14. Thanks for reading to the end. Here's the thread on one page: skywriter.blue/pages/did:pl...

13. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
But also, long live Sodom and Gomarrah.

12. I write this as someone brought up in and currently living in the countryside. There is much that I love about it, but also much I admire about cities. I don’t believe we need to set one against the other. But urban-rural conflict is one aspect of the constant effort to polarise and divide.

11. Importantly, the city is and has always been a much less controllable space for the far right than the countryside. It is less in thrall to traditional hierarchies and better able to mobilise: the sheer number of people provides a counterweight to oligarchic power.

10. They circulate myths about “no-go zones” and subways in which you’re more likely to get your throat cut than arrive at your destination. They evince what might or might not be genuine terror at seeing black and brown faces.

9. Now this idea is being resuscitated once again. The city is cast by the new wave of fascists as a degenerate, crime-ridden arena, dominated by Muslims, immigrants and “alien” ideas such as feminism, antifa, anti-racism, trans rights, asylum, public transport and intellectualism.

8. Evil city / pure countryside is an example of what Jeremy Lent calls a “root metaphor”: an idea so deeply implanted in our minds that we don’t even recognise it as an idea.

7. It should be noted that not all rural revivalists were on the far right. Lord of the Rings is a rural revivalist fantasy. A society of small farmers overthrows urban industrialism and restores a feudal aristocracy. The Shire is Wallop’s ideal society as much as Tolkein’s.

6. They sought to trigger a mass return of people to the countryside, depopulating the cities. I'm not sure they really thought that through: the result would have been generalised urbanisation. Though, given that some of them (esp Anthony Ludovici) wanted to exterminate so many people, maybe not.

5. They saw the countryside as the “true” heart of the nation, which upheld clean and decent traditions, and sustained old ideas about how society should be run. Crucially, they believed, it was not “polluted” by “miscegenation” and the “dilution” of “racial characteristics”.

4. The city, for them, was a seething mass of “aliens” and “cosmopolitans” (ie Jews). It teemed with “foreign” and “degenerate” ideas and practices. Some of them, particularly Gerald Wallop (Lord Lymington), railed against its democratic impulses: he wanted a revival of aristocratic rule.

3. It was rescuscitated in the 1920s and 1930s by fascist movements. “Rural revivalism” was a major force in the emergence of fascism in Germany, Italy, France, the UK and elsewhere. In the UK it was fomented by the likes of Gerald Wallop, Jorian Jenks, Rolf Gardiner and Henry Williamson.

2. As the prophet Nahum put it, “Woe to the bloody city! it is all full of lies and robbery; the prey departeth not ... the well-favoured harlot, the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts.” Lovely guy, I’m sure.

Similar finding in our analysis of the geography of the Reform vote below. Although the Reform vote was almost flat across rural/urban categories, Reform won a higher % of seats in urban wards, likely due to more parties contesting wards.
ruralspatialjustice.substack.com/p/where-is-r...

Ditto @electionmaps.uk 's crowd-sourced results spreadsheet, which also provided data used in this analysis. ruralspatialjustice.substack.com/p/where-is-r...

Protests kept apart - anti-fascist protest in foreground, far right in background.

Counter-protest was slightly smaller but noisier.

The speech I heard mainly attacked government on economy, plight of small businesses & farmers, but dived into conspiracy theory: govt wants to empty countryside of farmers to make way for immigrants.