Why is the right-wing media so desperate for a hot-riot summer?
Plus: Drilling into Farage's plan for crime, the latest on what Reform have been up to, The Lead Digest and updates from The Lead North team.
To read much of conservative traditional and new media these last few weeks is to learn that the forecast for what remains of the summer is “sunny, with a chance of total civilisational collapse”. The UK is a “tinderbox”, and all it takes, suggests friend-of-Viktor Orban Frank Furedi in the Daily Mail, may be “one spark. An online rumour, a viral video clip, perhaps a single inflammatory post on social media” for Britain to “go up in flames”.
The Daily Telegraph’s Allison Pearson is invoking the only mildly offensive stereotype of John, the local handyman, who has apparently told her that he and his friends have decided it will be up to them to “go down and defend our southern border” from migrants. “If our leaders are too weak to act, lovely John and the yeomen of Britain will go to the border, and they will do what needs to be done,” Pearson suggests menacingly. This from the same commentator who recently asked “Anyone else hoping for a military coup?”
Christian Calgie of the Express is not to be outdone, posting, “If you don’t understand how close tens of millions of Britons are to wanting a full-blown revolution, let alone fail to understand why, then you have no value as a political commentator.”
Former professor Matt Goodwin is beavering away on Substack, accusing the government of “pushing the UK into civil unrest”, former Tory and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell is calling for “regime change” – on and on it goes.
And it’s not solely on the right: the New Statesman recently illustrated its “Summer of Discontent” story with an image of angry men in St George’s Cross balaclavas.
This next week, with temperatures hitting the high 20s/low 30s should be prime riot weather. It may sound glib, but it’s possible that the return of the Premier League and the EFL will provide sufficient distraction for the bored young men who can turn a containable protest into a full on riot.
But that point is to deal in practicality and reality. And the truth is, our conservative media have pretty much entirely lost contact with both of those things.
The advent of Brexit should have been a great victory for the nativist element of British conservatism. And it’s true that this tendency has now completely taken over the right. But the lesson they took was the worst possible one: shouting on the Internet is where real politics happens. This is how they ended up with Kemi Badenoch, who displays the attention span and attention to detail of a serial X poster, and who dismissively described Liberal Democrats as “somebody who is good at fixing their church roof”, seemingly unaware that “fixing the church roof” could have been the Conservatives’ entire manifesto for most of its existence.
The conservative mainstream (now fully mingled with the hard right) is addicted to the consequence-free thrills of a Twitter row, and totally dislocated from reality. So they outdo each other in their imaginings of London as a Mad Max Hellscape, even when their eyes and statistics tell them this isn’t true. They come up with entirely new demographic definitions to get inflamed about – suggesting, for example, that anyone with one “foreign-born” parent cannot qualify as “white British” or that Rishi Sunak, born and raised in Hampshire, is somehow not entitled to call himself English.
All the while, they dream of decline and chaos. Brexit taught them the joy of destruction for its own sake, and now they are hooked on the feeling, which is why they don’t want to think seriously about solutions: they’re having too much fun feverishly imagining a charity rowing crew are in fact illegal immigrants, as former Reform MP Rupert Lowe recently did, or that whatever mad online rumour they read about Angela Rayner or Kier Starmer this week is true.
This is why appeasing the loudest voices is ultimately pointless. They are not interested in solutions and no amount of tough talk from the government can convince them to tone down the rhetoric. The government is better served by addressing the alienating factors in UK society, such as the narrowing of the social sphere of pubs, libraries, clinic and family hubs, the places that make communities cohesive and worth taking pride in (and which, ironically for those who see London as the great Satan, are plentiful in the centre of the capital). And that is exactly what they are doing, albeit weirdly quietly.
The declinism and destructiveness, the visceral unpatrioticness that has taken hold of the right, is doubtless dangerous. Their disregard for objective truth, their gleeful rush towards chaos make them terrifying and ludicrous in equal measure.
But this is conservatism unmoored from the ideas of power. The Conservatives have no route to power, and Reform has no experience of it. Without ambition, ideology, philosophy or principle to keep them on track, they have reached again and again for the destruct button. Media fellow travellers mistake engagement (likes!) for impact or respect, and the self-perpetuating circus rolls on. The best the rest of us can do is stick to the task of making our communities better and praying these fools don’t get anyone killed.■
About the author: Padraig Reidy is editor-at-large of The Lead. He also writes the culture newsletter
We recently looked at Nigel Farage’s claims about how Reform would tackle crime, and our Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald appeared on The Bunker podcast to drill into this further.
The Lead is keeping an eye on Reform UK and their fellow travellers. Get in touch on X, Bluesky and Instagram or email ella@thelead.uk with tips and stories. We especially want to hear from readers whose local council is now run by Farage’s followers.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire has blamed successive Tory governments for her feeling “unsafe” in “soft-touch Britain” — the governments she has consistently worked for, before losing her seat last year. She also had a meltdown when told by Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy that the vast majority of sexual crimes are by British-born people.
Reform continues to bang the drum on made up crime figures, in an attempt to prove we live in lawless Britain. Just yesterday, Wales’ first Reform MS, Laura Anne Jones, cited incorrect figures from the Daily Mail which said that under Gwent Police from June 2024 to May 2025, almost 86 per cent of the 44,827 crimes reported were left unsolved. In fact, as reported by the Abergavenny Chronicle, there were 58,878 crimes reported in this period, making Jones’ figures 14,000 off the mark. Plus, 5,945 of the crimes reported to them within the time frame are under investigation – not unsolved – making her 86 per cent figure inaccurate, too.
