A new European alliance is being born in front of our eyes. At first with trepidation. Now, increasingly, with conviction. It's happening so quickly you can barely hear the petty squeaks of protest.

Keir Starmer and Germany chancellor Friedrich Merz signed off on a 'friendship treaty' yesterday. It includes a mutual defence pledge under which each nation will come to the other's aid in the event of a threat and co-development on long-range missiles. It comes a week after Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron agreed to coordinate nuclear policy - an epoch defining event in French security terms. The two nations agree that there "is no extreme threat to Europe that would not prompt a response by both nations".

The retreat of the US from the world stage amid the war in Ukraine is having a powerfully beneficial effect. It is soldering together Europe's largest and most powerful countries. Over and above the post-Brexit trading arrangements, a new de-facto European alliance is forming.

And then, of course, with dreary predictability, comes the counter-attack. Farage. Tice. Badenoch. Little angry rattling guns of vacuity and paranoia. Tiny micro-soldiers, fighting their microscopic war. Discarded plastic army toys on the floor of a doctor's waiting room.

"This is an outrageous and deliberate snub," Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform, said, after Macron decided, perfectly reasonably, not to meet them. Tice looks like a Gillette advert gone horribly wrong, a toiletries promotion beamed in from a future nuclear dystopia, with a sense of lingering moral decay lurking beneath the folds of his skin. "Reform is polling higher than all of the other parties and by denying Nigel a meeting with Macron, the establishment is shutting its eyes to the lights of the Reform train that is coming." Note the way he speaks. Nearly every quote Tice gives now insists on the inevitability of Reform's victory. This sense of destiny is key to his approach

"Britain should have cancelled Macron’s state visit," Tice's girlfriend Isabel Oakeshott wrote in the Telegraph. She is a walking haircut with some garden-variety prejudices attached, vacillating between London and Dubai. "We've stuffed his mouth with gold, he's royally screwed us on small boats – the French president wasn't worthy of the King's red carpet."

You see similar sort of commentary over the broader post-Brexit reset. Reform leader Nigel Farage, a man whose mere image carries with it an unmistakable whiff of old ashtrays and halitosis, said it was "the end of the fishing industry". He told the Telegraph that the prime minister "underestimates how strong Brexit feeling still is in the Red Wall… something he will come to regret" and finished: "A Reform government would undo all of this with legislation."

He was incensed that Macron was able to give a speech to both Houses of parliament, but his hero Donald Trump was excluded, by virtue of a carefully-timetabled visit over recess. "This just tells you what this government's real priorities are," Farage said. "It's European Union above everything else, including America - who of course are not only our most important ally, but without whom we are defenceless."

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch - the ghost of a political career still searching for purpose in the material world - also vowed to reverse the deal if she wins the next election. She branded the post-Brexit talks a "surrender summit". Priti Patel said it "betrayed Brexit and Britain and the 17 million people who voted to take back control".

They are so used to having the public behind them, or imagining that they do, that they can barely speak without making reference to them. But the reality is somewhat different. This week the British Foreign Policy Group published its annual survey on foreign policy views in Britain, a crucial document of its type for understanding public opinion on this subject. It found a nation whose whole sense of its place in the world is changing.

Trump has shaken Brits' belief in America to its core. Fifty-three per cent of people think his actions are having a negative effect on the UK economy. British trust in the US has fallen from 53% to 38% over the course of the last year. The proportion of Brits who believe America is the UK's closest ally has fallen by 23 percentage points.

Instead, we are turning towards the EU. The proportion who consider it our closest ally has soared by 17% in the same time period. It is now nipping at America's heels, with 29% to the US' 31%. Fifty-nine per cent of people now believe that the UK's relationship with the EU is more important than its relationship with the US.

This is not a glitch. It is not an exception to the rule. In many crucial areas of policy, we find the same story: a populist right which insists it speaks for the people and then a set of findings which reveals a yawning chasm between their position and public opinion.

This is their Achilles' heel. When you get into the details of their proposition, people don't actually want what they have to sell.

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This week, Tice went to war against climate change. Until now, the growing Conservative opposition to net zero had been framed mostly in pragmatic language. It was utter horseshit, of course - the mewling yelp of a wounded animal complaining about the intervention of the vet - but there was a careful attempt to conceal the ideology behind ostensibly practical concerns. Badenoch, for instance, broke the cross-party consensus by saying that "net zero by 2050 is impossible", but insisted that she did not "say that with pleasure or because I have some ideological desire to dismantle it".

