Is Anglofuturism Going Mainstream?

A roundup of outings in the media from the Anglofuturism team and some friendly and not-so-friendly coverage from others.

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For those who simply can’t get enough of Anglofuturism, here's a brief roundup of our recent appearances in the media and coverage by others. Whisper it—are we going mainstream?

In a barnstorming appearance on Times Radio, Calum explained why we need Anglofuturism today:

Writing for Unherd, Tom reflected on why Anglofuturist ideas seem to have come of age:

I’d like to claim that this moment in the sun is the result of my podcast’s lengthy discussions of planning and industrial policy, but there are likely to be more fundamental reasons. Anonymous envisionings of things like a “Cecil Rhodes spaceport” were no doubt reactive to the overreach of “woke” culture, but also to the years of elite oikophobia and condemnation of British history that preceded it.

All the while, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the profound failures of modern British statecraft. Real-term wages have not risen since the financial crisis; the heaviest tax burden since the Second World War looks likely to be raised further; much of our best talent is leaving; we are giving away territory at extraordinary cost. Constrained by Byzantine planning laws, we have kneecapped HS2 just as China contemplates a new generation of maglevs. We can’t build a reservoir, let alone houses — and so on. Rather than fostering technological innovation, successive governments have tried to keep the economy afloat by importing large numbers of immigrants each year.

As Keir Starmer’s government ties itself in knots over whether it approves of the flag of St George, the failures of multiculturalism are writ ever larger. Last night, sectarian Muslim MPs welcomed the barring of Israeli football fans from a match in Birmingham. That shameful development does not point to a self-assured country with anything resembling an attractive vision of the future.

In these circumstances, then, it is little wonder that Anglofuturism has been more widely discussed. Who can begrudge a few nerds dreaming of a country that can plan for the long term, return to the frontiers, and create a future for itself that is both familiar and exciting?

Meanwhile, Aeron was in the New Statesman asking why the political left is showing so little optimism about Britain’s future:

Some are discomfited by our podcast’s unabashed belief in Britain’s manifest destiny. Nothing definitional in Anglofuturism demands you agree with the proposals we have featured, or that you share our mytho-Britannic vision of the future. But to us, it’s no mystery why presenting the ideas of tomorrow alongside the iconography of our present day, doing so in a way that makes British people feel proud of their history as much as of the days to come, provides a natural rallying point for those eager to get on with the unfinished business of the future. That some Anglofuturists are not natural allies of the left is undeniable, but secondary to the urgency of our situation. Progressives are already yielding territory to the right on anaemic wage growth, working-class communities, and patriotism. If they yield the future too, more’s the pity.

We are not, as some believe, nostalgic for a Britain that was once great. Anglofuturism asks only that Britain remembers to want greatness. This simple ambition has fallen out of fashion for too many on the left. As Matt Clifford, chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, put it at a Looking for Growth rally in London, “Whatever you care about, whatever your vision for this country, it will be much easier to achieve it if we make the UK rich again.” An Anglofuturism with redistributive characteristics, one in which co-operatives own and carry out asteroid mining, or a renewed state builds advanced infrastructure in concert with trade unions, is sorely missing from the political left’s imagination.

For once, most of the conversation about Anglofuturism was about us rather than from us. An already-infamous hatchet job from Hope not Hate painted Anglofuturism as the brains behind a shadowy coalition of nefarious dissidents:

Perhaps the most intellectual vision of the movement is the Anglofuturist podcast, run by Tom Ough and Calum Drysdale. The introduction to their programme imagines an Anglofuturist vision of “Georgian townhouses on the moon” and “small modular reactors under every village green”. The podcast has interviewed Curtis Yarvin (the American neoreactionary who in his appearance bizarrely mimicked a Chinese speaker) and Aria Babu (a think tank worker connected to Malcolm and Simone Collins, the American pronatalists). Although it features guests from the mainstream political scene — such as the Labour MP Dan Tomlinson — others express views that are no less extreme than those found in the Anglofuturist Book Club. In one episode, Dr Philip Cunliffe, a professor of international relations at University College London, referred to Muslim MPs as “cousin-shaggers”.

On the podcast, Douglas Carswell, the former UKIP MP, discussed the necessity for remigration, claiming that most migrants into Europe have “poor time preferences, impulsive behaviour and high propensity to live on welfare and commit crime”.

The New Statesman splashed a weekend feature on Anglofuturism, castigating Hope not Hate for their lazy hit piece, and moving the conversation on to whether Anglofuturists suffer from an overabundance of nostalgia:

Anglofuturists are acutely worried that Britain has become “museum island” or “butler to the world”. But their reaction to that anxiety is not reflection but reconstruction. In the language of the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym this is “restorative nostalgia”: the belief that the lost home can be rebuilt, that the past can be restored to working order if only the right aesthetic is applied. Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, lingers in the loss and recognises its impossibility. Anglofuturism can’t do that. It refuses to mourn so it mythologises. It mistakes self-pity for pride and aesthetic for vision.

