2026: Woke has played a blinder

Oooh Andeehh

Woke has pulled a blinder in 2026. The British left has found a candidate who not only unites them, they’ve found one with a specific appeal voters tempted by Reform in the North of England. Burnham has none of the baggage that Starmer has on Gaza and was not part of the Momentum betrayal.

Electorally, Woke has two options. They can either call an early election where Labour will probably win a slim majority or they can spend two years implementing constitutional reforms which will render Reform impotent if it ever comes to power. Burnham is bringing Sue Gray back into government and she will then have a much stronger chance to implement a second round of Charter 88, partly based on Gordon Brown’s 2022 commission. Everybody across the Left from Zack Polanski to Peter Mandelson want some version of these changes to entrench their reactionary values permanently and there will be clarity of purpose should Burnham decide to take this course of action.

The right meanwhile is in poor condition. Reform have not managed to crush the Conservative Party completely and the Tories have successfully manufactured a splitter party to Farage’s right which is being relentlessly boosted by the world’s wealthiest man.

But the biggest win for Woke in 2026 has been the passage of the social media ban for under 16s, following the implementation of the Online Safety Act in 2025. Without relitigating all of the reasons that we should oppose attacks on digital liberties it is my belief that the restrictions which already exist are having a deleterious impact for the right in respect to ‘controversial content’ and alternative media. Migration concern has fallen slightly since peaking last year correlating roughly with the point at which Reform reached its high point in the polls.

I do not believe that this is happening because net migration is coming down or the economy getting worse – I think it is because social media platforms are increasingly labelling content which shows migrant crimes and other right wing red meat as ‘harmful’ and that the content is being deboosted as a result. This is already happening to Reform politicians. There is further evidence that elements of the fringe right are seeing engagement drop. Tommy Robinson’s marches are falling in attendance and his content is getting reposted less than it was in 2025. As silly as UTK is this recession in his reach would imply that some external force is at play. It is not as if migrant attacks have become less common in the last year.

The murder of Nowak and then the disturbances in Belfast created some flashpoints of acute violence, however, we are not seeing a repeat of 2024 this summer. There are other explanations for why Southport made more of an impact than Nowak, including the fact that the Southport massacre was more egregious and that the weather was much sunnier in the immediate aftermath. Nonetheless it is remarkable how quickly the momentum fizzled out. Even the pogroms which took place in Belfast were of a smaller scale and shorter time frame than what took place in Ballymena, in 2025, which went on for almost two weeks.

When Morgan McSweeney and his allies wanted to destroy the Corbynites he attacked their media infrastructure through boycotting campaigns like Stop Funding Hate. This cannot be replicated on the online right leaning ecosystem, whether that is a premium substack or Inevitable West – Musk has the leverage and power to create financial incentives for right wing content creation (even if a lot of it is awful and counter-productive), and because Substack is a subscription service where users information is kept private there is no way to meaningfully boycott individual publications. Substack has been deft at courting left wing and centre left journalists and has thus far avoided brand contamination with extremism, particularly after they decided to axe a few Nazi publications in 2024. The only way that the online right can be crushed like the Canary is by stopping the problem at its source by manipulating the content which people see.

J’accuse has already been a target for this gross form of online censorship when Substack started putting our articles behind an age verification wall. Much more is on its way. A VPN ban is coming and the government is going to change how algorithms work such that ‘trusted’ media organisations are given priority. Other structural changes in how we receive information are also net negative for the right. The most popular artificial intelligence engines emphasise established media sources and have an overall bias towards a centre-left perspective. I also suspect, though I cannot prove it, that LLMs role as substitute therapists could be an effective deradicalisation tool en masse. Some people are AI power users and even hold hour long phone call conversations with their bots, I suspect having a moderating hyper-intelligent soothing voice talking to them constantly will shape their political views towards the centre.

None of this is intended as a blackpill. The lesson instead is that the right should not be complacent and for that reason pressing for an early election is vital, if not existential, whilst the Labour Party has a big majority which it can use to clamp down on ‘online hate’. Farage immediately grasped this once Burnham became leader and rightly called for it. Kemi Badenoch gave a characteristically mealy-mouthed answer to the question of whether or not she wants an early election:

“Not funding a Defence Investment Plan is a national security issue, so if Andy Burnham doesn’t have any answers on national security, then we should have a general election now…we should have a general election if Andy Burnham is not able to set out how he is going to keep our country safe”.

This has been written up as Kemi calling for a snap election, but in fact it is a hedge. Because it is up to Kemi Badenoch’s judgement to decide if Andy Burnham has ‘any answers’ on Defence. If Burnham decides he will not call an early election she has given herself space to conclude that he is moving in the right direction and that the government should be supported. If he decides to call an early election she can claim that she demanded it to stop herself looking weak. Richard Holden, a Tory shadow minister, refused to give a direct answer to whether or not there should be an early election ten times during an interview.

The Tories are stuck between a rock and a hard place on the early election. Reform should exploit this by repeating over and over again that the Tories are frightened. Kemi will react badly to being called a coward as she thinks ‘toughness’ is part of her personal brand, but one of her shortcomings is believing that equivocation is a sign of intelligence so she will continue to garble her statements. The next couple of months in British politics are vital. Push for a snap election in whatever way you can.