After a jocular endorsement by Robert Jenrick, a drive-by assassination attempt by a Left-wing activist organisation, and now an appearance this week in GQ, it seems that Anglofuturism has, to use an appropriately online term, broken containment.

For the uninitiated, Anglofuturism is a concept that originated on Twitter around 2021, when anonymous accounts began using AI image generators to create tongue-in-cheek pictures of a futuristic Britain. These accounts would share visions of gleaming trains, elegant housing, rewilded temperate rainforest, and impishly-named spaceports. (This video brings together many of the themes.)

At the time, it was an in-joke, and a niche one at that. An UnHerd essay on the theme by Aris Roussinos seeded further interest, including the podcast I co-host on the topic. There is no centralised structure to Anglofuturism, nor a coherent ideology, but self-defined Anglofuturists tend to be interested in technology and infrastructure, frustrated by Britain’s decline, and sceptical of apparent quick fixes such as mass immigration. Discussions of Anglofuturism might typically envisage a bolder and more technologically adept Britain that raises land from the sea, exploits its Antarctic territory, puts small modular reactors under village greens, and revives its heavy industry.

Over the past couple of years, the term has gained some currency among people working in politics and technology. In June this year, at the “Now and England” conference in Westminster, Jenrick told an audience: “I am what can be described as an Anglofuturist”. It was a wry aside that spoke to the ambitious vision for Britain that he had just been outlining — and prompted a hatchet job last week from Hope not Hate.

As detailed in UnHerd and elsewhere, Hope not Hate is an organisation that claims the lofty goal of fighting far-Right extremism, but has suffered some element of mission creep. These days, it is liable to smear anyone perceived to be an opponent of the Left, even those who are not remotely extremist. In this vein, it published an analysis presenting Anglofuturism as a unified movement with a dangerous agenda — all the better to undermine Jenrick, who had just spoken at the Conservative Party Conference. Because of my podcast, I was also mentioned in the report, though the hit job was so nakedly contrived that I seem to have survived the attempted cancellation.

The GQ article, unrelated to the report, summarised the “new tribes driving British politics”, naming Anglofuturism among them. It was perhaps overly generous for the magazine to suggest that Anglofuturism is “driving politics”, given that the parliamentarians agitating for a British mission to Mars remain lamentably few. But, if nothing else, it has been a week of multiplied interest in, and scrutiny of, a concept that for some time was an online in-joke.

I’d like to claim that this moment in the sun is the result of my podcast’s lengthy discussions of planning and industrial policy, but there are likely to be more fundamental reasons. Anonymous envisionings of things like a “Cecil Rhodes spaceport” were no doubt reactive to the overreach of “woke” culture, but also to the years of elite oikophobia and condemnation of British history that preceded it.

All the while, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the profound failures of modern British statecraft. Real-term wages have not risen since the financial crisis; the heaviest tax burden since the Second World War looks likely to be raised further; much of our best talent is leaving; we are giving away territory at extraordinary cost. Constrained by Byzantine planning laws, we have kneecapped HS2 just as China contemplates a new generation of maglevs. We can’t build a reservoir, let alone houses — and so on. Rather than foster technological innovation, successive governments have tried to keep the economy afloat by importing large cities’ worth of immigrants per year.

As Keir Starmer’s government ties itself in knots over whether it approves of the flag of St George, the failures of multiculturalism are writ ever larger. Last night, sectarian Muslim MPs welcomed the barring of Israeli football fans from a match in Birmingham. That shameful development does not point to a self-assured country with anything resembling an attractive vision of the future.

In these circumstances, then, it is little wonder that Anglofuturism has been more widely discussed. Who can begrudge a few nerds dreaming of a country that can plan for the long term, return to the frontiers, and create a future for itself that is both familiar and exciting?

Anglofuturism is, in some respects, the default state of the country: adventurous and culturally self-confident. Perhaps, as globalist orthodoxies break down, it is a state to which we shall return. And, given Britain’s current economic and cultural trajectory, it is not Anglofuturism that is dangerous — it is the ailing status quo.