THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "70 UP" (2026)

The melancholy that settles after watching 70 Up is of a particular, refined sort: the kind that arrives not with a bang but with the quiet certainty of a man who has just realised the party ended several hours ago and the host has been politely stacking the chairs around him. We always knew the ending, of course. That was the entire point of the exercise, launched in 1964 with the Jesuitical certainty that the child at seven would reveal the man. What we did not quite bargain for was how thoroughly the man—and the woman, the few of them they allowed in—would eventually reveal us.

Asif Kapadia, stepping into the enormous shoes left by Michael Apted, has the good sense not to try filling them with anything flashy. He simply walks the same path, more slowly this time, and lets the archive do most of the talking. The result is less a new instalment than a long, elegiac retrospective of an experiment that has outlived several of its own subjects and one of its principal architects. Lynn Johnson is gone. Nick Hitchon, the farmer’s son who became a nuclear scientist and once wanted to know about the moon, filmed his final contribution three days before departing the planet entirely. The screen notes the fact with a restraint that is almost British in its refusal to make a scene. One almost applauds the decorum, then feels slightly ashamed for doing so.

They start as innocent kids believing in happy ever after. That much is true, and the early footage still has the power to wound precisely because it is so unselfconscious. Little Tony wants to be a jockey. Little Neil wants to be an astronaut. Little Suzy does not much care for her expensive school. The intervening decades have performed the usual acts of quiet sabotage. Some of the dreams were simply revised downward into something workable: cab-driving, fostering more than a hundred children, sitting in a French house full of books and mild loneliness. Others were abandoned with the weary pragmatism of people who have discovered that life is less a narrative arc than a series of administrative appointments. The illusion falls away, as the original post observed, before their eyes and ours. The difference is that we have the luxury of watching it happen to other people first.

Kapadia understands that the real subject was never class mobility or the predictive power of the age of seven. It was the slow, democratic erosion of hope. The series has always been most interesting when its participants refuse to cooperate with the hypothesis. Neil’s trajectory—bright boy, homelessness, local politics, solitary contentment in exile—remains the most stubbornly human. Symon’s late flowering as a foster parent of heroic proportions feels like a quiet rebuke to the notion that the die is cast early. Even the ones who more or less fulfilled the expectations of their seven-year-old selves look faintly surprised to find themselves still here, still being asked the same questions by a new director who has the good manners to stay mostly out of shot.

There is something almost comically English about the whole enterprise. A nation that invented the stiff upper lip decided to film its own slow collapse into pensionable reflection every seven years, then sat down politely to watch. We did not turn away. We returned, decade after decade, like relatives who cannot quite bring themselves to miss the funeral. The second half of 70 Up even allows the remaining participants a certain amount of meta-complaint about the process itself—the intrusiveness, the framing, the way Apted’s silences could feel like moral judgements. Fair enough. After sixty-odd years of being national case studies, a little resentment is the least one can expect. The series was always a “little pill of poison,” as one of them once put it, and the patients kept swallowing it anyway.

What remains is the melancholy of recognition. These people are not especially representative, not especially diverse, not especially anything except themselves. Yet they have become our mirrors by the simple, brutal method of ageing in public at regular intervals. The childhood belief in happy ever after did not so much shatter as quietly dissolve, the way a coastal path dissolves under successive winters. We watched it happen to them so that we would not have to admit it was happening to us. Now the cameras have been packed away for good, and the rest of us are left alone with the knowledge that the experiment is over, the data is in, and the results are, on the whole, rather ordinary, which is, of course, the most devastating result of all.

THE SWEDISH ARITHMETIC

There are few spectacles more reliably diverting than a European election in which the result is declared a triumph of democracy by one side and an existential catastrophe by the other, both of them quite certain that the arithmetic of the ballot box has somehow been interfered with by reality itself. Sweden has just furnished us with another of these small masterpieces. The centre-left has edged back into contention after a narrow contest, and the explanation offered in certain quarters is as blunt as a fishmonger’s cleaver: the immigrants did it.

