<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/18/sickness-britain-novel-20-years-ago-jg-ballard>
"An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard
Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his
affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from
suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices”. How nice, he
thinks, how festive.
Soon he learns the truth.
So runs the opening not of a recent piece of journalism, but a novel by JG
Ballard,
Kingdom Come, which despite being almost 20 years old anticipates
today’s Britain with eerie precision. In the mid-2000s, Pearson reads up on his
new surroundings, only to find the same headlines that assail us in the
mid-2020s: “Every day the local newspaper reported attacks on an asylum hotel,
the torching of a Bangladeshi takeaway, injuries to a Kosovan youth thrown over
the fence into an industrial estate.”
The crusader crosses of St George, the hair clay and bloviating of
GB News
and the live-streaming, selfie-gurning, hate-spewing of Tommy Robinson – their
spirit is better captured in this last fiction by the late Ballard than in many
more recent and more breathless titles clogging up the annual best-of lists.
At the fag-end of 2025, the UK stands possibly only three-and-a-half years away
from electing rightwing extremists to power, led by a man among whose sparse
credentials for office are that he has never “directly racially abused” anyone.
To explain this, analysts and campaigners often reach for stories of Russian
money or US networks, or for analogies with German nazism. Such accounts
emphasise how unusual and exotic such movements are in Britain, how positively
foreign. The land that once boasted it couldn’t happen here can now only
splutter that at least it didn’t begin here.
This is bad history and worse politics. Analogies can never pass for analysis.
Nor does studying the rich funders of Nigel Farage or Robinson explain their
hoi polloi followers. Fittingly for a writer who titled one of his stories
Myths of the Near Future, Ballard observes the country of his time to glimpse
the society of our times."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
