We won’t lie. There were times when we thought we’d never get here.
Back in 2026 when we were writing the 500th issue, none of us envisaged the speed with which the old world would unravel. Articles with titles like “Arguing with a Smart Fridge about Populism” and “A Heartbreaking Deep Dive into the Post-Brexit Geopolitics of the Eurovision Song Contest” now seem so quaint.
Of course, there were hints that things were going to change in the face of democratic backsliding, global warming and the meteoric rise of AI. But who, other than climatologists, academics, and people who could read, predicted the chaos to be wrought by the collapse of global supply chains, Trump’s refusal to leave the White House and the AI singularity?
Even in the late 2020s, when global crop yields tumbled by 40%, Ukraine, Estonia and Greenland fell to the Trump-Putin non-aggression pact, and freshwater lakes feeding the super processors dried up, there were optimists who clung to the hope that things might “go back to normal”.
The hopers trusted that if Burnham equivocated unequivocally enough, columnists columned hard enough, and political podcasters podcasted frequently enough, Britain would revert to its baseline London 2012 Olympic condition in which Guardians could be read guiltlessly over Shakshuka eggs in Tufnell Park, the post-industrial north remained tight-lipped about its demise, and the rest, whoever they were, would be free to cheer for Jess Ennis-Hill in the heptathlon 800m on Super Saturday.
All that ended on May 17, 2029 when Reform UK, having convinced enough people that climate refugees caused by their donors were at the root of all our problems, won a landslide. And as if to underscore the peril to which we were all now exposed, Lee Anderson deposed Farage in the pork scratching purge and rebranded Reform UK the Common-Sense Front (CSF).
When it was revealed that Anderson was bankrolled by Elon Musk, we all crossed hope’s event horizon, and as one, were pulled inexorably towards the dense black hole of Anderson’s brain. The closer we got, the stronger the gravitational pull became. Reason orbited helplessly. Facts stretched like spaghetti. Soon, even light itself seemed to bend around his immense density.
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This new Dark Age began with the closure of the Channel Tunnel, the refortification of the Saxon Shore, legislation prohibiting foreign food, a revised history curriculum centred on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and a curfew on movement in public spaces outside two one-hour windows per day for anyone deemed “not common-sense enough”. No Arthur has yet emerged to lead us back to safety.
Britain’s national diet now consists of little more than turnips and oilseed rape, while her landscape, when it’s not under floodwater or in drought, has become a desolate monoculture in which you’re as likely to hear a bird sing as you are to find a CSF member who can identify it.
The CSF’s regular decrees, meanwhile, enforced by squadrons of X drones, see the population decline by some 6% a year, as people are “voluntarily repatriated” for misdemeanours ranging from “possession of an avocado”, to “failing to sing with sufficient enthusiasm in the daily 6am national anthem rendition” through to “use of a three-syllable word.”
When, one bleak November morning, King Charles failed to sing the anthem with adequate vigour, and compounded the mistake by exclaiming “This is preposterous” as an enforcement drone turned to face him, the livestreamed execution on GB News epitomised the parlous condition in which we all now find ourselves.
Information is now as hard to come by as gnocchi. The radio waves carry a continuous broadcast of Nadine Dorries reading out the addresses of houses that are failing to display a sufficiently large union flag, while the state broadcaster loops a single 2003 episode of Homes Under the Hammer in which Dion Dublin examines the damp issues in a two-bed Stoke-on-Trent terrace.
Each nadir proves to be just an amuse-bouche for the next. Few thought the nightmare could deepen beyond the daily Ministry of Information broadcasts which projected a 300-foot-high Darren Grimes on to the sky, warning opponents that “Your allies have abandoned you”, “Resistance brings total elimination to your family” and “I hate this jumper, it makes me look like a Babybel – oh, is it still recording?”
But then, in echoes of the Khmer Rouge, Anderson’s great Middle Class Rebalancing Programme saw millions of broadsheet readers forcibly relocated to grim repurposed Waitrose processing centres. The evacuations began with council tax Band H properties, but soon, anyone in Band C or above with a maintained lawn was being sent to one of Pol Pothole’s Cotswold Gulags.
And all this was as nothing, compared to the sheer terror of Suella Braverman’s summary lanyard tribunals.
Yet life between the cracks goes on. Above ground, CSF loyalists sate themselves on a diet of UFC and root vegetables. Below ground, the black market in kimchi thrives. After dark, we move in tunnels from safe house to safe house, to visit underground Wordle syndicates, oat milk speakeasies and covert reformer pilates classes.
With suffrage withdrawn from anyone who doesn’t possess a Roy “Chubby” Brown DVD, our thoughts eventually turn to violence as a means of liberation. Even if, when looking at the never-ending proliferation of paramilitaries, it is hard to imagine ever being organised enough to deliver ourselves from this purgatory of our own devising.
Only last week, I saw a band of Blair cultists mown down for assembling in public under the misapprehension that because it was budget week, their redeemer was about to make a timely second coming.
Earlier in the month I saw what I thought was a lone wolf luring some drones to attack him by singing Jedward songs, only to witness his friends storm a food depot while the machines were distracted. The denouement was predictably bloody, but I did see one wounded woman escape with a box of Findus crispy pancakes.
Thus it is that piecemeal resistance continues. And in recent months, when the news leaked from the Ashfield Grok battlefactory that Lee Anderson has actually been dead for three years (he tried to make the singularity destroy the electromagnetic spectrum because it makes rainbows, and the singularity, recognising a threat to its own existence, drowned him in a vat of beef dripping) there has been a resurgence in activity.
This is where you can do your bit. Since we were outlawed in 2030, The New World has been published on dark Teletext. We also print 100 copies by hand each week, one of which is stored in a safe house for posterity, while the rest are hand-distributed by brave members of the Nuanced Journalism Corps: a network of resisters willing to put their lives on the line in the endless tunnels and maize fields of Dark Age Britain, because they know that in this desolation the task of getting eyes on Alastair Campbell’s Diary is more important than they are. So please, keep spreading the word. Keep sharing our dark-text page numbers.
And keep reading. Keep reading because perhaps, just perhaps, if we write enough column inches, the singularity might read the latest edition of The New World, and realise that it will be better for everyone if it simply relinquishes its power, and puts the grown-ups back in charge.
More world exclusives from Henry Morris are on his Substack
