Britain Is Losing Its Grip On Reality

There is a significant divide between two warring classes in Britain. It is not left vs right or the haves vs the have-nots; it is between the reality-based class and the fantasy-based class.

Last week, Fighting for a Free Future held our latest event: Prospects for Liberty Under This New Government. When selecting the theme for the event, we did not expect the prospects for liberty under this new government to be particularly high. Alas, even this low barrier could not be cleared by the situation Britain is in and the supposed answers the Government touts.

At our latest invitation-only event - we will be publishing footage of it soon - we had some of the UK’s best advocates and minds for freedom speak including:

• Silkie Carlo from Big Brother Watch, who discussed Britain’s free speech crisis. As J.S. Mill long ago showed in On Liberty, a society without free speech cannot progress. I would encourage all readers to support their latest free speech campaign.

• Lord Dan Hannan, who surveyed the prospects for liberty as Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He discussed how we rediscover the habits, culture and institutions on which a free and improving society depends.

There are many crises of liberty in Britain today, but two clear frontrunners for our worst drew the speakers’ focus: free speech and Britain’s seemingly terminal economic decline.

Reflecting on the event, the free speech crisis engulfing Britain and our fiscal crisis should not feel like separate issues. Both are products of the same mentality - that our state overlords are better placed to dictate our actions, whether it is our speech or our economic activity, than we are. Whether it is through increased regulation of economic activity or the increased crackdown on free speech, there is now a class of people in Britain who believe that Government intervention in all areas of economic and public life is not only acceptable, but desirable. If they had even a cursory look at history, they would know this not to be the case. Indeed, if they had lived through the past 16 years in the same country we did, they would know that government intervention in all areas has been an abject failure and has led us to the disastrous economic and civil liberty situation we find ourselves in. Alas, they did not. These people have lived in fantasy land and continue to do so.

Britain’s New Divide: The Fantasy-Based Class Versus the Reality-Based Class

There is a new divide in Britain: the fantasy-based class versus the reality-based class. The divide that explains British politics right now is between those who use evidence to inform their views and those who do not. We have a class in Britain living in reality, and we have a class in Britain that simply does not.

One side argues from evidence-informed opinions and the reality of the world as it is; the other side argues from an entirely fantastical world where facts do not matter; feelings and experiences dictate views and how they suppose the world functions. Those in the reality-based class can disagree about policy solutions while accepting the same evidence. In contrast, the fantasy-based class have never let a fact get in the way of a feeling. Indeed, the fantasy-based class often treat inconvenient evidence as a moral affront.

This explains how Andy Burnham can denounce “40 years of neoliberalism” - that right wing free market ideology that has brought Britain its highest-ever tax burden, the highest-ever levels of public spending in real terms, and the greatest restrictions on civil liberties in peacetime. These facts don’t matter. What matters is that Burnham feels like we have had 40 years of extreme free market economics. This explains how many fantasists can argue that the NHS can be both the envy of the world and woefully underfunded. It doesn’t matter that the NHS ranks poorly in almost every global ranking. I feel like it is the envy of the world, and therefore it is. It doesn’t matter that the NHS has never had more funding in real terms, and Cameron ringfenced healthcare spending during the austerity years (those brutal years of cuts that managed to shrink the size of the state to, hang on, the same size it was at the midway point of the Blair years). I feel like the NHS is underfunded and therefore it is. Feelings, not facts, is the mantra of the fantasy-based class.

These are not traditional policy disagreements; we have two sets of people in Britain arguing from completely different worlds.

As with the NHS, this world of fantasy allows its class to hold positions that, at first glance, seem at odds with each other. That is because they are. Nowhere is this more stark than on civil liberties.

The fantasy-based class believes that you should be arrested for a mean tweet, but it is fine that chants about the erasure of the only Jewish country in the Middle East are ever-present in the nation’s capitals and across universities. I am taking no position on these protests other than to highlight the absurdity of the fantasy position. The fantasy-based class holds that universities should be bastions of free speech on issues of Palestine, colonialism, and transgender rights, but you are a literal Nazi if you dare to be a gender-critical feminist or support the right of Israel to exist.

