Breakthrough of the year: The Peripheralocracy
Let’s hear it for The Peripherals.
Has our Red/Blue political system ever looked weaker or more irrelevant? A rhetorical question, you understand, with the obvious response being an emphatic ‘No.’
Still, as Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai famously responded when Henry Kissinger asked what he thought about the French Revolution, perhaps it’s too early to tell?
Yet blip or paradigm shift, it’s abundantly clear that all the energy in British politics has drained to the periphery over the past year. A combination of the campaigning brio and easy platitudes of Nigel Farage on the right and Zack Polanski on the left.
Managerial, Red/Blue centrist dad political doesn’t have much appeal when nothing works and everyone’s poor and cheesed off. This was vividly brought home in a YouGov poll the other day looking at where the various parties started 2025 in terms of their polling and where they finished up.
