Description
In the summer of 2025, lampposts and motorway bridges across England were festooned with Union Flags and the St. George’s Cross as part of a political movement dubbed ‘Operation Raise the Colours’. Supporters of the campaign claimed the efforts were simple demonstrations of patriotism, though links with the county’s far-right movements were clear, as were connections to mounting racist violence across the country. For readers of JG Ballard, an author celebrated by Will Self as having ‘unerring prescience’, this was a strikingly familiar picture. In the 2006 novel Kingdom Come, the prolific author’s last, Ballard portrayed a similar civic fever taking hold in motorway towns around Surrey. Twenty years on from its publication, Kingdom Come makes for fascinating insight into the political condition of contemporary Britain. For Ballard, the advent of a consumerist age had hollowed people’s lives from greater meaning, letting their politics be dominated by an insidious, powerful political force - boredom. This boredom, then, becomes a foundation of and justification for violence. This paper suggests that this is a rare and perspicacious depiction of a society devoid of political myths, the sacred narratives that justify a political community’s existence, wherein the decline of previously established myths (both national and international) cause populations to turn inwards in a search for significance, leading to undesired political and societal outcomes. This is a trend that is not, of course, unique to England, as the international rise of populist radical right politics well demonstrates. The paper also therefore provides insight into the analytical potential for ‘returning’ to speculative fiction after its original publication to learn about contemporary political phenomena, an undertaking especially useful for analysing the inherently mythic nature of politics, where literature might reflect reality and reality, in turn, might reflect literature.
