I was sliding across the floor of Waterloo Station when I saw him: the most fucked man I have ever seen. It was a Saturday lunchtime in early September, the rain was whipping through the grand Victorian entrances, and we collided on the concourse.
He was young, badly shaven and completely off his gourd. To my mind, he looked a little like Ed Matthews with a traumatic brain injury. I backed off, but he just stayed where he was, feet planted to the ground, his body lurching at a 30-degree angle, as if he were leaning over some invisible ledge or calling a worm a cunt.
His pupils were stretching towards his forehead, while one corner of his mouth was trying to touch his shoulder. His tongue was sticking out like a dying dog’s, his jeans were falling down, and people were making unnatural movements to avoid him.
It was a look I’ve seen before: in the taxi ranks of super clubs, in the toilets of squat parties and at the weird end of Glastonbury. It’s a state you can only really achieve on heavy psychedelic drugs or at that tipping point where ketamine and alcohol become psychedelic. But this man was not on his way to lie in a field and stare at the clouds. He was on his way to save his country.
It was the day of the Unite the Kingdom march, and our man had either turned up late because he was talking to God or had already been sent home by his more sober compatriots. As if the scene wasn’t uncanny enough, Waterloo was festooned with flags and Championship football shirts and placards scrawled with imported American psychobabble. A young content creator had dressed up in some kind of whiteface morph suit and was mugging off the protestors openly, Borat style.
All the while, a games company had insisted that their activation for Borderlands 4 would go ahead no matter what, so there were out-of-work actors parading around in leather harnesses and carrying huge plastic axes. None of which I can imagine helped our friend’s state of mind.
Rabble-rouser-in-chief Tommy Robinson had already made a plea for attendees not to booze their way through it, in an attempt to curb the long-held accusations that his events are just a massive piss-up and to put an end to all the ‘English Drunkards League’ allegations. But half the crowd I saw already seemed shitfaced, geared up to their eyeballs and raring to get in the boozers. It brought back memories of being stuck with a crew of first-gen EDL guys on a Northern Line carriage over a decade ago. I’ll never forget how the carriage reeked of ammonia while some of them nonchalantly pissed down their jeans while the police escort held the doors back.
Perhaps the man I encountered that afternoon had actually avoided alcohol but had gone for some ‘Cali sober’ approach, deciding that the biggest nationalist march the country had ever seen was a perfectly acceptable time to drop a few tabs and let the vibrations take him over. Or maybe he was gearing himself up for trouble, like the child soldiers who chow down on bootleg amphetamines before committing atrocities. But more likely, this was just what he did most weekends and was unwilling to let Robinson’s pleas for temperance get in the way of his regular catharsis.
Some days later, I was sent a video from a colleague who is part of an England away supporters ticket group. It shows a group of young men (and one very old man), gathered outside a community centre in Portsmouth, all decked out in body warmers, caps and calf tats, with Union Jacks and St George’s flags draped over their shoulders like Crusaders’ tabards.
From a PA system pumps the immortal meme-trance anthem ‘Sandstorm’ by Darude, while red, white and blue flares burst into the drizzly sky. As the track builds to a crescendo, a man with a microphone starts ranting about a “show of dominance against Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana.” He seems angry but ecstatic, wired for havoc. The overall effect falls somewhere between an Identitarian flash protest and a Gatecrasher party from 1997. “We need to take it to the politicians, local and national,” read the message underneath.
Although they were slightly more ‘with it’ than the man at Waterloo, he and they were clearly getting stuck into the same Kool-Aid, a new version of that age-old union of euphoria and rage, the missing link between mobile disco and the kettling pen – a rave culture-infused take on right-wing bile. Acid Patriotism, if you will.
The coinage ‘Acid Patriotism’ comes from a short-lived concept that was all the rage a few years back: ‘Acid Corbynism’, a Fisher-inspired half-thing which posited a theory that Labour Party events circa 2015 were recreating rave culture in a new, altruistic manner, and that supporters were using them for sex and catharsis as well as solidarity.
But while Acid Corbynism lived and died in a few Tinder bios and Repeater-adjacent panel discussions, Acid Patriotism feels much more real, a phenomenon that seems to be becoming par for the course in Chaos Britain.
Much of this movement manifests on Reels and TikToks. In this new postmodern digital reality, Turning Point UK videos are often cut to ice rink bangers like ‘Mr Vain’ by Culture Beat and Utah Saints’ ‘Something Good’. On the bewildering ‘Brexit Brian’ account, a reel of “South Coast patriots in action” has Stone Roses’ end-of-the-night classic ‘This is The One’ clanging beneath it. Nick Tenconi, reanimator of the UKIP corpse, is currently in trouble for doing Nazi salutes to the sound of right-reappropriated Italo stormer ‘L’Amour Toujours’ – something you can very much imagine him doing at a Year 9 disco.
But it also happens physically, in the moment. In a video of an Epping hotel protest from just a few days back, a light-up karaoke machine plays The Farm’s ‘All Together Now’, while flags billow in the night sky and a woman screeches, “Hang the mayor.” The fact that many of these events seem to take place semi-spontaneously, on green-belt land, in all weathers, only adds to the spirit of ‘89 that pervades such events.
