George Orwell, the great dystopian writer, once dreamed up a vision of his ideal pub in London: a homely local called “The Moon Under Water” with plenty of oak and a fire in winter. This vision inspired Tim Martin to establish his chain of Wetherspoons pubs and to name several of them after it. On the British right today, some believe that such places of hearth and home, full of “regulars”, no longer exist—that their country has changed. And there are also those who want to update this quintessentially English ideal for the 21st century—and send its vaunted Victorian architecture and liver-sausage sandwiches into the stratosphere.
During the past two years, two online narratives have emerged within right-wing British political discourse: “decline porn” and “anglofuturism”. Both are in large part expressed and driven by AI images and videos, and both invoke an Orwellian patriotism. One is excessive in its pessimism, presenting a picture of British cities as hellscapes. The other is naive in its optimism, peppered with visions of flying taxis and half-jokes about putting a Wetherspoons on the moon.
For the British right, a political tradition once rooted in opposition to extreme fantasies, this is a novel development and suggests that a profound change in its nature may be taking place. Indeed, it might be leaving conservatism behind entirely. The utopianism evident in anglofuturism, for instance, conflicts with the long-held conservative principle that the present—known, concrete and rich with what Edmund Burke called the “mute wisdom” of previous generations—is preferable to the left’s misty hopes for the future. Equally, it is quite unconservative to proclaim a present dystopia, as this conflicts with the traditional conservative’s temperamental caution and preservationist impulse.
Why, then, have these two contrasting visions emerged?
In 1975, an adviser to prime minister Harold Wilson wrote in his diary: “this nation is in sad decline… Britain is a miserable sight.” Bernard Donoughue’s lament could well have been written in the spring of 2024, when I migrated to the United Kingdom from Australia. When telling locals that I was new to the country, the most common response was, “Why on Earth would you want to move here!?” There was a relentless pessimism about the economy, the National Health Service, crumbling infrastructure and the hapless handful of prime ministers who’d cycled through Downing Street in the previous decade. Only 16 per cent of Brits said the country was heading in the right direction.
This sense of national malaise crystalised in the pithy phrase “broken Britain”, which would hang like an albatross around Rishi Sunak’s neck in the 2024 election campaign. With the prime minister having anounced the coming poll while being pelted with rain outside Number 10, the Tories lost 251 seats and were left with just 121—their worst ever result.
Parties that lose power after a long period in office face an existential crisis, where they reconsider what it means to be on their side of politics—see, for instance, the Blue Labour debates after the demise of the Blair and Brown governments. But in 2024, the British right was forced to consider this question—what, in the mid-2020s, it should be for—in a changing and dysfunctional public sphere.
Three changes took place in the digital world that year that would profoundly impact the quality and content of the debates that have played out since, and lead the right into fantastical visions of the present and future. They all happened on Elon Musk’s X which, according to YouGov research, remains the “dominant platform for debate” for right wingers: nearly four in five Conservative MPs were still using it. (Many Labour MPs and the UK government also still use the site.)
First, in January 2024, X announced that it had become a “video-first” platform, with algorithmic changes meaning users were watching videos in eight out of 10 sessions. Other social media platforms had been video-led for some time and X had tried to pivot before—but in 2024, right-leaning politicians and commentators were, for the first time, debating ideas on an increasingly visual medium.
Then, in December 2024, OpenAI launched its text-to-video artificial intelligence (AI) model, Sora, with UK users gaining access three months later. It quickly became the most widely used model of this kind, creating videos when given written prompts. By the time Sora was shut down in April 2026, Musk’s AI model Grok had launched its own text-to-video and image-to-video capabilities. An increasing proportion of the visual media now dominating X was AI-generated—and often misleadingly so, with experts decrying a deluge of difficult-to-verify clips.
Finally, many left-leaning users (including many Labour and Green MPs) also stopped using X in favour of Bluesky in late 2024, angry at Musk’s support for Donald Trump. With fewer opponents on the platform, conservatives have faced less pushback when posting outlandish content.