For some adherents, Anglofuturism is a primarily white Anglo future, a fantasy of cultural and racial dominance masquerading as technocratic renewal. Anglofuturism is typical of the new online right, skilfully blending so-called hot takes with heavy irony. It’s also a broad church, with both nasty adherents (anonymous X accounts calling for mass deportations) and harmless, nerdy ones (a recent episode of the Anglofuturism podcast made the case for Pingu as a representation of English settler colonialism). The mistake made by a recent article on Hope Not Hate’s website was to lump them all together. If one person who shares the same views as you is racist, the thinking goes, then you must denounce those views. If racists like brutalist buildings, then all brutalist buildings must be torn down. It’s a tired tactic that elicits the mental image of a quivering man hiding behind the couch while Pingu plays on the television. Anglofuturism dares you to take it seriously, then arches an eyebrow when you do.

Anglofuturism regular and Bismarck analyst

Rian Chad Whitton

leapt valiantly to our defence, offering this meditation on the uses of history in politics:

The multicultural society, as defined by the five fingers of British Values, is not really one in which any group, right or left, has a concrete stake. No British citizen had any agency in making it. It was never proposed or articulated before enactment, and within its great fables, those who populate the anglofuturist email list are generally portrayed as arch-villains, or at best, poorly educated orcs who don’t know where their enlightenment comes from. This ranges from silly hotepisms to scholars publishing utterly misleading claims about British industrialists stealing the Industrial Revolution from West Africans.

For multicultural Britain, our past beyond the Empire is treated basically as pre-history. Just as Richard Dawkins might have used an Archaeopteryx to prove evolution, modern archaeologists will use one skeleton here or there to draw a straight line of English identity between 723 AD and today. Contemporary interest in Britain’s pre-modern past is less about the Angevins and more about constructing a primordial diversity to validate modern immigration retrospectively.

It is perhaps not surprising then that some young Britons, whether they be the descendants of Brythonic bogtrotters or more recent arrivals, would push back and look to the past for inspiration, and to centre themselves in preparation for a turbulent future. Is it futile? Possibly, and if so, the Staggers have nothing to worry about.

And friend of the show

Tom Jones

reflects on Dan Wang’s “Breakneck” in trying to give voice to an Anglofuturist political philosophy:

Wang argues that the development of ‘the lawyerly society’ has resulted in America being unable to develop the infrastructure necessary to keep up with its own population growth, or sustain sufficient economic growth – something that is replicated in most modern liberal democracies, particularly those in Western Europe, which have developed a dangerous combination of vetocracy and massive immigration-derived population increases.

But there is now an increasing view that we should treat developed Western nations as developing. Breckneck’s conclusion sees Wang argue that in order to compete with China, America must recapture its desire and willingness to build; the abundance and progress movements in America are also, in some way, a rejection of the approach of the lawyerly society and an adoption of the engineering society’s approach to infrastructure. There is a similar desire to see Britain build again too; Anglofuturism.

While Aris Roussinos has offered some intellectual scaffolding, the movement largely lacks rigorous political philosophy. For most of its adherents, Anglofuturism is defined not by theory but simply by a singular focus on grand infrastructure projects. If there is to be an Anglo future, we have to get Britain building again - and that means treating Britain, if not quite as a developing nation, then as a nation that needs to be developed.

Peter Franklin, writing for Conservative Home, argued that Anglofuturism might be the best hope for reviving the Conservative Party:

Certainly, it would take a great deal to shift our existentially dire position with young voters. And yet one can begin to sketch out a high tech, progressively patriotic agenda that might just cut through. In this regard the Anglofuturism podcast by Tom Ough and Calum Drysdale is well worth a listen.

The duo aren’t afraid to think the unthinkable, with episodes devoted to ideas like a UK space port, Britain’s “manifest destiny” in the Antarctic and reclaiming Doggerland from the North Sea. While these may count more as thought experiments than immediate propositions, such exercises encourage future-facing mental habits.

If we can contemplate the terraforming of Mars, then perhaps we’ll be encouraged to take on a less stretching objective — for instance, the terraforming of, er, Croydon.

David Goodhart, opining on the British political magazine scene in The Critic, names our offering here at Anglofuturism among the most promising new entrants:

My own very partial view of the magazine scene is that the energy and interest is coming overwhelmingly from the right, or at least the non-left, as in politics itself. There are the best substacks: the engaging Ed West, the optimistic Anglo-Futurists/Works in Progress cluster, the sharp and angry Pimlico Journal, (even read by Cowdery, he tells me). There is this readable and often surprising magazine, described as “dyspeptic” in a Prospect piece on who is funding Reform, one of the few in the last year that I learned something from.

And finally, perhaps heralding a bright future for Tom and Calum in modelling heritage knitwear, GQ included Anglofuturism in their overview of Britain’s emerging political landscape:

On the slightly more optimistic end of the spectrum is a group with an idiosyncratic, trad-coded vision of the future: the Anglofuturists. The term, coined by the writer Aris Roussinos in 2022, aspires towards a high-tech Britain that retains traditional “Anglo” characteristics.

Think high-speed trains zipping through rewilded forests – or, as per the AI-generated art for the Anglofuturism Podcast, a space station with a thatched roof. Guests on the podcast have included the pro-growth Labour MP Dan Tomlinson and there is lots of excited talk about artificial wombs, geothermal energy and raising land from the North Sea. Robert Jenrick has described himself as an Anglofuturist. Author, journalist and podcast co-host Tom Ough says this has started “a domino effect that we are confident will culminate in the planting of the Union flag in the red dust of Mars”. More seriously, he thinks that Anglofuturism’s wackiness is a way to jolt people into thinking ambitiously about the future again.