No such apologism from Tice. Instead, he engaged in a spot of blackmail, with a letter to energy companies which lacked any sense of grace and replaced it with unearned electoral entitlement. "I am writing to put you and your investors on formal notice," he started, with all the charm of a gangster in Depression-era America. "The renewables agenda no longer enjoys cross-party support. Put simply: There is no public mandate for the real world consequences of this agenda."

The planned effect of this letter is not about policy in some imaginary future Reform government. It is to sabotage climate change policy today. Clean energy projects like wind farms are funded by auctions with a guaranteed price for energy in the future. This is what allows companies to invest because it gives them confidence of a return in a new and unpredictable market.

By insisting that he will destroy the system, Tice is attempting to remove that sense of stability and predictability. It is an attempt to destroy the function of the system today, not in five or ten years. To make this claim, he relies on the classic populist narrative: The populists are coming. They are inevitable. They have the people behind them. "Reform UK is now leading in the national opinion polls, and a future government led by Nigel Farage is now more likely than not," he said. "Let me be clear: if you enter bids in AR7, you do so at your own risk."

Tice is actively trying to destroy British Net Zero efforts. He is working to undermine a massive jobs project, with offshore wind alone currently employing 40,000 people and 95,000 expected by the end of the decade, predominantly in Scotland, the east of England, and Yorkshire and the Humber. He is doing this on the basis of no mandate whatsoever.

Reform won 14.3% of the vote in the 2024 general election. Labour, which gave climate change action a prominent role in its pre-election agenda, won 33.7%. All other parties, including the Conservatives and Lib Dems, supported action on Net Zero. And yet Tice thinks he gets to destroy climate change policy because he is currently polling around the level of Starmer's 2024 vote share. It's a democratic affront.

The reality of public opinion on climate change can be seen in the DESNZ Public Attitudes Tracker. Needless to say, it doesn't have the slightest connection to Tice's hysterical warnings. The level of concern about climate change stands at 77%. Eighty per cent of people support the use of renewable energy like wind, solar, and biomass. Opposition to renewable energy stands at just ten per cent. Sixty-nine per cent of people expect renewable energy industries to provide economic benefits to the UK. But let's hear again about how there's "no public mandate"...

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This same distinction between public opinion and populist-right opinion is also present in discussions around multiculturalism and particularly race. In recent months, prominent mainstream right-wingers have adopted an explicit form of racism which would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

The spectacle of it is astonishing. Douglas Carswell, the gurning spam-brained chump who once joined Ukip to oppose nativism, now writes: "Mass deportation of Pakistanis from Britain. I don’t care how long you’ve lived here. Out." Matthew Goodwin, a walking parable about the dangers of life without introspection, now sits with Michael Gove and ponders whether Rishi Sunak is truly English because he isn't white. Suella Braverman, a psychological breakdown wrapped in a bundle of human skin, now writes articles claiming she is not English because she has the wrong ethnicity.

As Sam Freedman correctly observed, the last time we saw this level of racism on the British right was during Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech. The comparison is very telling. At the time, Edward Heath sacked Powell. Those in a leadership position on the right held the line against racism. But in the country the mood was different. There was immense public support for Powell. In a recent Origin Story episode, I documented how large parts of the trade union left came out to support him and attacked students protesting against him. A Gallup poll after the speech suggested 74% of the population supported him.

Now the situation is completely reversed. Right-wing leaders show none of the conviction or moral commitment of Heath. Heath himself is a dirty word on the right now, a symbol of flaccid Europeanism. In fact, he is ten times the man of any one of them, a reminder of an age when the right had standards and a basic sense of societal responsibility.

And yet, crucially, the public is more anti-racist than it has ever been. A survey by British Future and the Centre for English Identity and Politics in 2019 found just ten per cent of people thought ethnicity was an important determining factor in being English, down from 20% in 2012. The biggest change was in the views of the over-65s, where the importance of whiteness dropped from 35% to 16%.

