They’ve brought the hangman back. But this time he’s trending. He wears a suit, carries a smartphone, and hides behind parliamentary privilege and blue-tick outrage. His scaffold isn’t built of timber and rope; it’s made of hashtags, headlines, and hashtags repeated until fear hardens into “common sense.” He doesn’t swing the trapdoor himself; he points, and the crowd does the rest.
Maurice Ogden’s The Hangman was a warning. Written in the 1950s, in a decade scarred by fascism and McCarthyism, it described a town that stayed silent as the hangman went about his work. First, a stranger; then, a neighbour; then, one of their own. Each time, the people told themselves: another’s grief is our relief. Each time, the scaffold grew higher. By the end, the hangman comes for the narrator, the last man standing, and tells him: I did no more than you let me do.
Seventy years on, the story is ours.
The hangman has returned to Britain, not as a man but as a network. A pipeline of politicians, pundits, and anonymous accounts who make their living through outrage. They claim they’re protecting British identity. What they’re really protecting is the industry of fear.
The new scaffold is built daily. Talk-radio soundbites. TV panels dressed as debates. Tabloid front pages that speak of “invasions,” “swarms,” “crackdowns,” and “burdens.” Social-media accounts that flood timelines with rumours about crimes allegedly committed by migrants. Each share, each nod, each “I’m not racist but…” adds another plank.
The difference between then and now is speed. In Ogden’s town, the hangman worked by dawn. Today, he works by algorithm. The rope tightens every time a lie outperforms the truth.
The language has changed, but the instinct is the same. Replace “alien from another land” with “boat person,” “economic migrant,” or “illegal.” The labelling does the work. It strips the human, leaving the target. It tells the reader who to fear before they’ve even met them.
Ministers now talk in the grammar of threat. “Stop the boats.” “Secure the borders.” “Take back control.” It’s the tone of siege, of encirclement. The public, bombarded daily, internalises the rhythm. Fear becomes normal. Cruelty becomes policy, and decency becomes naive.
What was once “the hostile environment” has become something worse, a culture that feeds on humiliation. Videos of dawn raids trend online. Migrants are filmed through windows like wildlife. Newspapers print pictures of tents, not people. Words such as safety and security are redefined to mean exclusion and containment.
This is the Britain that congratulates itself on its “toughness.” But toughness without morality is cowardice, and the cowardice here lies not only with those who shout loudest, but with those who look away.
The silent town is us, the readers, voters, viewers, scrolling past each story thinking, at least it’s not me. We’ve traded British sensibility of fairness, decency, and proportion for slogans. The moral reflex that once said, this is wrong, now says, this is politics.
The hangman doesn’t need to convince everyone. He only needs silence. He thrives on the half-hearted liberal who says, “it’s complicated,” while the rope tightens. He thrives on the working-class voter who is told that migrants caused his rent hike, that the asylum seeker in a hotel is the reason his GP queue is longer. He thrives on outrage disguised as news, on performative anger, on that daily drip of suspicion that turns a country against itself.
It’s easy to think the victims will always be someone else. The foreigner. The refugee. The Muslim. The welfare claimant. But The Hangman warns what happens next. Once the structure is built, once exclusion is routine, it doesn’t stop at the first victim.
When the scapegoat runs out, new ones are made. The poor. The protester. The journalist. The artist and anyone who refuses the script. The hangman only ever pauses to find a new definition of “them.”
The question is whether anyone will step forward before the rope finds its final shape. The hangman is not a man but a mirror. He reflects the moral emptiness of those who say nothing.
In the poem’s closing lines, the narrator cries out, “I did no more than you let me do.” That sentence should haunt every editor who prints hate for clicks, every politician who stokes division for votes, every citizen who scrolls past cruelty and calls it news.
The scaffold is already here. We built it ourselves.