The Architects of Division - Part 2
How Britain’s Right-Wing Media and Politicians Weaponised the Existential Vacuum
If Part 1 showed the making of the void, Part 2 shows the merchants who moved in. Every society that loses its sense of meaning eventually finds someone willing to sell it back at a price.
Every generation inherits its own form of confusion. Ours is the collapse of meaning. The world has not become less informed, only less coherent. Data overflow, opinions multiply, yet the shared sense that life follows an intelligible order, that institutions, politics, and collective purpose still hold moral weight, remains disintegrated. Into that vacuum, new merchants of meaning have stepped in.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy, a school of thought centred on humanity’s search for purpose, warned that when life loses meaning, people seek substitutes: power, pleasure, conformity. But the deepest craving is not for comfort; it is for coherence, the sense that one’s life, however painful, still forms an intelligible whole. People will endure misery; if they can make it make sense. Dostoevsky, a 19th-century Russian novelist and philosopher whose work explored faith, morality, and the psychology of suffering, saw the same tendency in his characters: they longed not for truth, but for a narrative that justified their suffering. When faith or reason failed, ideology took their place.
Modern Britain lives in that same psychological terrain. The old moral infrastructure, Church, Crown, work, class, and civic pride, has decayed. Public trust has collapsed at every level; look around, and you can feel it. In the OECD’s 2024 trust survey, only 27 per cent of Britons expressed confidence in their government, and barely 19 per cent trusted the news media. Party loyalty has disintegrated into cynicism. The National Centre for Social Research reports that 45 per cent of citizens now say they “almost never” trust any government to act in the public interest, double the proportion just four years ago. The vacuum Frankl described, an emptiness where meaning should be, has become social fact.
That emptiness is not abstract. You can measure it in the numbers as much as in the mood of the country. In 2024, the top 10 per cent of households controlled around 57 per cent of total UK wealth, while the bottom half held less than five, according to the Office for National Statistics. Food-bank use has more than tripled since 2015, with the Trussell Trust distributing over 3.1 million emergency parcels in 2023–24, the highest on record. Wages, adjusted for inflation, remain below their 2008 level, marking over a decade of stagnation(ONS, 2024). The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates 7.5 million people now live in insecure or unaffordable housing, while the Institute for Government calculates local-authority spending per person has fallen by roughly 30 per cent since 2010.
The result is not only economic deprivation but psychological dislocation. People no longer recognise themselves in the nation’s story. Politics feels like theatre performed for someone else’s audience. The economy looks rigged. The media sounds manipulative. Beneath it all runs the same quiet conclusion: the system stopped being about us a long time ago.
A society in that condition becomes susceptible to what Dostoevsky called possession, the takeover of the self by a single, obsessive idea that fills the void where conscience and complexity once lived. In our time, possession has become political. Right-wing media and populist politicians have learned how to manufacture moral coherence out of chaos. They provide meaning without truth.
GB News, the Daily Mail, TalkTV, Reform UK, and the orbit of commentators who populate them operate as meaning factories. Their product is not information but certainty. Each broadcast converts confusion into moral clarity: the “real Briton” versus the “elite,” the native versus the outsider, the truth-teller versus the traitor. This formula delivers emotional stability to audiences who feel unmoored. It tells them who they are and who to blame.
Studies bear out how engineered this process has become. An Ofcom analysis (2024) found that over 40 per cent of GB News political segments used language of “threat” or “betrayal.” Press Gazette engagement data show that emotionally negative headlines attract nearly 25 per cent more clicks than neutral ones. Social-media analytics reveal that anti-immigration content generates several times as many interactions as policy reporting. The machinery of division is profitable because outrage performs the function of belonging.
It also completes the psychological circuit Frankl described. When people can no longer find purpose in contribution or creativity, they seek it in opposition. The culture war offers moral labour, the work of defending civilisation from corruption. It reframes humiliation as heroism. Each headline about “illegal migration,” each televised fury over “wokeness,” renews the feeling that one’s suffering serves a higher cause.
Political actors learned the rhythm quickly. Brexit transformed grievance into destiny, its slogan “Take Back Control” functioning as therapy, not policy; a promise that chaos could be reinterpreted as victory. Boris Johnson, Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage, and the chorus that followed them all drew from the same Dostoevskian script to offer salvation through righteous anger, and people will overlook deceit in exchange for meaning. Fear became the only form of coherence left, a moral narcotic that could sustain political identity long after truth had fled.
The pattern didn’t end with Brexit; it mutated. Reform UK now sells the next dose of national salvation like a travelling apothecary, a bottle of snake oil labelled “common sense.” Its rhetoric is the same as its predecessor’s, only more desperate, promising to defend “ordinary people” while courting the disaffected and deceived. The irony is that its message depends on the very despair it claims to heal. It cannot fix the wound without closing its business.