Recent research by More in Common found 74% of English people believe you can be English regardless of your skin colour or ethnic background, with just 17% believing these are important factors. This belief straddles the usual cultural and demographic divides - across age groups, education levels and party support. It has a clear majority among Conservative and Reform voters.

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I'm not trying to suggest that British public opinion is uncomplicatedly liberal. Ask the public whether they want to ban something and they'll answer yes then inquire as to what it is. Opinion polls and focus groups on issues like immigration show a public view that is well to the right of where most progressives are, albeit more complicated and nuanced than populists suggest. Public opinion is reliably and depressingly ill-informed on all sorts of issues, from tax to international development. Liberals do not encapsulate the will of the people any more than populists do. I'm also not complacent about how robust progressive opinion is. We cannot rely on it or assume it will stay this way. We must fight for it.

But that's not the point. The point is that right-wing populists have succeeded in portraying themselves as the Hermes of national sentiment. They are the messenger, carrying these tablets of inner truth to the media elite. They are the ones who reflect the views of 'ordinary people' - the imaginary homogenised masses who politicians vaguely imagine sitting blinking in front of the TV with a can of Stella complaining about the neighbours. They translate the authentic true self of the country to everyone else. And they invariably do so in their own image: entitled, thin-skinned, paranoid, zealous, prejudiced and ignorant.

The press and the broadcasters regularly criticise Conservative and Reform politicians. But since 2016, they have accepted the basic outline of this narrative. The populists understand the thoughts of ordinary people in a way no-one else does. Their ultimate victory is therefore inevitable. This is what encourages the vast coverage Reform gets, which then allows them to reach a wider audience and secure strong polling. That then lets Tice portray their victory as a matter of time, which then grants him the ability to write bullying letters to energy companies trying to sabotage Net Zero.

But this phenomenon also operates in less obvious ways. Whenever a centrist or left-wing party is on the wrong side of public opinion, you damn well know about it. Journalists delight in highlighting the gap. We are all aware, for instance, that the instincts of Labour MPs are way to the left of the public on immigration. We all know that their views on the two-child benefit cap are miles away from what we see when we conduct polling.

So where is the associated coverage of how far away from the public Tice is on climate change? Or Goodwin on race? Or Farage on Europe? Where is the insatiable journalistic desire to highlight the most problematic aspects of a party's propositions, the gaps between their instinct and that of the country? It is nowhere to be fucking seen.

This is partly to do with X.com. Elon Musk really did succeed in fundamentally dragging the public conversation to the far-right, as if we dug up the town square and then had it repositioned in Hades. Now we find the majority of mainstream journalists on there, using it for information, seemingly without any concern at the fact it has become totally unhinged.

But the problem is deeper than that. It is to do with a set of assumptions about a magical right-wing connection with the nation's heart which bears no resemblance to the evidence of public opinion.

We live in a very strange era, with a centre-left party in power and the populist right utterly in charge of the conversation. It feels as if the barbarian is at the gate, ready to knock it down. If either Reform or the existing form of the Conservative party secure power, we are in serious trouble. The policies they are advocating - on Europe, climate change and particularly race - are so extreme that we would be living under a de-facto far-right government.

But instead of anxiety, there should be far more confidence than there currently is. Progressives simply could not have a more advantageous starting position. On these key issues, their instincts are fully in line with the public. Their opinions and their demands fit neatly into existing national sentiment. If you can't win a political battle with that starting advantage then what are you even doing in this game in the first place?

We can see the populist weakness very clearly indeed. It is the worst possible weakness you can have: a yawning chasm between your policy and the wishes of the voters. Now we need to take that weakness and damage them with it, in ways that can never be put right again.

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Odds and sods

This week's newsletter is also available as a podcast which you can listen to here. If you're using a podcast player, like Spotify, do like and subscribe and all that jazz.

My i paper column this week was on the Afghanistan leak, in which we demonstrated once and for all just how little we give a damn about Afghan lives.

This week I watched Superman - obviously, I mean come on - and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me in a darkened room. Now I'm going to go watch it again, this afternoon. It won't be the last time.

Have a lovely weekend you lot, see you next week.

Smoking kills. A few people had suspected as much before the second world war, but it was not until 1950 that the scientific evidence began to accumulate that smokers were at dramatically higher risk of lung cancer than non-smokers. Other health risks of smoking would be identified over the years that followed.

