The Legacy Parties Are Wishful Thinking: 2025 isn't a blip. It's an inflection point

We are already in a once in a century revolution.

Every now and then (and I would say roughly every century or so) cultures tend to go through an absolute transition.

Usually driven by technological developments, societal upheaval drives significant cultural revolution. As a result, we look back in hindsight at past eras as having a particular character. The Elizabethans were like that. The Edwardians like this. The Victorians like this and the Fin De Siecle ushered in such and such revolutionary change.

It's palpable that today, we are living in another huge epochal evolution.

As most great change socially is inseparable from great change materially, the primary driving factor is indubitably the second industrial revolution in digital form. Two things have happened. Humans have become so comfortable that they have naturally become more selfish. Without the need to strive together as one to combat hardship, we have in The West observed the rapid race towards hyperindividuality. So much so that birth rates have plummeted. Unlike other creatures that procreate more, the more resources are available, humans seem to do so less. A tribesmen in Africa may sire a village of offspring where as a middle class Englishman considers becoming a father rather like losing limbs - a loss of agency and freedom, a downgrading of lifestyle and a sacrifice rather than an indicator of success.

We have also seen the development of technology reduce team activities. One man operating a computer has replaced entire production lines. Add to that an increasingly online world where interactions happen through the lens of avatars and idealism, not real life face to face relationships, and hyper individualism and identity politics is stretching the very fabric of society and precipitating mental health crises.

At the same time, interconnectivity driven by air travel, internet and developing world industrialisation, has fuelled globalism, which in turn has boosted mass immigration from poor countries with high birthrates, to rich countries with a declining work force. The way the world has been for around two millennia is in a process of top to bottom reconstruction.

And people can sense it.

As society irrevocably changes, so does politics. And in the UK it's been one hundred years since a change to the old guard. Political outfits that made sense in the previous era - let’s call it the second Elizabethan Era, feel woefully divorced from the realities of life under Charles.

Perhaps the first sign in the West that a revolution had begun was Brexit. Britain has oftentimes been the vanguard for revolution, whether setting precedents for colonialisation and then decolonialisation, driving the industrial revolution and even creating the world’s first modern parliament. So it is fitting rather than look to America to see who lit the blue touch paper, casting one's gaze closer to home in the form of Brexit, arguably the first domino to fall.

And who is the Cromwellian figure at the helm of the metamorphosis? Nigel Farage. Who now happens to be leading the entryist political outfit that has all the other parties on the run.

So is it really a protest vote? Well it's a protest that has been building over the course of two decades and may soon find concretizarion at the next general election.

One day, historians will look back at the wider epoch within which we currently live and observe remarkable things. Might we be at the tail end of white Western dominance? Is humanity itself circling the plughole with the development of AI?

One thing is for certain. We are a long way away from business as usual. Which usually means one thing, a changing of the guard.

It's hard to predict what will happen next, but one thing is clear. Tomorrow is going to look nothing like today.