Elon Musk has designs on British politics. Musk, of Tesla, SpaceX and X fame, is promoting Ben Habib’s micro-party “Advance UK”, which recently attracted the support of Tommy Robinson.
Advance UK was established after Habib fell out with Nigel Farage and Reform UK. It was founded by Habib, Christian Russell and Richard John Shaw (who had run the short-lived Integrity Party), and Mohammad Shoaib Sohail, who appears to be a low-level social media influencer who makes little-watched satirical YouTube shorts.
Robinson has attached himself to Advance UK after a political journey that has taken him from the BNP (all but defunct), to the BFP (defunct), to UKIP (all but defunct), to For Britain (defunct), to Habib and friends. Truly, the only way is up.
Advance UK appears to largely exist on X. Its prominent members include one respected academic in Professor Norman Fenton and a lot of wannabe social media influencers like Jim Ferguson, “a relentless voice for freedom, sovereignty, and truth” who appears to spend most of his time posting suspiciously artificial posts on X in search of virality. Mr Ferguson is a big fan of gruesome AI-generated videos — some of which he bizarrely promotes as real.
Let’s be blunt: Advance UK has absolutely no chance of achieving political success. Mr Musk perhaps enjoys their AI slop, and the frantic sycophancy of their representatives, but they have minimal support and no obvious chances of attracting more.
Alas, right-leaning Americans have a delusional and unsavoury perspective on the UK. To be clear, they are absolutely correct that Britain is in trouble — poor, weak, divided and horrifically misgoverned. I have no precisely no disagreement there. But American apocalypticism and condescension is very much unwelcome.
American Conservatives are keen to tar Britons as weak and submissive. “America still has warrior culture, guns, physical specimens,” wrote Mike Cernovich this year, “British men hang your heads in shame.” Have Cernovich’s American “physical specimens” ended the flow of fentanyl into their country and put down the gang wars scarring their streets? No? Curious.
I’m not sure that Americans always remember which country they live in. They are often keen to draw attention to the very real problem of knife crime in Britain’s capital but forget that London is much safer than most big US cities. American observers, Mr Musk among them, were rightly outraged by the grooming gangs scandal in Britain — but Americans who have used it as a chance to bash Brits (ignoring the fact that it was brought to light by British whistleblowers and journalists) should recall that the US has had its own horrific problems with gang sex trafficking.
Reading American right-wingers on the state of Britain, one finds a curious desire for the thrill of violence. “Arm the British resistance,” howls Kurt Schlichter of TownHall. Britain’s peaceful hotel protests and flag-raising campaigns have been doing a lot to promote restrictionist and patriotic narratives without excusing state crackdowns. Americans with a thirst for vicarious kicks are depressingly unhelpful when it comes to improving the condition of Britain.
American horror at the state of Britain is, to some extent, a product of a romantic Anglophilia, according to which Britain is the land of Downton Abbey and afternoon tea. It is indeed a sad thing that Britain, as it actually exists, is so depressing. But when American commentators claim that Britain has “fallen”, they are being unproductive despair-mongers. Yes, Britain has a lot of problems, but so do you, and defeatism ignores the tremendous appetite for change in the country.
They should stop wallowing in declinism. It is hypocritical and counterproductive
It does not help that American Conservatives so often latch onto the wrong figureheads for British “resistance”. Tommy Robinson is widely disliked in the UK (which, whatever you might think of him, is not the case for Nigel Farage). He has a long record of political failure. He often submerges himself in avoidable controversies by promoting false claims. To see him as a leader in waiting for discontented Britons is titanically delusional.
All this is a terrible shame. I’m not saying that Americans are wrong to be interested in Britain. I’m not saying that Americans are wrong to be depressed about the state of Britain. Elon Musk may do a lot of good if he funds legal cases against officials who ignored and enabled grooming gangs. But they should stop wallowing in declinism. It is hypocritical and counterproductive.