The British right appears since to have lost its bearings—its grip on reality, its own principles and a proper sense of proportion—in this visual, AI-driven echo chamber. By investigating these two genres, we can better understand how this once grand political tradition is dissembling.
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, the insurgent Reform UK and depleted Conservatives emphasised migration concerns. This had worked well for Nigel Farage’s party in the campaign and Kemi Badenoch was desperate to keep up. Happily, for the Conservatives, this strategy precluded a reckoning with the consequences of austerity, Brexit and the stagnation of living standards, factors which had far clearer detrimental impacts on Brits.
According to YouGov, the percentage of the public identifying immigration as a key issue rose from 37 per cent in January 2024 to 51 per cent in April 2026, while major concern with other issues, such as the health system, fell. This divergence will have had multiple causes, from Fleet Street’s alarmist framing of migration stories to Keir Starmer’s inept communication of his government’s policies and achievements in these areas. But it surely helped that the connection between immigration and national decline was also increasingly appearing on social media feeds.
In the past two years, there has been an explosion of video content depicting supposed urban decay in British cities—think homeless people, litter and buildings in disrepair—often alongside visual representations of non-white communities, particularly Muslims. Critics have dubbed such content “decline porn”, for it simultaneously appals and titillates viewers. London has been a particular target: between March 2024 and March 2026, “‘London in decline’ narratives on X increased by 150–200 per cent, and migration-related narratives referencing London increased by over 350 per cent,” according to the Greater London Authority. Extreme right-wing groups based in the UK “appeared to be among the most prominent contributors to several clusters” of content whose subject matter included knife crime and phone snatching, it found.
A lot of this content is AI-generated and appears likely to stoke racial and political divisions. For instance, one fake video of young, black British men wearing black hoodies and balaclavas sliding on blow-up rafts at “Croydon water park” falsely claims the nonexistent facility is “taxpayer funded”. The creator of that video is based in northwest England and, as he told the BBC, has never been to Croydon.
While the Croydon video is obviously fake (there’s a polar bear in the splash zone), other manipulations might more easily go unnoticed. Kurt Caz, for instance, is a YouTube “auditor”—he visits public spaces and institutions, filming the reactions of staff and security. He posted a video in October 2025 titled “Avoid this place in London!” (it was Croydon), with a thumbnail image showing a black cyclist wearing a balaclava in front of a shop bearing Arabic signage. In the video, the shop’s signs are in English, and the cyclist isn’t wearing a balaclava—he was a fan of Caz’s, who had stopped to compliment him. Digital sleuths alleged that the image had been digitally altered.
In a sense, this is not new. There have been narratives about “decline” in the UK, on both left and right, since the end of empire: most recently, David Cameron’s 2010 election promise to fix “broken Britain”. But these videos are different—they show not gradual accumulating losses but an immediate descent into lawless hell.
Some right-wing politicians, particularly in Reform UK, have amplified such divisive content. Durham County Council’s Reform deputy leader, Darren Grimes, admitted a photo he shared online depicting a group of south Asian men in a housing estate was AI-generated. John Hill, Reform’s candidate for Eastney and Craneswater, shared an AI-generated video of a fake street interview with a Muslim man (he says he shared it by accident). Reform’s Ken Tranter, who was recently elected to Hampshire County Council, shared another AI image of a Muslim family with the caption “they breed, you pay”. It is unclear to what extent these politicians truly believe in these messages, or whether their use is purely cynical. Either way, it is radical—at times, even nihilistic—in its pessimism about the nation’s urban life. This complicates traditional notions of patriotism on the right—constructive criticism is of course vital, but can one truly love one’s country while simultaneously appearing to fear and even loathe many of its most populous places?
