The Summer They Want
Back from a sunlit cove and into a country caught in a loop of fear, protest, and distraction - this is the summer of just about managed chaos. And it’s not by accident.
I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write.
I know this may come across as somewhat odd considering that you’re currently reading something that I’ve written, sitting on the gloriously quiet Tube (I’m very pro-summer-holiday commuting), but that’s what’s happening. It’s like all my usual tools have gone blunt. Like I’ve got sand in the gears of my thinking brain.
Which I suppose isn’t odd when you consider the fact that I haven’t seriously written something for over two weeks and that last week this time I was bobbing happily in a sunlit cove just off a tiny nameless island in the Adriatic, wondering out loud to myself what the maximum safe human consumption of calamari and pistachio gelato is.
I didn’t check Twitter for several days. That’s practically a sabbatical.
But now I’m back. Back at work, back in London, back in motion, and back in a country that feels like it’s humming with tension. And not the good kind of tension either. Not “will the storm break or just hang there, sexy and sultry” tension. This is “something’s about to kick off and no one’s going to take responsibility” tension.
Again.
Because, while I was recharging like an overcooked iPhone left in the sun, the UK has been slipping into another summer of unrest - protests, arrests, fearmongering, far-right posturing. We’ve been here before. Hell, we were here exactly a year ago after the Southport attack, when false claims that a Muslim asylum seeker was responsible spread around by all and sundry helped trigger the worst civil disorder in a generation.
And now it’s happening again. The names have changed - Epping, Nuneaton, Newcastle - but the script stays the same.
There seems to be a playbook. Something awful happens. The details are messy, painful, and often not fully known. The far right leaps in, declares a cover-up, waves a few flags, and picks a hotel. Local fears are stirred, national narratives are weaponised, and before you know it - BANG! - someone’s set off a firework at a police van. Reform UK shows up with laminated placards and Nigel Farage’s serious face. By the time the facts emerge - too late, too nuanced, far too complicated - the damage is done.
And this is the summer they want.
Not a summer of joyful chaos. Not a summer of football and festivals and sweat-stained office dress codes. No, what they want is a simmering season of just-about-manageable disorder. A society that never quite erupts, but always feels about two degrees from boiling over. A country that’s too stressed to think, too anxious to breathe, and too distracted to notice who’s lighting the fuse.
And, as ever, yes, there absolutely are people with genuine concerns. I’ve lived in stretched neighbourhoods. I’ve worked with vulnerable populations. I understand what it’s like when resources are thin and patience is thinner. But what’s happening here isn’t a public debate. It’s not community-led conversation. It’s not pressure for solutions.
It’s theatre. And the audience is the algorithm.
Protesters in Epping claim their town has been betrayed. That they weren’t consulted. That they’re scared. That they’ve been ignored for too long. And I don’t doubt that it’s largely true. What I do doubt is whether anything that’s being shouted through a megaphone outside the Bell Hotel is actually about building a better asylum system.
Because if it was - if we were genuinely talking about housing, services, safety, and integration - then Reform UK wouldn’t be leading the conversation. The same party that wants to deport more people than we have planes, destroy net zero, and hand out Britannia Cards like Brexit-themed Clubcards, doesn’t care about nuance or practical solutions. They care about headlines, and more than that, they care about fear.
The scale of these protests isn’t insignificant - thousands in Manchester, hundreds more in Epping, Islington, Newcastle. But it’s the optics that matter more than the numbers. Flags. Hotels. Arrests. Police in riot gear. Shaky iPhone footage of people shouting across barricades. It's all incredibly clickable. And it's being shared on Telegram groups, Facebook pages, and now increasingly, through mainstream media channels that should know better.
Because here's the thing about modern newsrooms - they've become nothing more than content mills, desperate for engagement in a dying industry. Every hotel protest becomes "FURY IN [INSERT TOWN NAME]." Every counter-protest becomes "CHAOS ON THE STREETS." Every shaky phone video gets the full rolling news treatment - breaking news banners, breathless reporters, talking heads debating whether this is the "worst we've ever seen" or just "Tuesday."
And leading this orchestra of manufactured outrage is, as ever, Nigel Farage and the GB News ecosystem - slippery as eels in a bucket of Vaseline. They've perfected the art of lighting fires while holding the matches behind their backs. Farage shows up to "observe" tensions he's spent months stoking, all furrowed brow and "legitimate concerns." GB News hosts clutch their best strings of outrage pearls about "two-tier policing" while platforming exactly the voices guaranteed to make things worse. They ask "innocent" questions designed to weaponise fear, then retreat into wounded victimhood when called out.
It's performance art, really. The carefully modulated outrage. The strategic silences. The way they can turn "just asking questions" into a dog whistle so loud it breaks windows. They don't need to explicitly call for violence - they just need to create the conditions where it feels inevitable. Then, when the inevitable happens, they're nowhere to be found. Suddenly it's nothing to do with them. Just concerned observers documenting the collapse they've spent their careers engineering.