Pity the poor smoker. Addicted to a popular product that had seemed harmless, he was now being told that his habit was killing him. (It often was a he, although cigarette companies had also marketed cigarettes to women with the feminist slogan, “torches of freedom”.)

What to do? An editorial in the British Medical Journal captured one solution. “It is said that the reader of an American magazine was so disturbed by an article on the subject of smoking and cancer that he decided to give up reading.”

It’s hard to think of a pithier example of what psychologists call the biased assimilation of information. Biased assimilation refers to the various ways in which we avoid unwelcome facts and seek out information that bolsters our own views. The most obvious example — obvious because it is a fairly novel development and because the mechanics of selecting information are so transparent — is the way we follow like-minded people on social media. But people have long sought out news sources that bolster their particular views of the world, as anyone who has ever had a newspaper round and surveyed the contrasting front pages can attest.

There are plenty of more insidious ways in which we absorb some information sources and miss others. Some of them are hidden and algorithmic. Even if you take care to follow commentators or news sources across the political spectrum, social media companies will show you more of what seems to hold your attention. If you are on the centre-right and share a lot of centre-right articles with your friends, soon enough you will stop seeing much stuff from leftwing columnists, no matter how many of them you think you are following.

Less obvious still are our own mental algorithms, which have been subtly skewing our view of the world for far longer than the internet has existed. Two people with contrasting preconceptions about the world can look at the same information but perceive it very differently. Imagine that you happen to encounter a newspaper article discussing what we know about the effects of the death penalty, including a study by researchers Palmer and Crandall. You are told that these scholars found pairs of neighbouring states with different capital punishment laws, and compared the murder rates in each pair. In eight of the 10 pairs, murder rates were higher in the state with capital punishment. This research suggests that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent.

What to think of Palmer and Crandall’s research? Does it seem plausible? If you’re opposed to the death penalty, then it probably does. But if you’re in favour of capital punishment, then you might quickly notice the potential for sloppy errors. Was this research peer reviewed and professionally conducted? Did Palmer and Crandall consider alternative explanations for the pattern they spotted? Should we really buy the idea of paired comparisons between adjacent states? In short, do Palmer and Crandall really know what they’re doing, or are they hacks?

Do not fear that you might offend Palmer and Crandall. They are fictional. They were dreamt up in the late 1970s by three psychologists, Charles Lord, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper. Lord and his colleagues recruited experimental subjects with strong views about the death penalty and showed them summaries of two imaginary studies.

One of these made-up studies demonstrated that the death penalty deterred serious crime. The other, by the fictitious researchers Palmer and Crandall, showed the opposite. As one might expect, the experimental subjects were inclined to dismiss studies that contradicted their firmly held beliefs. This is biased assimilation in action, not at the level of picking which researcher to follow or which newspaper to read, but at the level of picking which information to accept or to reject.

Lord and his collaborators also discovered something more surprising. In some cases, their opinionated experimental participants were shown brief research summaries. In other cases, they were given more detail about research methods, supplemented with graphs and commentary by other fictional academics. The more detail people saw, the easier they found it to reject the unwelcome evidence. Each new detail was an opportunity to dismiss the whole thing.

We are well used to worrying about people consuming a skewed information diet, shorn of context, detail and balance. We imagine that a balanced, detailed news diet would be better. The study by Lord and his colleagues suggests it would not be as helpful as we might hope — not in the face of a committed believer.

That believer is likely to systematically reject contradictory evidence, meaning that as the balanced evidence pours in, the evidence they actually read, accept and remember piles up only on one side. Loading up both sides of the cognitive weighing scale with equal weights is not going to produce balance if the weights keep accumulating on one side and bouncing out of the other.

We shouldn’t overgeneralise from one study, particularly as Lord, Ross and Lepper deliberately recruited experimental participants who were passionately committed to a point of view. For most people, on most issues, a balanced diet of information is likely to be a healthy one.

Yet that underscores the original point: what we believe about the world depends on which ideas we are open-minded enough to entertain. Providing all the detail and balance in the world is useless when you are faced with a reader or viewer who greets all of it with a selective memory and a lopsided scepticism. A curious and open-minded media ecosystem is undoubtedly important, but so too are curious and open-minded citizens.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 20 June 2025.

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