Deputy Leader Richard Tice appeared to encourage vigilantism as our “neighbourly duty” and “the gentlemanly thing to do”. Of course, Tice fails to acknowledge that many of those who took up arms in last year’s riots – sparked by the murder of three young girls in Southport – were extremely likely to have already been reported for… violence against women and girls.
Reform’s only female MP, Sarah Pochin, distanced the party from its leader’s dear old friend President Trump in a press conference this week. Asked about whether Reform had found itself “aligning” with the president, she said: “This party is not aligned with Donald Trump. Donald Trump does what he does over the pond, and we do what we do.” She added that, although he does seem to “clearly respect women”, Trump is “a bit of a chauvinist”.
According to a report by Desmog, the areas most at risk from extreme high temperatures include a number of anti-net zero Reform-led constituencies, such as Clacton, Boston and Skegness, Ashfield and Runcorn and Helsby.
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The Lead Digest
Here at The Lead, we like to consume just as much as we create, which is why we spend a little time each week rounding up our favourite stories, books, podcasts and films to offer our readers a sample of the work that informs our world.
Ella loved this exploration of the subconscious mind and whether we can truly alter the way it thinks by Hannah Ewans in the Independent. It digs into emerging research and theories, unpicks the neuroscience and dabbles in the unknown. Fabulous!
Ed couldn’t get enough of this short but sweetly successful social campaign by a Brian Potter (as in, Phoenix Nights) impersonator. Connor O'Brien, from Bury, took to Instagram to complain about a sink hole that had been bothering locals for months. After his video was shared by the MEN, United Utilities took responsibility for the hole and sorted it out.
He also watched the new Happy Gilmore 2 after resubscribing to Netflix to get through the summer holidays — almost 20 years after he watched the first one on VHS.
Luke enjoyed this Independent article about the surreal rise of the supermarket food stunt, particularly the element about innovation being focused on something that might be shareable through TikTok rather than products to actually eat; "the food industry equivalent of social media rage bait” indeed. Those sell-out strawberry and cream sarnies were a joke, weren’t they?
For Padraig, Jemima Kelly’s Financial Times story on the far-right commentator and software engineer Curtis Yarvin’s garden party is a must read — and Martin Robbins’ newsletter about the incredibly naff revenge of the nerds, published on his Substack The Value of Nothing, is an excellent follow up.
Padraig also recommends Dan Trilling’s superb essay on the genesis of the migrant hotel issue. “At its root, it is a story of public penny-pinching and market forces causing a problem that is then made worse by politicians promising a quick fix or finding a convenient scapegoat,” he writes. “If that sounds familiar then perhaps it’s because it’s a story we also find in our hospitals, schools and wider communities.”
Natalie has finally made it back to the cinema this week after a long, baby-induced hiatus to see Weapons, a gory, jumpy, twisty horror that has cult-classic written all over it. It's a touch too long, but the cast is brilliant (Josh Brolin and Julia Garner) and it doesn't go in the direction you expect.
At The Lead we’re dedicated to telling stories beyond the bright lights of London and Manchester (although sometimes we still will). We have dedicated journalists and titles in Blackpool, Lancashire, Calderdale, Teesside and Southport bringing in-depth news and features twice-a-week to those communities. You can subscribe to support our vital local journalism.
The Blackpool Lead continues to tell the story of the Metropole, after last month speaking to a whistle-blower about conditions within the hotel. At the weekend, there were small scale protests outside the hotel which resulted in a child watching out of the window, only to see a St George's Flag with "send them home" slapped across it. We spoke with the man who took the picture, who was there to try to have 'good conversations' with protestors.
In Lancashire, four people have died in incidents where police suspect drink or drug-driving is involved. It comes a week after they launched their summer campaign to discourage such behaviour. A number of arrests have been made.
Could the tide be turning against BP’s H2Teesside project at Teesworks? The latest load of documents published by the Planning Inspectorate suggest things are not as straightforward as they could be. Leigh reports for The Teesside Lead.
Thanks for reading today’s Thursday newsletter. Make sure you’re subscribed to The Lead so you don’t miss our upcoming editions. Tomorrow, as the nation sweats through heatwave week, Ella Glover will be getting to the bottom of why our homes are so unbearably hot. Football is back, and on Saturday our reporter Fred Garrett-Stanley will ask why refereeing in the Premier League is still so whitewashed.
Ed, Zoë, Ella, Luke, Natalie, Padraig, and The Lead team.
That's a pretty fair commentary. We are watching the gradual growth of the hard right-wing that feeds its supporters through tabloid comics like the Mail and the Express as well as pop-up "news" channels on the internet. Farage is the Daily Mail made flesh and spouts sound bites with no real substance but which go down well among his rabid, attention-deficient followers. The difficulty that the more realistic and moderate members of the public face is that moderacy doesn't make headlines.
It's long been known that the average Conservative Party member is considerably more right-wing than the average Tory MP: that's how Liz Truss became PM.
Perhaps when they picked Badenoch as leader – a black female Diet Farage with little hope of competing with the white male full-fat Farage – the Tory membership were intentionally euthanizing their own party for Reform's benefit.
After all, Reform can truly succeed in the Red Wall in a way the Tories didn't even in 2019, as it lacks the "they shut our pits" stigma that still hasn't _entirely_ dissipated from the Tories.