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 of the central London station, 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 tongue was sticking out like a dying dog’s and his jeans were falling down. The rest of the people in the station—suburban day trippers, tourists, commuters, hen parties—were making unnatural movements to avoid him.
It was a look I’ve seen before: in the taxi ranks outside super clubs, in the toilets at squat parties, and in the weirder ends of Glastonbury. It signposts a kind of dissociative rave-state that you can only really achieve on heavy psychedelic drugs—or at that tipping point where ketamine and alcohol join forces to 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, one of the anti-migrant, anti-government nationalist parades that have become more frequent on the streets of London these last couple of years, and our man at Waterloo was either arriving late because he’d been up all night ‘talking to God,’ or had already been sent home by his more sober compatriots. As if he alone weren’t uncanny enough, Waterloo had been swarmed by the marching mob, and was festooned with England, Wales, and Scotland flags, football shirts, placards scrawled with imported American psychobabble, the telltale markers of his fellow travelers: Britain’s patriots. Niko Omilana, a young British-Nigerian content creator pictured below left, was there too, not that I recognized him immediately. He had dressed up in some kind of whiteface morph suit and was openly mugging off the protestors, tricking them into divulging their most racist opinions, Borat style.
Also present were reps from a games company, who had insisted that their activation for Borderlands 4 would go ahead no matter what. I can’t imagine the troupe of out-of-work actors, parading around in leather harnesses with huge plastic axes, helped our friend’s state of mind.
Tommy Robinson, rabble rouser in chief for Britain’s new right wing, had already made a plea for attendees not to booze their way through the day, in an attempt to defy the long-held accusations that his events are just massive piss-ups. But half the crowd I saw already seemed shitfaced, coked up to their eyeballs and raring to get into the boozers. It brought back memories of being stuck with a crew of first-gen English Defence League guys on a Northern Line tube carriage over a decade ago. I’ll never forget how the carriage reeked of ammonia as 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 kind of Charles Manson 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 over. Or maybe he had overdone things while gearing himself up for trouble, like the child soldiers who chow down on bootleg amphetamines before committing atrocities. More likely, this is just what he does most weekends and he 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 a football supporters’ group for fans who go to England away matches. It shows young men (and one very old man), gathered outside a community center 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 its juddering crescendo, a man with a microphone starts ranting about a “show of dominance against [left-wing Your Party MPs] 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 big night at the much-missed Sheffield super club Gatecrasher circa 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.
My coinage here rides on the back of a short-lived concept that was all the rage a few years ago. ‘Acid Corbynism’ was a Mark Fisher-inspired theory that Labour Party events leading up to the 2015 election were recreating rave culture in a new, altruistic manner, and that left-wing voters were using them not just to express solidarity, but to find sex and catharsis.
But while Acid Corbynism lived and died in a few Tinder bios and Repeater Books-adjacent panel discussions, Acid Patriotism feels much more tangible, a phenomenon that seems to be becoming par for the course in the current climate of Chaos Britain.
“In a video of an Epping migrant hotel protest, a light-up karaoke machine plays M People’s ‘All Together Now’ while flags billow in the night sky and a woman screeches, ‘Hang the mayor.’”
Much of this strange union between acid house and nationalism manifests on Reels and TikToks. In our postmodern digital reality, Turning Point UK videos are often cut to ice-rink bangers like “Mr Vain” by Culture Beat or Utah Saints’ “Something Good.” On the bewildering ‘Brexit Brian’ account, a reel of “South Coast patriots in action” has been set to The Stone Roses’ end-of-the-night classic “This Is the One.” 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 imagine him doing at a Year 9 disco.
But it also happens physically, in the moment. In a video of an Epping migrant hotel protest, a light-up karaoke machine plays M People’s “All Together Now” while flags billow in the night sky and a woman screeches, “Hang the mayor.” Look at the footage from these hotel picket lines and roundabout flag raisings, and you’ll see groups of men in shorts having the time of their lives as women in going-out-out leggings drink and scream, indulging in something they perceive as thrilling and transgressive. Bags of cans and PA systems are commonplace, despite small inter-beefs about “bringing down the tone.”
