Robert Jenrick says he’s an Anglofuturist. What does that mean?

by Patrik Hermansson and Harry Shukman

In late June, the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick took the stand at a conference. Addressing the crowd of Tories and radical-right political figures, he made an unusual statement. “I am what can be described,” he said, “as an Anglofuturist.” His statement was applauded. But what did he actually mean?

Look up Anglofuturism on social media, and you’ll be confronted with some odd images. Anglofuturist accounts post AI-generated moon bases emblazoned with the Union Jack, giant spaceships hovering over Westminster, and Maglev trains zooming through green and pleasant countryside. At a glance, Anglofuturism is about reigniting the ambition of Victorian engineering on high tech projects in this century.

Not far beneath that alluring surface, however, the Anglofuturist movement is much darker. Some of its most prominent advocates are deeply racist. Our analysis of Anglofuturism raises awkward questions for Jenrick — who hopes soon to lead the Conservative Party — and the movement as a whole.

The term “Anglofuturism” has different contextual meanings. It was first outlined by Aris Roussinos in a 2022 article for UnHerd. Aptly describing British politics as “short on positive visions”, he asked: “What if we could combine the High Modernist optimism and can-do attitude of the postwar interventionist state with the bucolic romanticism of a landscape restored to nature, and farming on a gentler, and more human scale?” Inspired by the mid-20th century Ladybird Books, which depicted a prosperous post-war society of gleaming British-made aircraft soaring over newly-built motorways, Anglofuturism, as Roussinos saw it, represented “nostalgia for modernity”. Elsewhere, he said Anglofuturism would mean “an SMR for every county town”, referring to the emerging technology of small nuclear reactors. Like the Ladybird Books and their jet engines, there is a boyish charm to imagining the Britain of 2040. One fantasy described by Roussinos begins: “You’re commuting on your high-speed Maglev train from the northeastern metropolis to your government-subsidised mansion flat in a now much-expanded London…”

Since that first article, Anglofuturism has expanded into a busy internet community. There are Substacks dedicated to it, podcasts, a book, and countless social media images of space stations named after famous explorers and astronauts in Union Jack suits exploring new planets. While some AI images were inspired by the British Empire, naming hypothetical space ships after the colonists Cecil Rhodes and Warren Hastings, Anglofuturism appears to be more focused on thinking ambitiously about the future. And if the movement was just pushing for the construction of fast trains and high-tech housing in harmony with the environment then it would be worth welcoming. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

A good place to examine the goals of Anglofuturism is by reading the Substack magazine, The Anglofuturist. It is run by Aidan Todd, a writer who used to go by the pseudonym John Arcto.

In a 13-point manifesto of Anglofuturism, he writes at the top: 

“We reject the narrative of British decline, and dream of a high-tech, abundant, and optimistic future where the traditional British culture is maintained and restored. We aim to establish the future that never arrived, but still could do.”

However, his interpretation of Anglofuturism is not merely about building cool new infrastructure projects. In his essay What Is To Be Done?, Todd articulates a strategy that seems aligned with white nationalism. “We need to instil a racial consciousness in straight White men,” he writes. 

As the name suggests, Anglofuturism is in part inspired by the original Italian Futurism set out by Filippo Marinetti. Todd explicitly writes that he draws inspiration from Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto when he sets out what he considers to be the core beliefs of Anglofuturism. Marinetti’s movement advocated for modernity and cultural rejuvenation and had significant influence on the rise of Italian fascism.

His essay calls for activism on university campuses, entryism into political parties, and forming an intellectual vanguard organisation. He further describes the implementation of a race-driven immigration policy. To achieve that, he calls for collaborating with much more extreme activists, even if they are neo-Nazis. “We should work with all kinds of right-wing groups, even neo-Nazis (so long as they don’t make it all about the Jews),” he writes. 

A further goal of Anglofuturism, according to Todd, is the rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler. In a section on messaging, Todd explains this:

“Make seemingly apolitical and ironic jokes about Hitler to desensitise people to him. We are not Neo-Nazis, but the treatment of Hitler as the real life Voldemort is a bedrock of the ‘Boomer Truth Regime’, which perpetuates Wokeness.”

