The title may be hyperbolic, and there is no doubt that very few in the UK experience anything like the poverty of developing countries, but its existing governance and political structures present a key form of third worldism: a byzantine, fragmented set of actors and institutions competing against each other and creating self-referential rules and procedures. Modern Britain is an archipelago of disparate bureaucracies and levels. Infrastructure projects and economic planning must now be strained through a variety of organisations, from local enterprise partnerships and council plenaries to planning bodies, representative organisations, lobby groups and charities.

The successor ideology, or the new orthodoxy, represents an evolution of liberalism rather than its replacement[1]. What then contests it must understand this evolutionary nature, recognising that the fruits of the new orthodoxy grew from the liberal tree. Sullivan identifies moral clarity as the clarion call of this movement[2]. This means the removal of objectivity or neutrality as values of a governing consensus, instead characterising nations or the Western ethico-legal order as intrinsically racist and subjective. Sullivan thereby reveals the flaw of his argument, that the liberal order was genuinely objective, whether in its governing apparatuses or in its media complexes.

The character of what is called progress contains a deep irony. In the flavour of dramatic irony, we as an audience can seemingly see ahead of our expert narrators, yet the play goes on as we are told that, no, everything is going according to plan. In fields as diverse as ecology, agronomy, economics or medicine there is a disconnect between what is witnessed and what is accepted. These fields are increasingly side-lined in developed economies which are dominated by their service and administrative sectors[1]/tasks[2], creating a loss of knowledge.

Enclosure, beyond its historical specificities as a means of enclosing common land, has a wider implication of enclosing autonomy itself in various forms. “The enclosure of common land ran alongside the decline of communal systems of agriculture and the marginalisation of other forms of communal entitlement”[1]. The specific aspect of the community is the maintained functioning of established lifeways and relations between groups/classes. Enclosure in a wider sense is the closing off of means of independence, in the form of freehold land, unclaimed commons or specific relations that entail duties between groups. Through a combination of structural imperatives and negotiated choices both rapid and extended declines of established modes of existence are curtailed and destroyed in favour of new methods and relations which close off autonomy.

A “peculiar species of authoritarian utopianism sweeping through the ruling institutions of American life, which I have termed ‘the Successor Ideology’”[1] is emergent in liberal democracies throughout the West. In various forms of identity politics, culture wars, NGO complexes[2] and institutional capture, a sociocultural logic is nascent, struggling to fully form into a coherent multiplicity of organisational and political structures. Through Rudi Dutschke’s formulation of a long march through the institutions, the successor ideology represents a bridge between systems of liberal government and neoliberal business practice and a metastatic superstructure of cultural revolution.

Metropolitics as a phenomenon is a convergence of various trends and forces: international urbanisation and the development of a vast precariat class between and within cities; the growth of telepresence technologies and vast networks centred around social media and cloud computing; international security architectures like the Five Eyes as well as private surveillance structures; the logistical revolution; and cosmopolitan culture as a growing element in socio-political cultures i.e. the development of a post-national ethic.

“Metropolitics, a rootless, placeless and increasingly timeless politics concerned with the dissolution of barriers to speed”[1]. Virilio describes a new mode of politics within the modern city as a post-Leviathan beyond the space of the nation-state. Metropolitics is a politics in the tradition of the friend-enemy distinction, yet its enemy is abstract. Barriers to speed constitute its primary locus of action, being the means through which these are sped up or eliminated altogether.

Looming global recession has encouraged a typical response of returning to normal, whether that be in the form austerity measures to keep national debt-to-GDP at “reasonable levels” and increasing interest rates to control inflation or introducing pro-growth measures to reduce cyclical turbulence. Similarly to the 2008 crisis, a prescribed toolkit is being used with similar expectations of potential success. However, there appears to be little questioning of the assumptions which suggest the global economy (and advanced economies in particular) can return to historical growth levels (including the meagre growth of the 2010s).

Our postmodern age is bringing forth a spatio-ontological shift that moves from expansion and negentropic escape (i.e. the capacity to expand order into new territories through colonisation, global interconnection and technological oversight) to an inertial position characterised by homogeneous geoscapes through the “global city” and metropolitics as the closing of the frontier. These are the spatial borders of what Escobar calls Globalistan, a configuration of “‘no places’ or ‘cities of nowhere,’ places that are ostensibly public but definitely non‐communitarian”[1]. While the growth of urbanisation and the development of city hubs suggests a growth and expansion in the normal operations of capitalist accumulation, the extremity of city growth and the demographic projections of urban dominance change this nature. Expansion is no longer geographic but instead temporal and ontological.

The video posted of Adam Posen[1] (a well-known monetary economist deeply tied to the variety of neoliberal think tanks, central bank committees and academic fellowships) stating that support for manufacturing industries and onshoring of productive capacity are a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in” is perfectly indicative of the ideological networks of which Posen is a member. It shows the embedded nature of the successor ideology (woke ideology, post-neoliberalism, identity politics, etc.) and its tentacular reach, as it easily seeps into establishment institutions and policy-making networks.