Copyright newstatesman
Solar energy beamed to Earth from kilometre-scale orbital megastructures originating in Oxfordshire. Franchised micro-factories orchestrated by artificial intelligence, opening across Britain. An automated restaurant in Bloomsbury. This is not nostalgia: this is actually-existing Anglofuturism. A world away from the decline and despair in most news offerings, Anglofuturism, Britain’s only truly optimistic podcast, has been heralding the future that’s already here. The podcast, which I have been producing since its early episodes in 2024, broadcasts interviews with founders, policymakers, and visionaries about their big ideas for the future of Britain. It is part of an emerging Anglofuturist scene, and the political mainstream has noticed. At a conference in June, Robert Jenrick, the Conservative Party’s leader-in-waiting, declared that he could be “described as an Anglofuturist”. Hope Not Hate then condemned the emerging nationalist tendency on Britain’s right, though it did admit that our podcast represented the “most intellectual vision” of Anglofuturism to date. More recently, in the pages of the New Statesman, we were upgraded to romantics, helplessly in denial over the loss of a Britain that can never be regained. As the producer, I am the quietest member of the trio which brought you beloved hits like “Dark Abundance and the Caning Question” and “Britain’s Manifest Antarctic Destiny”. But here today, I’ll tackle a question to which nobody has yet found a satisfactory answer – if Anglofuturism is here to stay, then what exactly does it mean for progressives? Tom, Calum (co-hosts of the podcast) and I came together through a shared love of the patently and patriotically ridiculous: a spacefaring Britain building Georgian townhouses on the Moon, small modular reactors delivering nuclear energy from underneath village greens, and a Britain capable of delivering infrastructure projects on time and under-budget. But, when we looked into them, we began to wonder if these ideas were really so far-fetched. When the Marxist philosopher Franco Berardi wrote about “the slow cancellation of the future” in 2011, he was diagnosing a persistent malaise in the contemporary political imagination. Somewhere along the 20th-century journey of war, economic depression, and financialisation, political movements lost any capacity to imagine a future that wasn’t just a continuation of the present. Partly in response to this, political theorists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams wrote the left-accelerationist manifesto, Inventing the Future. It envisioned industrial renewal and exponential take-off in computing delivering an abundant, post-scarcity utopia. Berardi wrote a scathing response that pointed to the “post-humanist” endpoint of a technology fetish divorced from material concerns. There is undoubtedly something tragicomical in Anglofuturist ideas: that industry and capital could foster, rather than eliminate, our sense of home in the future seems to run against all historical understanding. But we steeled ourselves to accusations of cringe and pressed on. Our early episodes on raising Dogger Bank from the sea and building more British spaceports earned laughs but also, to our surprise, raised emotions. In a political climate characterised most of all by disbelief in the possible, the portrayal of a utopian tomorrow that felt like home seemed at least to hold people’s attention. Pessimism is widespread in Britain today, founded in the belief that our greatest days are now so distant that future success is out of reach. But Britain’s paralysis has long stemmed from a surplus of declinism and a deficit of execution. The fundamentals remain strong: the UK’s universities maintain top-three status in citation share, its deep technology clusters are among the most active in Europe and globally, and the natural advantages of a densely-connected island geography and the English language remain ours to leverage. Momentum is already building. Our friends in the Looking for Growth movement already stepped forward last year to build grassroots organisations across the country, pushing for policies that got the government out of the way of companies developing the next generation of technology, and of itself in housebuilding and large infrastructure projects. Meanwhile, LFG activists relentlessly execute civic-minded projects: cleaning graffiti from public transport, restoring beauty to local parks and bus shelters, and operating in general as an example of how much our apparent deficit in state capacity is due to lack of determination. Anglofuturism has sympathisers in the Labour party. In our conversation with Dan Tomlinson MP, shortly before he became Labour’s Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, we found much common ground in the diagnosis of poor prioritisation and a morass of unfit-for-purpose regulation holding back Britain’s ambition for cheap and abundant energy, a strong economy, and public services able to deliver on their promises. But Keir Starmer’s government has failed to galvanise even its own MPs sufficiently to push forwards with this programme. Instead, it has lost ground to petty squabbles about minor redistributive changes – obsessed with the near-term, for lack of a narrative to direct attention to the future. If optimism about what people can do for their country only comes from the right, some blame must lie with progressives who surrendered that ground. The proposals we feature on our podcast are often radical. Guests such as Joe Hill, Policy Director at public services think tank Re:State, Curtis Yarvin – the philosopher credited with providing the intellectual ballast for the current Trump administration – and Santi Ruiz, of the Institute for Progress, gave prescriptions for reform that would make many progressives blush in their ambition. But crucially, each grounded their proposals in the basic belief that Britain’s central priority should be to achieve strategic autonomy, state capacity, and economic growth. None of that is irreducibly right-wing. 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. [Further reading: Looking for Growth looks for a political consensus]
