Ahnaf Ibn Qais watches as hotels burn, flags rise, & people chant not against strangers alone but against their own unravelling.
Beneath the bunting lies an exhausted island, where Portsmouth, Dundee, & Epping reveal the rituals of a society that has lost faith in its rulers, its myths, & itself.
The protests won’t end, because the decay that birthed them cannot be reversed; they are the theatre of a Civilization rehearsing its own extinction.
The summer streets of Britain have become stages where the last rites of community are rehearsed in public view: hotels clad in scaffolding, bunting strung like votive charms across suburban cul-de-sacs, Union flags dragged from lofts…
& hung not in pride but in despair.
In Portsmouth, in Epping, in a dozen provincial towns long abandoned to property speculators & retail collapse, the crowd gathers each week to chant its misery into the night air.
They point at hotels, at HMOs, at rented rooms filled with men from Eritrea or Afghanistan, yet the deeper object of their fury is the unspoken knowledge that the old hearth is gone & won’t return.
What Westminster calls “asylum policy” is only the surface crust; beneath lies the magma of a people estranged from their rulers, estranged from their myths, alienated from themselves.
The flagging movement (rows of Union bunting tacked to lampposts, hand-sewn banners unfurled at protests) is less an assertion of strength than a funeral procession in miniature.
Symbols, once detached from substance, become the masks of exhaustion: the flag ceases to be the emblem of power & instead becomes the relic of what power once was.
The very act of waving it at hotels filled with foreign men is an admission that sovereignty has dissolved, that identity is now theatre.
Each placard, “Protect Our Children,” “Make Epping Safe Again,” reads less like a demand than like an epitaph carved in cardboard, announcing to the passerby not policy but mourning.
The rituals deepen as anger mixes with spectacle:
Phones are held aloft to stream confrontations into the digital void, young men test their courage against riot shields, & middle-aged mothers cry out their fear of a society that can no longer guard its daughters.
There is violence at the edges, but even the violence feels performative: eggs hurled at counter-demonstrators, teeth knocked out on police shields, chants of “Send them back” echoing as much for the cameras as for the crowd itself.
The hotels & flags aren’t ends in themselves; they are the props of a theatre in which decline is acted out every Friday evening.
Britain has entered the phase where its people, unable to halt their unravelling, choose instead to ritualize it in public, draping death in bunting & calling it resistance.
The forever protests reveal not strength but vacancy:
A government that cannot govern, a politics that can only pretend. The MPs & councillors who shuffle into interviews speak in a tired liturgy of disclaimers... acknowledging anger, condemning violence, promising reforms that never come.
One mouth utters “mass deportations,” another coos about “pastoral insecurity,” & both dissolve into the same theatre:
Slogans without substance, policies designed to appear decisive but crafted to alter nothing.
This is the essence of technopopulism, the late style of a hollow order; populist sound married to technocratic gestures, producing only the pantomime of control.
The Rwanda scheme, the ECHR revisions, the endless announcements about “detain & deport”... each is a ritual of competence, but competence no longer exists. The audience senses the trick.
They stand in the streets not because they believe Westminster will hear them, but because they know Westminster has already failed. The placards & chants are less an appeal than a verdict: the center has forfeited its authority.
What unfolds in Epping or Portsmouth isn’t governance but choreography. Police lines absorb & repel surges of rage, shields gleam in the lamplight, pepper spray hisses through the night air.
It is order staged as performance: an institution that cannot command obedience simulating strength through spectacle. Yet those who gather outside hotels or march under bunting read the simulation for what it is:
The last convulsions of a state that survives only by appearance.
Every Saturday night, Britain repeats the ritual:
Locals cry out that their daughters are unsafe, that their towns are occupied, that the hearth has been stolen. Youths in tracksuits scream of civil war into phones that stream their fury to unseen thousands.
None of this is campaigning in the old sense, for there is no longer a hearth at which petitions can be laid. The protests persist because the failure is permanent, the fracture irreparable.
The hollow state endures in its formulas, drafting policies, applauding its competence, & congratulating itself on its restraint.
Yet all the while, the crowd grows louder, convinced that the words from Westminster are only breath & ash. Britain has reached the stage where power is an echo, not a force: a government that can still gesture but cannot rule.
The protests in Portsmouth, Dundee, & Epping are only the surface ripples of a deeper fracture: Britain is moving toward insolvency, & insolvency will finish what immigration debates have merely signalled.
The gilt panic of 2022 was the rehearsal; the true crisis will come when the bond market finally breaks, when liquidity evaporates, & the state’s fiscal husk is exposed to the open air.
From that moment onward, councils won’t be saved, pensions won’t be paid, & the NHS will collapse in practice rather than in rhetoric. The veneer of governance will peel away, leaving behind only local fury & a hollowed center incapable of response.
The future isn’t simply One of rising protests but of dispersal. Millions will leave:
White pensioners liquidating homes before services vanish, South Asian shopkeepers retracing ancestral routes to Karachi or Dhaka, Afro-Caribbean families returning to Jamaica & Trinidad…
Professionals of every shade booking flights for Canada, Australia, or the Gulf.
The exits will be steady at first, then tidal. Britain will export its own in numbers unseen since the days of empire, not as settlers of colonies but as refugees of their own collapse.
& yet, even as the island empties of those with means, it won’t remain empty. The subsequent waves of arrivals won’t resemble today’s migrants... who, for all their failures, at least seek wages, shelter, & a foothold in civic life.
The post-UK will be the magnet of harder men: traffickers, warlords, smugglers, & combat veterans seeking havens in the carcass of a fallen state.
Where today’s Deliveroo riders still try to work, the inheritors will arrive as predators, carving territories from abandoned towns, turning hotels & HMOs into redoubts of clan & militia.
The asylum of the future won’t be for those who wish to integrate, but for those who thrive in fracture.
Thus, the protests already carry the scent of futility. What they fear is real, but what is coming is worse:
Not a manageable crisis of housing stock or cultural tension, but the terminal collision of bankruptcy & migration, outflow & inflow, a nation both exporting its own & importing its undoing.
The bunting & chants are therefore not demands for reform, but dirges sung ahead of exile. Britain is rehearsing its dissolution, & when the markets finally fall silent, the people will follow.
💀 🔥 The DOOM Cometh…! ⚰️ ⏳
 | A guest post by
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I’m reminded of HP Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep story, the god passes by a city and the people try to pretend everything is normal by performing strange empty emulations of their past...
This is a William Burroughs scenario in the making😱 ( the Wild Boys).