5 years on from the devastating 'dirty bomb' new forces are filling England's political void, as Ian Laherne discovers for Temptation magazine 

The low ceilings and dark surroundings of the King's Arms, in the nondescript town of Wattleton, evoke a byegone age, and CAMRA, the influential real-ale society, started one of its first branches here. There is little to give away its status as a hangout for Wattleton's growing anarchist movement.

Here I meet Mark Jeffreys, an activist in the Destroy Power Collective who works part-time in a local bike shop. Over a cheap pint of Fosters he tells me of his desire to see an end to capitalism. He is full of praise for the protest movement in Greece which toppled the government at the beginning of the year and has abolished money, established a glorified barter system, and destroyed the state.

'We could do that here,' he says in thick Estuary English. 'If it could happen there, could happen anywhere.'

He tells me how he has been encouraging his fellow Wattleton residents not to vote. 'Most of them weren't going anyway, so I didn't need to,' he says. 'Honestly, it's harder and harder to find people who vote around here. My mum does, but she's proper Old Labour through and through, she's an exception.'

We are joined by a woman with long dark hair and hooped earrings called Kara and a cheerful Irish blonde called Sinead. Both have a story to tell.  

'A mate of mine was attacked by BPF,' Sinead says, referring to the extreme-right British Patriotic Front, the other main beneficiary in Britain's turmoil after the anarchists. 'They terrify me. It's one of the reasons I am moving back to Ireland.'

'All I can say is the BPF don't offer any kind of solution,' Mark says. 'We don't need money, we don't need the state. We don't need them. They're not an alternative, just the shock troops of capital.' A recent BPF protest against illegal immigration ended in a riot and the deaths of two anarchist protesters.

*

'All we want is law and order,' Charlotte Gould, the deputy head of Britain's newest political party, says in a clear crisp voice as I meet with her in the British Patriotic Front's modern, air conditioned Wattleton campaign office. She is dressed immaculately in designer clothes from the hottest stores in the London market.

Above her head is a plasma screen displaying a series of BPF publicity videos on repeat. 'Send them all back!' one advertisement says. 

The BPF know how to push the right buttons. Five years ago this town, already hit by Covid and economic recession, was attacked using a so-called 'dirty bomb'; a makeshift nuclear weapon. ISIS claimed responsibility for the blast. The attack devastated the lives of many of the town's inhabitants, with many still suffering the effects of radiation sickness. 

'I hope you are not going to print lies about us.'

'What sort of lies might I print?' I ask.

'That we want to destabilize the country.'

She looks coldly at me.

'The other obvious charge, of course, is that we're right-wing extremists. We're not. We care about vulnerable British people who have been made to suffer by the globalist elite."

Her gaze is steely and penetrating. This is the first interview anyone from the US media has conducted with a senior member of the BPF hierarchy, and I feel intimidated and disconcerted by her presence.

What of the murders committed by individuals linked with the BPF? The attacks on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people? She brushes them aside. They have nothing to do with party policy; they are simply the work of disturbed individuals, failed by a system racist against the indigenous, white people of Britain.

Anna Renfrew, a confident young woman with dyed red hair and striking blue eyes, studying English at nearby Paxfield University, proceeds to tell me about what she feels are the reasons for the nation's downfall. She tells me how the party's leader, Duncan Stone, has provided her and countless fellow BPF members and supporters with a reason to hope again in 'Britain's destiny'. 

As we talk I learn her parents used to be in the Socialist Party, whose forerunners Militant used to run Liverpool Council briefly in the 1980s.

'The problem with the SP and with my parents is that they just live in a world where everything would be perfect if the rich gave all their money away. They don't understand not everyone is equal and some races are more disposed to greed and criminality.' She seems to enjoy my discomfort as we sip lattes together in Wattleton's dilapidated mall, the Primrose Centre. 

'We should never have let Scotland become an independent country,' Anna says. 'Look at Britain today. We were once a proud nation but we've been humiliated and betrayed, and that betrayal is unforgivable."

'Who is responsible?' I ask.

'Jews,' she says immediately.

AN: I've made a few changes to this prologue compared to how it was in 2014 but will probably go on to change a bit more as I'm still not entirely happy with it. I'll be editing and reuploading this sporadically over the next year I'd have thought.