York and the Fiction
York has not radicalised on its own; it has been radicalised by a press corps drip-feeding grievance into the bloodstream, laundering nationalism into common sense and calling it articulate.
York is not supposed to be political. Postcards, cobbled lanes, medieval walls, Harry Potter shops. Heritage on tap. That’s how the articles always start: fairy-tale York, suddenly a frontline in the migration wars. The shock is the story.
Then the trope: Middle England, once docile, now radicalising.
Anecdotes in place of analysis
A girl harassed near a hotel.
A woman followed home.
A child who can’t play outside.
Each anecdote is presented as truth. No police reports, no verification. Doesn’t matter. Whether isolated or not — the get-out clause that makes every claim serviceable. Journalism without evidence, only feeling.
What’s missing? Austerity. Policing cuts. Housing collapse. The reality that makes everyone feel less safe. Gone. Migrants are left carrying the blame.
That is ideology at work: effect masquerading as cause.
The York myth
First York is described as tranquil, untouched by “hard politics.” Then immigration arrives and confrontation begins.
But York has always been political. Trade unions, student occupations, anti-austerity protests. All erased. Why? Because they don’t fit the narrative.
The myth of innocence is functional. It makes confrontation look like an awakening. When the poor protested, it was pathology. When York protests, it is historical, it is destiny.
The laundering of nationalism
These are not agitators, the journalists tell us, but “young, articulate men” hanging flags. They aren’t extremists. They are authentic. Read that back slowly, young, articulate, men. Now watch that social media post from Epping.
Articulate? Is it articulate to scream “pedo” at a man who dares hold the opposite view? Is it articulate young men who circle and jeer until he has to run for the police line? The coverage dresses them up as calm, intelligent, thoughtful, as though wearing an England shirt and draping a flag grants sophistication. But there is nothing articulate in the mob’s instinct. It is menace, pure and simple. To call it articulation is to elevate intimidation into politics, to excuse the pack when it bares its teeth.
It’s a trick of tone. Something Telegraph columnists have mastered. A flag on the city walls becomes pride, not intimidation. The mother in the crowd insists she’s not racist, only exasperated. And her disavowal is printed without question.
This is how racism protects itself: not in rage, but in the weary sigh.
Equivalence as complicity
In Leeds, two groups face each other. Protesters and counter-protesters. Both want safety, we are told. Both think they defend the community.
That symmetry is fraudulent. One side wants safety through exclusion. The other through solidarity. Flattening the difference is not balance but complicity.
The press as radicaliser
The radicalisation is not of York’s middle classes. It is of Britain’s press.
Every article another rinse of the same material. Same anecdotes, same staging, same sanitising of the far right into “community pride.” Elon Musk amplifies a nationalist street movement and it’s reported like the weather.
Normalisation in slow motion. People are not radicalising spontaneously; they are being radicalised. By headlines, by features, by repetition.
Steve Bannon popped up last week to declare Britain on the brink of civil war, supposedly because of “radical Islam.” Try again. The danger comes from the far right, drip-fed daily by a radicalised press corps. The Mail, the Express, the Telegraph, GB News (scoundrels all) pump grievance into the bloodstream until it looks like inevitability. Bannon knows this, of course. His trick is to name the enemy as the other, while the real engine of radicalisation sits in the newsstands and on the TV schedules, stoking fury for clicks and circulation.
Reform’s Manufactured Martyrs
Nor is it only the press. Farage and Reform are radicalisers too. They take the raw material of grievance, polish it on TV, and send it back into the bloodstream as common sense. Witness the rehabilitation of Lucy Connolly, jailed for her online bile and now paraded as a martyr of free speech. What would once have been the margins of extremism are being folded into the centre ground, sanctified by Reform as the authentic voice of the nation. It is the same trick as the newspapers, laundering the unacceptable until it looks inevitable.
What disappears
Migrant voices. Gone.
Material context. Gone.
Council budgets gutted, services shredded, landlords profiteering. Absent.
Instead: anecdote. And more anecdote.
This isn’t journalism to explain. It is journalism to ratify the agenda.
The dialectic of grievance
Grievance is conjured, reported, amplified. Then used as proof grievance exists. A self-fulfilling cycle.
Dialectics inverted: lived insecurity caused by capital is displaced onto the migrant body. The “I’m not racist, but…” line becomes the chant of authenticity. Every week the press presents it as common sense.
There are other voices, of course. Migrants in the hotels, caricatured but never heard. Anti-racist protesters, painted as the mirror image of fascists. Communities trying to survive austerity without turning on one another.
But they don’t make it into the story. They don’t radicalise in ways that sell papers.
So the fiction holds: York, radicalised. England, radicalised. Middle England awakening.
In truth, it is the media that is radicalising the country. They are doing it one anecdote at a time.
Missing in Action
Where, in all this, is our government? Our Labour government. The party that once claimed the mantle of internationalism, anti-racism, solidarity across borders. Silent, absent, or worse — chasing the same voters with the same dog whistles. The void is not just political but moral. If the far right is being normalised, it is because Labour has left the field empty, muttering about pragmatism and flags while the country is radicalised in real time. The lasting legacy of Starmerism will not be competence or stability but capitulation — to Farage, to the scoundrels of the press, to the normalisation of far-right extremism at the heart of British politics.