Reform and the Conservatives have been able to get away with such catastrophising because, by some measures, British cities have declined and the public is disappointed: homelessness, for instance, has risen significantly across England, and phone thefts have increased in London. But by many metrics, British cities have improved. Overall crime in London has decreased in recent years, particularly violent and serious crime. In 2025, homicides in the capital hit their lowest level since records began. Knife crime per capita dropped 12 per cent from January to August 2025 in London compared with the same period in the year before, and has fallen in the UK generally by 5 per cent. Most of these statistics decreased during years when migration was increasing; migration to the UK has now also decreased substantially over the past two years.
Ironically, the UK’s cities, particularly London and Manchester, remain some of its starkest success stories. The bigger issues are a lack of economic growth across the map and the concentration of wealth and power in the City and Westminster—problems the previous government notably exacerbated, and which the distraction of decline porn has enabled the right to ignore.
This sense of Britain’s frustrated potential has captured the attention of another, rather eccentric faction of the British right—one that wanted a more serious confrontation with the chequered legacy of the Tory years, and to forge a far more hopeful vision of what might come next for the UK. They, too, are keen on using AI to conjure images of their utopia.
In 2022, UnHerd columnist Aris Roussinos wrote an essay diagnosing “the fundamental problem facing Britain as one of eroded state capacity”—a crisis which he believed neoliberalism and its adherents in both major parties had helped create. He wanted to break with the post-Thatcher consensus, empowering the state to make more strategic investments to put Britain back at the forefront of industrial development. He sought to inspire this national effort with a “cultural nationalist project”, drawing on a mythologised history of British invention and discovery. He posited a term to encapsulate this forward-looking but patriotic vision: “anglofuturism”.
Anglofuturism is an extremely online subculture (Roussinos insists he didn’t coin the term, but borrowed it from the “right-wing Twitter hive mind”), which is principally expressed via playful, AI-generated images pairing a utopian vision of technological progress with a patriotic love of national heritage. A typical image might contain highspeed trains hurtling through idyllic English countryside, cooling towers with crenellations or spaceships plastered with Union Jacks. The idea of a Wetherspoons on the moon was posited jokingly by Tom Ough, one of the hosts of the Anglofuturism podcast (which suggests the UK should be “the most successful country in the galaxy”).
The movement has some serious proponents. Reform’s Treasury spokes-person Robert Jenrick, then Tory shadow justice minister, declared himself an anglofuturist at a 2025 conference. Calum Drysdale, Ough’s co-host, recalled: “the audience realised that this man… had been looking at the same Twitter posts that they had.” Tory MP Alex Burghart, who is Kemi Badenoch’s de facto -deputy and the main shaper of policy in her inner circle, is another ally—and perhaps the movement’s platonic ideal, as a former history scholar who used digital technologies to examine Anglo-Saxon charter documents, and later drove AI policy under Sunak. Appearing on the same podcast, he praised the movement’s aesthetic. “The future ought to have more wood in it, and wool and leather and thatch,” he said.
In 2025, the press caught on. The Times dubbed anglofuturism “the tonic for Britain’s woes” and GQ listed the anglofuturists as one of “the new tribes driving British politics”.
To the extent that the sometimes silly graphics of this movement translate into a concrete policy agenda, anglofuturism is pro-science, pro-development and pro-innovation—those highspeed trains through the English countryside aren’t going to build themselves. And here it does address a real issue: the UK has become anti-development, an international laggard on infrastructure delivery, and isn’t making the most of its still-worldleading scientists and innovators.
In this sense, the anglofuturists’ staple ideas have a lot of overlap with the left-leaning “abundance” and “yes in my backyard” (Yimby) movements—that planning rules need to be drastically reformed, that trainlines and bridges need to proliferate more cheaply and effectively, and that scientific agencies such as the Advanced Research and Invention Agency and the Incubator for AI should be expanded. In one way, the anglofuturists might be seen as a slightly zanier offshoot of the popular Dominic Cummings-influenced “growth groups”. If the right could indeed turn in this more innovative direction, it might finally face up to the crisis of state capacity Roussinos identified, and which had worsened during the austerity years.
