From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum receive Ed West, author of Wrong Side of History, long-suffering conservative and the man who very nearly called his son Athelstan. Ed holds that England is probably the only real country and that British values are totally fake, and he is untroubled by this, being a great believer in fake villages. His Britain is a Harry Potter theme park, in a good way: the country the rest of the world already wants to visit, and the one its cultural elites are embarrassed by.
But Hogwarts only works with a hard edge. Without money and safety it is merely twee, a nation laughing at its decline over a cup of tea while people inject heroin outside the Home Office. Disneyland, Ed points out, doesn’t have this much crime. Real decadence, in his telling, is not sex parties but a loss of will, a country that can only love itself ironically. The cure is twenty per cent more Singapore, driverless camper vans and robot servants, which leaves only the matter of what anyone will do for meaning once Britain has become lovely again. Politics can’t answer that, he concedes, and he fears the Zoomers will have answers of their own.
The episode explores:
Why Britain should become a Harry Potter theme park, in a good way
What separates a Harry Potter Britain from mere twee
Why England might be the only real country, and whether anyone should tell Bulgaria
Battle Abbey, where only traitors and weirdos choose to be Normans
Why the cult of 1945 does more damage than the cult of Arthur
The crime thread, suspended sentences and the case for incapacitation
Twenty per cent more Singapore, and what it does for you to leave your laptop in a café
Decadence as a loss of will, and the trouble with the 2012 Olympics ceremony
The future as a hierarchy of impulse control
France as Britain’s natural ally, largely because Ed wants a house in the Dordogne
Tom’s minimal phone, which looks as though it was drawn by a child
Why Ed chickened out of calling his son Athelstan, and the first pro-Anglo-Saxon DEI initiative
With thanks to Paritosh Purohit for research contribution.