One can almost hear the collective intake of breath among the more refined commentators. To notice that people who arrive in a country under one set of circumstances tend to vote in a particular way is regarded, in polite society, as the rhetorical equivalent of breaking wind at a state banquet. Yet the data, those tiresome little numbers that refuse to take instruction from the higher moral faculties, keep insisting on the point. Voters of foreign background in Sweden lean heavily toward the left; those of Swedish background are more evenly divided. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern, observable across much of Western Europe, and it has the awkward quality of being both predictable and politically radioactive.

The argument that follows from this observation is simplicity itself, which is why it offends. If a large and growing portion of the electorate consistently prefers one political family, then the other political family faces a mathematical problem that no amount of better messaging or more photogenic candidates can solve. The left’s strategy, according to this view, is the open frontier: welcome the arrivals, naturalise them in due course, and collect the resulting votes with the serene confidence of a man who has just discovered that the roulette wheel is fixed in his favour. The right’s counter-strategy, if it wishes to remain in the game rather than become a permanent minority interest, is said to be “remigration” — a word that manages to sound both bureaucratic and faintly medieval, as though the Interior Ministry had briefly consulted the chronicles of the Reconquista.

Fire, as the original notice put it with admirable economy, is fought with fire. One may quarrel with the metaphor. Fire, after all, is an equal-opportunity consumer of furniture, and the political arsonist often ends up standing in the same ashes as his intended victim. Still, the underlying logic has a certain grim clarity. If demographic change is treated as destiny by one side, the other side can hardly be expected to treat it as an immutable force of nature. To do so would be to accept permanent exclusion from power with the stoicism of a Stoic who has misplaced his copy of Epictetus and is making do with a pamphlet from the local Green Party.

What elevates the whole business from mere arithmetic into high comedy is the solemn pretence that none of this is happening. Official discourse prefers to speak of enrichment, diversity, and the moral imperative of openness, while carefully avoiding any discussion of the electoral consequences of those virtues once they have been translated into citizenship papers. It is rather like a host who invites half the neighbourhood to dinner and then expresses mild surprise that the conversation has turned against the previous seating plan. The guests, for their part, are under no obligation to vote for the host’s preferred party simply because the canapés were adequate. Loyalty is not a condition of entry, and gratitude is not a political programme.

The right, meanwhile, finds itself in the unenviable position of having discovered the problem rather late in the evening, after the furniture has already been rearranged. Its more voluble spokesmen now talk of remigration with the sudden enthusiasm of a man who has just remembered where he left the fire extinguisher. Whether such a policy is practicable, desirable, or even coherent is a separate question; the fact that it is being proposed at all tells us something about the scale of the anxiety. Permanent minority status is a prospect that concentrates the mind wonderfully, even among politicians whose usual talents run more to slogan than to strategy.

One need not endorse the remedy to acknowledge the diagnosis. Societies that import large numbers of people from cultural and political traditions markedly different from their own should not be astonished when those people bring their preferences with them. To pretend otherwise is to treat the electorate as a blank slate upon which the host nation may write whatever values it prefers — an assumption that sits oddly with the simultaneous insistence that every culture is of equal worth and must be celebrated rather than assimilated. The contradiction is so glaring that only a professional intellectual could fail to notice it, and even then only with considerable effort.

Sweden’s narrow result is therefore less a verdict on any particular policy than a reminder of an older truth: politics is downstream of demography, and demography is downstream of decisions that were sold at the time as acts of pure benevolence. The left has played the longer game with some skill. The right is now being invited, by its own more impatient voices, to play a shorter and sharper one. Whether either side will ultimately thank the immigrants for the opportunity remains to be seen. The immigrants themselves, one suspects, will continue to vote according to their own lights, which is, after all, what free citizens are supposed to do. 

The rest of us are left with the spectacle of two political camps arguing over the consequences of a transformation that both of them, in different ways, helped to create — and doing so with all the grace of men who have just realised that the house they are fighting over no longer belongs exclusively to either of them. It is, as the original note observed with devastating understatement, as simple as that. The difficulty, of course, is that simplicity has never been democracy’s strongest suit.

BIT BY BIT, THE SWITCH FLIPS ...