Alas, just as AI has led the catastrophist right to excess, so has it led anglofuturism astray. Anglofuturist visions have become unmoored from the practical problems of infrastructure and public service provision that Roussinos originally sought to solve, in favour of things that merely look futuristic. An anglofuturist campaign to create a “super spaceport” in the UK, for instance, was met with derision from those working in the sector. One senior industry figure told the Critic that: “The Hebrides already has three ‘spaceports’ and they’re just car parks. It’s the one thing the British space industry doesn’t need.” Then there is the anglofuturist plan, proposed by the Adam Smith Institute’s Duncan McClements, to help solve the housing crisis by building a “new Atlantis”: an artificial island the size of Wales on Dogger Bank, the large sandbank in the North Sea. This far-fetched idea dismisses the problems identified by Yimbys (that it is difficult to build housing and train lines in existing cities due to regulation and local resistance) by wishing them away in favour of a fanciful blank slate.
Few of the politicians engaging with anglofuturism appear to be seriously confronting the crisis of reduced state capacity
Roussinos has seemingly grown disillusioned with some of this, telling the Critic last year that his one-time ideological baby has morphed into a “space-imperialist kitsch of right-wing AI memes” and a “bombastic space opera”. Few of the politicians engaging with anglofuturism appear to be seriously confronting the crisis of reduced state capacity which he outlined: Tory MP Katie Lam, for instance, continued to insist on shrinking the size of the state in her appearance on the Anglofuturist podcast. For conservatives in search of a way forward, anglofuturism appears to be more of a vibe than a consequential agenda, allowing them to sound vaguely patriotic and innovative without articulating hard measures to get there.
Here, some proponents of the utopian and dystopian visions find common ground. Anglofuturism has many adherents with diverse views, and it is not free from the declinist tendency of dystopian right-wingers to blame immigrants. Robert Jenrick defected to Reform UK with a message that Britain was “broken”—and the Conservatives had started its decline. Elsewhere, the GB News contributor Jack Hadfield last November tweeted that “Anglofuturism without mass deportations completely misses the point. I’m fed up with this soulless, hollowing out of a radical idea that has now been taken over by Westminster Yimby types who never post about WHY we have more graffiti on the tube.” A GB News presenter and the Cummings-aligned Looking for Growth group had earlier staged a viral campaign for volunteers to clean graffiti off the Bakerloo line, demonstrating the links between growth-oriented futurists and anti-decline sentiment. One of their videos garnered more than 2.3m views on X, and was retweeted by Musk himself.
Again, imagery plays a perverse role. Some in the more intolerant faction of anglofuturists put the red squirrel emoji in the biography sections of their X profiles. According to artist and writer Alexander Adams, this is “the unofficial symbol of Anglofuturism… which represents native British inhabitants. This is implicitly counterposed with the immigrant grey squirrel population, which has almost entirely displaced the native species in many places in mainland Britain”. Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future thinktank and author of How to be a Patriot, has been attacked on X by various “red squirrels” for calling out what he sees as racist rhetoric on the site. In some images, they superimposed Katwala’s face onto the body of a grey squirrel.
The visual distractions of decline porn and anglofuturist utopias have helped the British right avoid having to address the legacies of austerity and Brexit, or thinking seriously about Britain’s future and its contributions to it. Roussinos tried, in his own idiosyncratic way, to start those conversations. But the dominance of cheap AI video and the decline in the quality of debate on social media platforms such as X have enabled the right to dodge hard truths.
What’s more, the right’s appetite for promoting these colourful and extreme visions also calls into question whether it is still “conservative” in any meaningful sense, or whether radical visions of utopia and dystopia are diluting its innate scepticism and measured temperament. That matters because (as Keir Starmer has shown) a political project without a real plan, that is unsure of what it stands for, unravels quickly in office. Until the right can find a vision more credible than raising Dogger Bank to the surface, more constructive than decrying Croydon water park, British political discourse will continue to stagnate. It might have rained on Rishi Sunak, but it could be time for right-wingers to put down their phones, go back outside and check the prevailing winds.