Acid patriotism has been bubbling away for some time now. The catch-all “disobedient” movement that encompasses everything from lockdown measures to ULEZ to fifteen-minute cities to digital ID and currency is loaded with old ravers and smiley-face iconography, with the likes of Danny Rampling, Norris ‘Da Boss’ Windross and former Shoreditch nightlife impresario Alan Miller being prominent figures in the hierarchy. These are the people whose wide-eyed green room theories have started to manifest on a national level.
Britain has always had a fascinating relationship between hatred and hedonism, one that goes right back to the skinhead knees-ups and whatever the Blackshirts got up to after their work was done. But whereas once these were postscripts to activism, right-wing events have become as much a party as a protest, and bags of cans and PA systems are commonplace at hotel protests – despite small inter-beefs about “bringing the tone down”.
Look at the footage of hotel picket lines and roundabout flag raisings, and you’ll see groups of men in shorts having the time of their lives and women in night-out leggings drinking and screaming into the night sky while indulging in something they perceive as thrilling, transgressive and semi-legal. With all the organic organising and fly-postering, it’s really not too far away from a Nicky Blackmarket M25 party. Something for old ravers to do with their nights off.
There is something carnivalesque in how these gatherings flit between singing and dancing and sudden police baton charges. With all the bizarre jingoistic costumes, cheap pyrotechnics, guest speakers, novelty sunglasses, giddy, nonsensical conversations and a drug-native crowd (there have been several Class A and B charges amongst the rioter roundups), it can feel a lot like a barbecue where somebody has slipped something in the punch.
It’s hard not to see the magnetic pull of such happenings and why so many people’s legal defence is that they simply “got swept up in the moment.” Through design or accident, nationalist happenings and protests in the UK have become places where almost anything could happen: huge, thronging events that sit on the edge of adrenaline and disaster. And what could be more ravey than that?
How many people at these gatherings are doing MDMA, LSD or psilocybin, or listening to Sasha & Digweed sets is something we’ll never really be able to reliably datafy. It’s also hard to say how much of it stems from meme culture (like the Gigi D’Agostino craze does) and how much of it comes from rave culture.
But it almost doesn’t matter, because, first of all, the attendees drink and snort so much that they’re immersed in ‘the weird zone’ anyway. And secondly because these events are semi-accidentally loaded with trippy imagery: the ABBA Voyage goes Knights Templar outfits, the manic scrawlings on the placards, a crew of Mauris doing the Hakka for Charlie Kirk, crews of middle aged in cowboy hats and a man in a Union Jack leather racing jacket leading a gospel version of Jerusalem to wide-eyed pensioners. Not only do they seem like acid journeys in and of themselves, but they also call to mind the weirdest end of MAGA, of what Don DeLillo called “our national hallucination”.
Looking further back than acid house, it also feels very 1969 “dark hippy” out there on the streets of Britain. With the constant news about distant massacres, absconded sex pests, random violence, and vigilante groups forming, the UK Britain appears to have created a yellow-label Helter Skelter. Granted, we aren’t quite in full Trumpland yet, but unlike the States, the movement here is not led by tech teetotallers high on other people’s blood but retired messheads whose natural state of being is three sheets to the wind – no matter how angry they pretend to be (note here that Tommy Robinson has admitted to a fondness for the Colombian room.)
Maybe someone high up at Palantir or in some dark, Mountbatten-coded corner of the security services was taking note, and perhaps they knew that infusing anti-immigrant protests with this sensibility would push them into the stratosphere. That they would finally be able to shed their Nick Griffin-era drabness, all the sombre war poem readings and David Irving speeches, and fall in line with something closer to the emotional register of modern British life.
It all feels like a very similar conclusion that Paul ‘Guido Fawkes’ Staines made many years ago, when he pivoted from acid house promoter to conservative media figure some time ago, or the moment when the National Front decided to recruit outside football matches – very much the raves of their day.
Certainly, something is working on younger people – a demographic that the right has always found difficult to court. Beyond the frothing boomers, such protests are full of kids who appear as if they could be watching Kettama at Warehouse Project at 2am and belting out ‘Jerusalem’ in Piccadilly Gardens on the way home. Scan footage of the crowds, and there are a lot of shoulder bags, a lot of Stone Island trackies, and broccoli hairdos. How political they really are is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard not to believe they are attracted to the sheer spectacle and anything-goes mentality at some of these events – in lieu of much else to do.
The reasons for this are probably innate. A friend of mine who’d made friends with some younger people at a pub in the Northwest says they all go heavy in the gym, listen to hard European techno, play darts on ketamine, and play golf on ketamine. Infamously, a Teletech shirt was seen at the Middlesbrough riots, and it’s easy to wonder if British life, British drug habits and British politics are just getting more intense in some kind of tandem freefall.
That there is an inherent disconnect between drugs (which are meant to bring people together), party music (which is meant to do the same) and right-wing politics (which are meant to do the exact opposite) matters little. From skinheads listening to ska to second-generation immigrants running for Reform, the right has always been knowingly, gleefully chaotic and hypocritical.
It’s just another strange and dangerous chapter in this country’s uneasy relationship between hedonism and violence, popular culture and cultural conservatism – the chemical and the political combining in ever more fascinating ways.
Whether the man in Waterloo ever sobers up his views or his habits, remains to be seen.