The genius is in the deniability. They're never quite responsible, but always perfectly positioned to benefit when things go wrong.
And in that manufactured drama, the actual issues - the broken asylum system, the underfunded councils, the deliberate political choices that created this mess - disappear entirely.
And meanwhile, actual asylum seekers - people who’ve already been through unimaginable journeys - are stuck in a weird purgatory. Housed in hotels that cost the taxpayer seven times more than regular accommodation, offered little to no support, and now effectively trapped behind a wall of eggs and fury.
Some waved from their windows. Some, apparently, blew kisses. And suddenly that became a scandal too. What were they meant to do? Hide under the bed? Pretend they’re invisible? Is that now the performance expected of people awaiting a decision on whether they can live in safety?
I don’t know what the government thinks it’s doing. On paper, they’ve got a plan: phase out asylum hotels by 2029 (which is basically code for: “Not our problem until the next election”). They’ve given the police sweeping powers to ban protesters and stalk social media. But none of that answers the question of why these flashpoints keep erupting.
And it certainly doesn’t challenge the emotional ecosystem that now underpins British politics - a sort of low-boil moral panic that never quite burns out. A nation addicted to offence, suspicion, and moral superiority, regardless of what side of the aisle you’re on.
Even the counter-protests, which I broadly support, can sometimes feel like they’re stuck in a Groundhog Day loop. We all know the drill: a far-right group calls a march, Stand Up To Racism calls a counter-march, the police form a line, the speeches are given, everyone goes home. Rinse, repeat. And somehow, nothing moves. Nothing shifts.
Because while we’re all out on the streets - or arguing in comment sections - the system keeps humming along. The Home Office misses its targets. The asylum backlog grows. Hotels get more expensive. Local councils buckle. And a handful of very loud people get to keep deciding the national mood. And the algorithms love it. Every angry click, every outraged share, every "I can't believe this" retweet feeds the machine. The platforms don't care if you're sharing something because you agree or because you're horrified - engagement is engagement, and engagement pays the bills.
This is how a handful of provocateurs with ring lights, apartments in Dubai and grievances can set the national mood. They don't need mass support - they just need people who can't look away. And once you're in that cycle, it's hard to get out. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and serves up more of it. Your timeline becomes a hall of mirrors reflecting your worst fears back at you until they feel like the only reality that exists.
Breaking free requires deliberate resistance: unfollowing accounts that make you feel worse about the world, seeking out sources that challenge rather than confirm what you already think, remembering that your phone isn't showing you Britain - it's showing you a version of Britain designed to keep you scrolling.
It boggles my mind that the most radical thing you can do in 2025 might just be turning off notifications and going for a walk.
Which brings me back to this odd re-entry I’m trying to make.
I’m back, but I’m not entirely sure what kind of country I’ve come back to. I want to believe that we’re better than this. That the Britain I know - flawed, complicated, infuriating - can still pull itself together when it matters. That people can hold genuine fears and still reject fascism. That we’re not locked into a cycle of forever-anger.
But I’m also tired. Tired of how easy it’s become to manipulate the public with fear. Tired of politicians who perform concern while leaving systems to rot. Tired of seeing the same story play out, over and over again, with a slightly different cast and a new logo on the placards.
I don’t know if this is going to be the summer they get. I desperately hope not. I hope the counter-movements grow louder. I hope the media does better. I hope people look at the mess and decide that maybe we don’t need to set the country on fire just because Facebook told us to.
But I also know that the people stoking these flames want us to feel paralysed. They want the chaos. They thrive on it. They don’t want solutions. They want suspicion. And they want it all year round.
This is the summer they want.
But it doesn’t have to be the one we give them.
And with that - brain gears only moderately de-sanded - I’m back.
And it looks like I have a lot of work to do.
My anti-Farage anti-right wing claptrap speech:
Britain is not, I repeat NOT, a ‘crime ridden hell hole’, as the Far Right would have anyone outside of the UK believe.
There is no doubt there is a ‘two tier’ Country - the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have-nots’; and those who Have Not find the UK a very different experience to the Haves. But that is not what the Far Right would have you believe. They believe the Have Nots are the ones who are causing all the problems. So the problems for the Have Nots just keep on getting worse. Access to health care on the NHS being rationed or denied; access to Social Care support; access to Education for the severely disabled; access to food for the disabled and elderly on welfare; having to choose between heating or eating in the winter, or cool air or food in the summer heat; access to adequate, well maintained mould-free or indeed any housing for the poorest and most vulnerable. Millions of disabled and carers are STILL ‘sheltering in place’ without any support in a Post-Covid world. There is no doubt that ‘going outside’ now, has become a ‘middle class luxury’ for many.
BUT even with all these privations, the UK is still NOT what the White Supremacists and Farage-led Reformers would have you believe.
The UK is OK.
Britain is not, I repeat NOT, a ‘crime ridden hell hole’.
Welcome back. Glad you had a gorgeous holiday. Thanks for your astute analysis. We need it x