Britain has always had a fascinating relationship between hatred and hedonism, one that goes right back to the skinhead punch-up parties seen in Adam Curtis’ recent Shifty documentary series and whatever the Blackshirts got up to after their work was done. But where these were once postscripts to activism, right-wing events have become as much a party as a protest. The catch-all “disobedient” movement, which now encompasses people opposing everything from COVID jabs to the ULEZ to 15-minute cities and digital ID, 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 all prominent figures in its hierarchy. These are people whose wide-eyed green room theories have started to manifest on a national level.
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 among the riot van roundups), it can feel a lot like a barbecue where somebody has slipped something in the punch. With all the organic organizing and fly-postering, they’re not too far away from a Nicky Blackmarket party held out near the M25 motorway: something for old ravers to do with their nights off. The fact that many of these events seem to take place semi-spontaneously, on green-belt land in all weathers, only adds to the pervasive acid house spirit of ‘89.
Whether by design or through circumstance, nationalist protests in the UK have become places where almost anything could go down: huge, thronging events that sit on the edge of adrenaline and disaster. It’s hard not to see the magnetic pull of such happenings and why so many of those who fall foul of the law base their legal defense on simply getting “swept up in the moment.” How many of them are doing psychedelics or listening to Sasha & Digweed sets is something we’ll never be able to reliably datafy, but it almost doesn’t matter. Acid Patriotism meetups are loaded with trip-like imagery: the Boomtown-goes-Knights-Templar outfits; the obscure placard scrawlings; a crew of fancy-dress Maoris doing the Hakka for Charlie Kirk; a man in a leather Union Jacket racing jacket leading wide-eyed pensioners in a gospel version of “Jerusalem.” They seem like acid journeys in and of themselves, but they also call to mind the weirdest corners of MAGA, of what Don DeLillo called “our national hallucination.”
Looking beyond acid house, it feels very 1969 “dark hippie” out there on the streets of Britain right now. With the constant news about absconded sex pests, outbreaks of random violence, and vigilante groups forming, the UK appears to have created a yellow-label Helter Skelter. Granted, we aren’t quite in Trumpland yet. And, unlike the States, the movement here is led not by tech teetotalers high on other people’s blood, but by embittered mess heads whose natural state of being is three sheets to the wind, no matter how angry they pretend to be.
Maybe someone high up at Palantir or in some dark, Mountbatten-coded corner of the security services was taking note, knowing that infusing anti-immigrant protests with this sensibility would push them into the stratosphere. That nationalism here would finally be able to shed its Nick Griffin-era drabness, with its somber war poetry and David Irving speeches, to fall in line with something closer to the emotional register of modern British life.
It feels like a very similar conclusion to the one Paul ‘Guido Fawkes’ Staines drew many years ago, when he pivoted from acid house promoter to conservative media figure, or when the National Front began to recruit outside football matches—very much the raves of their day.
Certainly, this approach appears to be working on younger people—a demographic the right has always found difficult to court. Beyond the frothing boomers, recent nationalist protests have featured a not unsizable number of kids who look like they could be watching Kettama at Warehouse Project at 2AM and belting out “Land of Hope and Glory” in Piccadilly Gardens on the way home. Scan footage of the crowds and there are a lot of shoulder bags, Stone Island trackies, and broccoli hairdos. How political they really are is anyone’s guess, but it’s not unlikely that they’re 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 pal of mine who’d made friends with some younger people at a pub in the English northwest says they all go heavy in the gym, listen to hard European techno, and play golf on ketamine. Infamously, a Teletech shirt was seen at the Middlesbrough riots. 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 tension 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.
Where all this is going remains to be seen. For now, it’s just another strange and dangerous chapter in England’s uneasy relationship between hedonism and violence, pop culture and cultural conservatism—the chemical and the political combining in ever more fascinating ways.
Follow Clive Martin on X @clive_mart1n—and subscribe to his Substack, British Chaos
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