“The Boomer Truth Regime” is a phrase coined by Neema Parvini, the disgraced academic who called black people “impulsive and low-IQ” and co-founded the Basketweavers far-right network. The Boomer Truth Regime is the belief that post-war society is based on myths, namely that Hitler was an evil character (“a real life Voldemort”). If he can be seen in a more flattering light, the thinking goes, then maybe ideas dismissed as Nazi can once again be accepted as politically viable. Todd recognises that this will be unpalatable, and calls for message obfuscation. He writes: 

“We should try and obscure this in our public-facing material, talking about ‘cultural compatibility’, in a way that is publicly palatable without fundamentally changing our views, but the fact of the matter is that White immigrants are more desirable.”

Although Todd’s version of Anglofuturism is the most extreme, his radicalism is by no means alone in the movement. Alexander d’Albini, whose 2024 essay collection is the only book published on the subject of Anglofuturism, describes his movement as “rooted in a pre-Modern English ethnic identity”. Although he says Anglofuturism “does not entirely fit” within an ethnonationalist framework, he nevertheless identifies the “200 million people with English heritage who live outside of Britain” in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as belonging to the Anglofuturist world. In other words, English-speaking white people.

Anglofuturism remains a niche interest, attracting young, mostly male fans. One of the movement’s busiest communities is the Anglofuturist Book Club, a private group on X and Discord. Run by a yoga instructor who goes by the curious name of Benjamin De Rebel (and elsewhere Benjamin Saxon), it contains a dozen members from the online right. Among them, when HOPE not hate gained access to the group, was an activist from the fascist Homeland Party and Ben Aston, a former Reform UK parliamentary candidate who said Jews are responsible for “the mass import of Muslims into England”. Both have since left.

The Anglofuturist Book Club discusses articles and podcasts to emerge from the movement, hoping to better articulate what Anglofuturism actually means. While the club’s members argue over policies, there is a great deal of overlap between Anglofuturism as they conceive of it and the online far right. One indicative anecdote comes from an Anglofuturist Book Club member living in the US describing a visit to a shopping mall. “Theres no whites,” he said. “All muslims and mexicans. Its horrifying [sic].” Others claimed feminism seeks “to suppress masculinity”, that Jews own water companies, and that the average IQ of the UK is “diminishing”, ultimately leading to “civilisational collapse”. Another shared a plan for “remigration” — a euphemistic term for the mass deportation of legal immigrants, in addition to illegal ones — written by far-right activist Pete North.

Perhaps the most intellectual vision of the movement is the Anglofuturist podcast, run by Tom Ough and Calum Drysdale. The introduction to their programme imagines an Anglofuturist vision of “Georgian townhouses on the moon” and “small modular reactors under every village green”. The podcast has interviewed Curtis Yarvin (the American neoreactionary who in his appearance bizarrely mimicked a Chinese speaker) and Aria Babu (a think tank worker connected to Malcolm and Simone Collins, the American pronatalists). Although it features guests from the mainstream political scene — such as the Labour MP Dan Tomlinson — others express views that are no less extreme than those found in the Anglofuturist Book Club. In one episode, Dr Philip Cunliffe, a professor of international relations at University College London, referred to Muslim MPs as “cousin-shaggers”.

On the podcast, Douglas Carswell, the former UKIP MP, discussed the necessity for remigration, claiming that most migrants into Europe have “poor time preferences, impulsive behaviour and high propensity to live on welfare and commit crime”.

He added:

“Some cultures are better at inventing things and creating an elevated standard of living and a morally superior way of life. And some cultures are better at creating the sort of horrific abuses we saw in Rotherham. Now this needs to be said and it is going to be said, and until they shut down social media we will be allowed to say this: not all cultures are the same and once you recognise that you stop having to defer to the idea that we must defer to other cultures in Britain.”

Several months after his appearance on the Anglofuturist podcast, Carswell posted on X: “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free.”

At the start of this year, it looked like the Anglofuturist movement was destined to be a very niche online subculture. That may have changed now that Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary and the man likeliest to next lead the Tory party, has called himself an Anglofuturist. The movement’s aims are much darker than they appear at first glance. Behind the gimmicky images of spaceships named after famous Victorians is a group of people pushing, at the very least for mass deportations, and, at worst, a whites-only nation. Anglofuturism is a gloss over disturbingly extreme ideas.