How ‘Acid Patriotism’ Swallowed Britain Whole

I was sliding across the floor of Waterloo Station when I saw him: the most messed up 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 c*nt.

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, 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 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. 

WORDS by CLIVE MARTIN

PHOTOS by GUY SMALLMAN/GETTY IMAGES, ANDY BARTON/SOPA IMAGES/ LIGHTROCKET via GETTY IMAGES