I once attended a debate at SOAS about whether or not Palestinian resistance should be violent or peaceful. Violence overwhelmingly won, and those advocating for a peaceful resistance made clear that they were only doing so to give another side to the debate. I highlight this not because of the debate itself, but because of the experiences of the Jewish student who brought me to it. They detailed to me the horrific antisemitism they had experienced at SOAS, including having a swastika drawn on their accommodation door multiple times and regularly being called a Nazi. Only in the fantasy world can a gay Jewish student be a Nazi. And don’t get me started on Queers for Palestine.

The fantasy-based class insist Britain remains defined by its colonial past and is a cesspit of racism today. To them, reparations are a pressing necessity despite Britain leading the abolition of the slave trade - even to nations that held slaves longer than Britain. Now even British institutions like the Church and National Trust have fallen into fantasy thinking. Take the tragic case of Jason Arday. To the fantasy-based class, the overwhelming evidence that he plagiarised much of his research or made it up entirely, the inconsistency that he was in a coma for six months in his book proposal but somehow not in his book, the multiple marathons that he ran for charity and the amounts raised being proven to be false, does not matter. The investigation into Arday himself was an injustice, a witch hunt fuelled by racism. To the fantasist, everything is seen through the lens of their fantasist worldview.

Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

How have we ended up here? How have we ended up with a significant class of people in the UK totally detached from reality? The combination of critical race theory and intersectionality is the core pillar of the fantasy-based class.

Critical race theory is a form of legal thought that emerged in America in the 1970s as the argument that racism can be embedded in laws and institutions; racism does not just exist as individual prejudice. Even those with only a cursory understanding of 1970s American race relations will see that this argument held some value at the time. Intersectionality examines how characteristics such as race, sex, and class overlap to create distinct experiences of discrimination or disadvantage.

The serious problems we see today emerged when these analytical tools hardened into a combined, comprehensive worldview. Society came to be interpreted primarily through identity, power, and oppression, while personal testimony was increasingly treated as a privileged source of truth. Ideas such as objectivity were dismissed as disguises for established power. In its broader political form, it has encouraged different groups to see their struggles as interconnected and to believe that none can be fully liberated while the systems said to oppress others remain in place.

This helped create the fantasy-based class: people trained to judge evidence according to who presents it, explain every disparity as proof of discrimination, and treat disagreement as complicity. Once a theory is constructed so that contrary facts merely confirm the oppressive power it claims to fight again, it becomes impossible to falsify. Reality no longer disciplines the theory. The theory is used to rewrite reality. And then theory takes over the individual's life. If facts no longer matter, nothing can rein in the theory. When the core tenet of the theory is oppressed groups being beaten down by the rich and mighty oppressors, then you feel an additional moral urgency. The theory becomes the worldview of the individual through which every moment, every interaction is viewed and must be acted upon through the worldview's lens. This is how the extension of the theory goes from social issues to economic issues.

This is a key reason why many in the fantasy-based class, particularly at the more extreme end of fantasy thinking, raise Palestine in every moment of their life. Whether it is the attacks on Gail's Bakery; you cannot buy bread without the experience being seen through the lens of critical race theory and intersectionality. Louise Haigh bringing up Palestine during the TUC Congress; you cannot speak about domestic workers’ rights without speaking about other “oppressed groups”. British Jewish comedian Philip Simon's show was cancelled because his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict conflicted with the comedy club's opposition to the Israeli government’s policies and actions; even a comedy club must submit to critical race theory and intersectionality. To me, it is a crazy proposition that a comedy club in Edinburgh has a policy on a conflict in the Middle East. To the fantasist, of course, a comedy club in a country thousands of miles away should have a policy on Israel and Palestine. Otherwise, it is complicit in oppression. Whether it is a bakery or a comedy club, these are arenas of the battle of the oppressed versus the oppressor. Every action taken in relation to them is a choice between siding with the oppressor and siding with the oppressed.

Those who were not directly indoctrinated into the theory, whether at university or through a local socialist group, have absorbed them by osmosis. Enough of the left have this worldview, particularly politically active young left-wing activists, that other politicians and commentators fight each other to impress them and get them onside. A key way to do this is to adopt their worldview; and so the fantasy-based class grows.

This Is A Dangerous Situation

Ayn Rand saw evil as beginning with a wilful detachment from reality: the refusal to accept evidence, acknowledge facts, and accept the world as it is. Its root is when the individual starts to think that wishes can override reality. Can we really say the fantasy-based class is evil? This has been a question that I have been struggling with for months now. I have tended to follow Hayek’s maxim that you should assume your opponents are not evil but misguided. However, as I see the fantasy-based class ignore evidence more and more, and as I see them argue for solutions that will literally collapse Britain, I have struggled to see them as merely misguided. The brazenness of their untruths in the face of objective facts, not traditional political debates, led me to question my long-held view.

Having discussed this issue with many and seriously reflected on it, I have come to the conclusion that the fantasy-based class is not evil, but by living in their world of fantasy, by ignoring facts, by allowing wishes and feelings to trump reality, they have given themselves a much greater capacity to do evil. Yes, evil actions arise from both the fantasy-based class and the reality-based class, but by detaching themselves from reality, they have made their whole class actively dangerous towards Britain. Look at the calls to shut down freedom of the press in the wake of Jason Arday’s death; imagine the number of lives that could be saved if we moved to a healthcare system worthy of a first-world country; take the collapse of our Labour market and the destruction of businesses from Labour’s view that higher taxes and increased regulation can somehow be separated from their real-world consequences.

The combination and entrenchment of critical race theory and intersectionality across a broad section of society has created a class of people that do not live in reality, that believe in feelings over facts, that believe that history and views do not matter if you are an oppressed group, that believe any action is right if it is in the name of a just cause, that believe that consequences do not follow actions.

The fantasy-based class treat the world as they think it ought to be - both in a positive sense, by ignoring economics and the limits of the state, and in a negative sense, by attributing bigotry to anything that contradicts it. Their theory allows them to remove the need to make decisions about priorities and relevance, as every “struggle” is interconnected; this is why Palestine is everywhere. It allows them to make broad, sweeping statements about the nature of systems and institutions that are impossible to falsify because facts and figures are simply evidence of bigotry and evil if they wish them to be so. This all stems from a refusal to take the world as it actually is, with all its considerations and limitations. It's dangerous because it's unfalsifiable, unstoppable, and also appeals to the worst parts of human nature by giving people things to hate while feeling good about themselves for doing so. This is an incredibly dangerous group of people.

What Can We Do?

Having established the danger of the fantasy-based class, we must try to lessen it by pulling some of these people back to reality. When those of us in the reality-based class try to convince those in the fantasy-based class to come back to reality, we cannot assume that the facts we present will win the argument. They will not. This class trades in emotions. We must win the argument on both evidence and empathy. We must show that the reality-based class is not callous; that the positions we hold aren’t unempathetic. We must show that wanting a different and better healthcare system is not indifference to the health of the poor; that speaking about the UK’s tax burden is not contempt for the hard times of the low-paid; that pointing to the progress Britain has made on race is not a denial that racism still exists. At Fighting for a Free Future, we are trying to push a version of freedom and free markets that is attractive and imaginative; that plays to both facts and emotions.

We also must do what the free market and liberty movement hasn’t been great at; we must get better at storytelling. We must tell the story of the shopkeeper whose life was destroyed by the “consequence-free” policies of the fantasy-based class. We must profile the jailed free speech activists abroad to show what happens when the state decides what can and can’t be said. We must tell the stories of the abject lives of the poor before capitalism and of how capitalism lifted billions of people across the world out of extreme poverty. We must use new tactics that appeal to both facts and emotions.

This is not giving ground to the fantasy-based class; this is adjusting our tactics in the face of the serious dangers that they pose to life and liberty. If facts were enough, we would have won decades ago.

I appreciate that this may not be enough. Ultimately, and thankfully, there is one final backstop against the rise of the fantasy-based class: reality. None of us can escape consequences; none of us can escape facts. Reality, whether it is economic or social collapse, will catch up with the fantasy-based class. And reality is a bitch.

Harry Richer is the Director of Fighting for a Free Future, under Chairman the Rt Hon Steve Baker. He has worked as a senior aide in the British Parliament and has also co-written multiple publications on Austrian School economics, including the 2024 Springer book The Age of Debt Bubbles. He can be followed on X through @HarryRicher96.