Figures like Tommy Robinson, reinvented as symbols of defiance, claim to be “uniting the Kingdom” by dividing it further; his movement operates as moral theatre for those who confuse persecution with purpose. At the same time, Rupert Lowe, ex-Reform’s loudest voice, has crossed from populist opportunism into something darker, proposing what amounts to ethnic cleansing by arithmetic, a euphemism for demographic erasure dressed in policy language, calling for “negative net migration” as if human beings were variables in a spreadsheet. It is the language of moral collapse disguised as arithmetic prudence, a rhetoric widely acknowledged but utterly indifferent to its own implications.
Matt Goodwin, once a scholar of extremism, now feeds it. His manipulated metrics of “native decline” and “demographic replacement” lend academic varnish to xenophobia, giving intellectual permission to paranoia. In Dostoevsky’s world, this is the moment when the preacher begins to believe his own sermon, when illusion and opportunism merge until they are indistinguishable.
Each of these figures profits from the same wound, the collapse of faith in the possibility of an honest politics. Their success depends on keeping Britain angry, atomised, and afraid, as they cannot thrive in a country at peace with itself; peace would put them out of business. That is why every speech, every interview, every X post (Tweet) must remind their audience that the nation is under siege. For them, apocalypse is a business model, and despair a campaign strategy.
The underlying social pain is real, wages stagnate, housing costs soar, local services crumble, but instead of confronting the structural failures that cause despair, or holding those responsible to account, the architects of division moralise it. Poverty becomes proof of governmental betrayal; migration becomes the reason schools and hospitals are overstretched. The logic is circular but effective, if life hurts, someone must have done it to you. Dostoevsky’s characters sought redemption through punishment; the modern voter seeks restoration through blame.
Once internalised, these stories harden, and once hardened, they crystallise into dogma that metastasises through the culture. Research at Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab shows that exposure to partisan narratives increases “identity-protective reasoning”, where contradictory evidence strengthens belief instead of weakening it. Questioning the story feels like self-betrayal, and this is how ideology replaces faith, not through conviction but through dependence.
Add to that the role of the media-political complex that sustains itself through repetition. Outrage must be renewed daily. When immigration loses potency, the target shifts to universities, climate activists, or “elites.” Each cycle intensifies the next, like addiction. The neural feedback loop is identical, a hit of anger, a brief sense of unity, then withdrawal and the need for another fix. In Frankl’s terms, this is meaning addiction, a pathological pursuit of purpose that deepens the vacuum it pretends to fill.
Just like a victimless crime, the costs are measurable. King’s College London’s 2024 survey found that 61 per cent of Britons believe the nation is “more divided than at any point in living memory.” Seventy-four per cent of strong conservatives feel “under attack for their beliefs,” and 68 per cent of progressives say the same. The two camps mirror each other perfectly, each trapped in its own moral siege. Parliamentary discourse reflects the public mood, where contempt has replaced persuasion, mockery has replaced dialogue, and anonymity online provides a safe harbour for those who spread messages of hate and division further, without accountability or culpability.
As Dostoevsky warned, when a society abandons shared moral language, freedom itself becomes unbearable. People seek masters who will relieve them of doubt. The modern master is not a single autocrat but a distributed network of media personalities, influencers, and politicians who validate emotion and dismiss evidence. They do not need to lie convincingly; they only need to lie consistently.
What follows is predictable. As faith in politics collapses, faith in conspiracy grows. Telegram groups now weave migrants, the World Economic Forum, and vaccines into a single imagined plot. Local-election turnout in 2024 fell to 33 per cent, the lowest in nearly half a century. The betrayal narrative breeds both fanaticism and apathy — two faces of the same despair.
Frankl believed that even in despair, meaning could be chosen through responsibility and creative purpose. Dostoevsky believed redemption began with truth faced without illusion. Both would recognise in Britain a population starving for moral coherence but fed only spectacle. The remedy is neither censorship nor counter-propaganda but the slow reconstruction of meaning through fairness, transparency, and participation.
People must be given reasons to belong that do not depend on enemies. Work must once again connect effort with dignity. Institutions must speak honestly, even when honesty hurts. Education must teach how stories shape thought and how to resist their seduction. A society that understands how myths are made is less likely to mistake them for truth.
The architects of division know something vital, emptiness is intolerable. They sell belonging to those abandoned by history. But meaning built on resentment collapses the moment it meets reality. When that collapse comes, as economies tighten, scandals multiply, and trust disintegrates further, Britain will face the same question Dostoevsky posed through his tormented protagonists and Frankl through his survivors:
When the lies stop working, what will we live for?
Next - Part 3: The Reconstruction of Meaning - how Britain can rebuild truth, trust, and belonging only by rejecting the political and media order that betrayed them.