The mood is very fragile. There is a feeling of global disorder and growing chaos. The threat of war edges ever closer. Some people are even predicting revolution in the UK. Two weeks ago, Dominic Cummings gave an interview to Sky News prophesying violent uprising, then wrote on his blog that there is “Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political … Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare.”
I think something much deeper is going on beneath the surface of Britain today. Two years ago, a historian called Christopher Clark wrote a book that makes you look at your own time in a completely different way. Called Revolutionary Spring, it tells the story of the unrest that swept Europe in 1848. In a few weeks, uprisings spread like ferocious brushfire – from Paris to Berlin to Vienna, Prague and Milan. Thousands of demonstrators stormed national assemblies and kings fled their countries, caught up in a wave of violent upheaval never seen before. Clark’s book inspired me to make Shifty, my new series of films, because the world he describes feels so similar to today. One in which “the political horizon was dark. Neither nations nor governments knew where they were going.
