an alliance of England’s Left parties, bolstered by peripheral nationalists, as the prospect of Farage ascending to Downing Street. Such an outcome would accelerate the dysfunction and fragmentation that Reform both relies on and exacerbates. If in power, Reform will likely confront obstruction from Westminster bureaucrats, intensifying provincial England’s rebellious attitudes. Westminster’s disintegration fuels growing identitarian divides, which in turn deepens political breakdown—while the nation itself grows poorer, angrier, and less well governed. There is more to Ulsterisation than just flags on poles.
Approaching this issue realistically and fundamentally, last week’s elections across the UK underscore a shared conclusion: Westminster, as currently structured, fails to function. In the peripheral nations, the favored response is secession; in England, the gamble is on Reform as the last hope to resolve the crisis. The optimistic 1990s liberal cosmopolitanism Starmer sought to preserve has vanished: his political downfall stems less from his own shortcomings than from trying to lead a country that no longer exists. Meanwhile, it is difficult even for supporters to envision Farage fashioning something more stable from the same volatile landscape.
The state might avoid outright dissolution but will continue to hollow out as its diverse populations increasingly align with smaller, sharply opposed political factions. The process, accelerated dramatically during Starmer’s ill-fated tenure, remains far from complete. Farage may act as an agent of fragmentation as much as a nation-builder. Some difficult unions collapse; others persist, fueled by hope or fear. Whether Britain’s future unfolds as unity or breakdown depends as much on circumstance and chance as intentional choice. Westminster, like the Yugoslav cartoon, remains powerless, bound to witness events as they unfold while remaining motionless.
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