Want to understand the sickness of Britain today? Look no further – a novel explained it all 20 years ago | Aditya Chakrabortty

So runs the opening not of a recent piece of journalism, but a novel by JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, which despite being almost 20 years old anticipates today’s Britain with eerie precision. In the mid-2000s, Pearson reads up on his new surroundings, only to find the same headlines that assail us in the mid-2020s: “Every day the local newspaper reported attacks on an asylum hotel, the torching of a Bangladeshi takeaway, injuries to a Kosovan youth thrown over the fence into an industrial estate.”

The crusader crosses of St George, the hair clay and bloviating of GB News and the live-streaming, selfie-gurning, hate-spewing of Tommy Robinson – their spirit is better captured in this last fiction by the late Ballard than in many more recent and more breathless titles clogging up the annual best-of lists.

At the fag-end of 2025, the UK stands possibly only three-and-a-half years away from electing rightwing extremists to power, led by a man among whose sparse credentials for office are that he has never “directly racially abused” anyone. To explain this, analysts and campaigners often reach for stories of Russian money or US networks, or for analogies with German nazism. Such accounts emphasise how unusual and exotic such movements are in Britain, how positively foreign. The land that once boasted it couldn’t happen here can now only splutter that at least it didn’t begin here.

This is bad history and worse politics. Analogies can never pass for analysis. Nor does studying the rich funders of Nigel Farage or Robinson explain their hoi polloi followers. Fittingly for a writer who titled one of his stories Myths of the Near Future, Ballard observes the country of his time to glimpse the society of our times.

Everything in Kingdom Come happens in Brooklands, a suburb that wants to pretend nothing is happening. We are not in some supposedly benighted outpost of the north-east or south Wales, with cheap sentiment about the snaggletoothed “left behind”, but a junction off the M25. Rather than Epping, the centre of last summer’s protests against asylum hotels, we’re out west, among the “orbital cities of the plain, as remote as Atlantis and Samarkand to the inhabitants of Chelsea and Holland Park”. Out here are forests of business parks and convention centres, thickets of discount furniture warehouses and cheap takeaways. The great leisure activity is the gleaming giant shopping mall, which boasts “more retail space than the whole of Luton”.

Amid this yawning suburbia, Pearson starts to come awake. One evening, he sees an old Volvo up in flames, and an angry mob about to storm a “shabby house”. Inside, he supposes, must be “a released murderer or a paedophile exposed by the local vigilantes”. But no. Out come Muslim women, who have been praying in a makeshift mosque and who must rely on a police line against violence from their own neighbours. As for the white locals, they have taken to wearing red crosses – not for football matches but for an entirely different kind of kickabout, where they set on Asian shopkeepers.

It’s a mark of Ballard’s powers of observation that he spotted as far back as the 2000s that it would be to London’s perimeter where ethnic minorities would now be moving. The centre of the capital is not only turning whiter and richer, but the author could see how, a full decade before the Brexit vote, its enemies were defining the place as anti-English: “The West End, Bloomsbury, Notting Hill, Hampstead – they’re heritage London, held together by a dinner-party culture. Here, around the M25, is where it’s really happening. This is today’s England.”

Today, politicians, economists and journalists talk of the 2000s in tones of pure elegy. Imagine! One prime minister who spent more than a decade in office. House prices always rising. Flights to third-tier European cities for 99p. Easy credit and ever-cheaper goods coming in from China. Coalmines were turning into call centres, factories were becoming malls and a productive economy was turning to consumption. In the middle of the 2000s, the former mining town of Barnsley began planning to turn itself into a Tuscan hill village, ringed by a circle of torch lights.

Yet before the decade was out came an almighty crash, from which the UK has never recovered, and even before that living standards for middle- and working-class households were starting to deteriorate. In the middle of the 2000s, the going was good only for those Britons who didn’t look down to see the sands on which their lifestyles were built.

Ballard was one of the very few who did look down. In his telling, Brooklands is a bubble land, and the air is already escaping. Its landscape is post-industrial Britain, built on Westminster renewal funds and property developers promising regeneration. Still, shoppers aren’t going to the mall, he notes, they’re starting to trade down. Meanwhile, the town’s top brass think the solution is to clear the mall’s hinterland of migrants, so that it can be expanded. And so they incite race riots.

Near the apex of this brand-heavy, unproductive society is a guy who used to act in EastEnders and The Bill and now presents on the mall’s own cable TV channel (which gets better nightly ratings than BBC Two). But David Cruise has his eye on Westminster. As spin doctors and columnists talked about “retail politics”, an actual retailer fancies a crack at parliament. Cruise is defined in terms that could apply to many of those at the top today: “Today’s politics is tailor-made for him. Smiles leaking everywhere, mood music, the sales campaign that gets rid of the need for a product. Even the shiftiness. People like to be conned. It reminds them that everything is a game.”

Twenty years after this story was printed, we are just starting to write the history of the strange death of neoliberal England. Yet Kingdom Come demonstrates that our current mess has a long, long history. The bleakness that surrounds today’s politics stretches back to when the sun was out all day long and not a cloud was to be seen. Especially if you didn’t bother looking.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist