Britain is now impersonating Australia. It’s all it can do to fend off the far right

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Britain is now impersonating Australia. It’s all it can do to fend off the far right

Waleed Aly Columnist, author and academic November 21, 2025 — 4.00am Advertisement

In politics, as in cricket, Britain lags decades behind Australia. This is not really the place to parse how England’s “Bazball” style of cricket is a low-grade facsimile of the attacking approach with which Australia dominated the sport decades ago. But it is the place to note how British politics seems like a strange echo of our 2010s: that era when our major parties kept axing sitting prime ministers, and asylum seekers were never far from the centre of political debate.

On this, Britain’s impersonation is far more convincing than it is in cricket: four prime ministers