Picture the scene, dear reader. Somewhere in a fluorescent-lit bunker that smells of institutional coffee and quiet despair, a group of extremely serious people in extremely expensive suits are nodding along to a PowerPoint about “streamlining identity verification.” One of them is Lisa Nandy, Culture Secretary at the time, looking for all the world like she’s just discovered the secret to happiness: forcing every adult in the country to exist as a neat little data packet that the state can ping whenever it feels insecure. She went on the telly and said it with the serene confidence of someone who has never once been on the wrong end of a government algorithm. All British adults will have a digital ID by the end of Parliament. 

Not a card you have to wave about like a Soviet internal passport, she insisted. Nothing so vulgar. Just a lovely digital thing on your phone that you’ll only really need to prove you have the right to work. It’s for your protection, you see. Against illegal workers. Against fraud. Against the terrifying spectre of people existing without the state’s prior approval. How thoughtful. How modern. How very, very fucking convenient for the people who will eventually own the off-switch.

The original objection still stands, and it stands taller than ever. Many people might want the sort of UN-flavoured, centralised data framework the government was so keen on building. Some will think it’s really convenient. They don’t mind the government being able to watch what they spend their money on, who pays them, where they go on holiday, what vaccines they take each year, how well they did in school and what their political opinions look like online. Some will even clap like seals at the idea that international Digital ID will magically stop illegal migration and fraud and make the streets safer. Fair enough. People clap for all sorts of things. Some people clap for reality television.

The problem—the screaming, copper-bottomed, Black Mirror-shaped problem—is that no one was asked to vote for it. Digital ID is not a card or a wallet on your phone. It is an entire YOU file, accessible by authorities, that will eventually grant you permissions depending on your behaviour. That framework was already being sketched in. The permissions logic is baked into the concept from the start. Once the infrastructure exists, the temptation to expand its uses is not a bug. It is the entire operating system of power.

If this was so marvellous, so obviously better for everyone, why didn’t the government spell out exactly what it was, what it would do, and—crucially—what it could do in five years, ten years, when the political weather has shifted and the same machinery is being run by people who make today’s lot look like soft liberals? Why didn’t the parties put it in their manifestos in plain English? Why the soft-focus language about convenience and “gateway to government services” while Nandy reassured everyone it would never, ever be used to restrict access to the NHS or pensions? Because they knew. They knew the majority would look at the full prospectus and say, in no undertrain terms, sod off. And that is not an acceptable answer in a country that still pretends to run on consent.

Bit by bit the control changes. First it’s just for right to work. Then it’s the easiest way to access benefits. Then it’s the preferred method for banking, travel, healthcare records, age verification, everything. Suddenly not having the digital equivalent of a gold star means life becomes a series of minor, grinding humiliations. You are not banned. You are simply… less convenient. Less trusted. Less permitted. The government does not need jackboots when it has an app that can quietly throttle your existence.

This was never just about Lisa Nandy, though she was a particularly enthusiastic salesperson for the product. It was the entire apparatus—ministers, civil servants, the think-tank circuit, the same revolving door of consultants and global forums that treat the population as a management problem rather than a collection of free adults. A cartel of the well-connected, convinced that the only thing standing between civilisation and chaos is more data, more verification, more central visibility. They talk about “trust frameworks” and “useful, inclusive, trusted” systems while building the architecture for something that looks, smells and walks like soft authoritarianism with a user-friendly interface.

Orwell didn’t warn us about the jackboot first. He warned us about the language that makes the jackboot feel like common sense. “Protect Britons.” “Tackle illegal working.” “Cut bureaucracy.” “Digital age.” Every phrase is a little anaesthetic. By the time you notice the needle, the drip is already running. The plans were eventually watered down under pressure, then publicly scrapped when the political weather changed. Three million people signed a petition. Public opposition was loud enough that even a government with a large majority had to retreat. That should be the end of the story. It never is. The infrastructure thinking remains. The appetite remains. The belief that ordinary people cannot be trusted with their own lives without a digital chaperone remains. 

And the next time the same idea is wheeled out—perhaps under a different name, with slightly softer edges and a new set of smiling ministers—it will arrive wearing the same patient smile Nandy wore while explaining that this was all for our own good. The only rational response to that smile is to treat it the way you treat a man offering you a free tracking collar “for your safety.” You smile back. You say "no". And you remember that the people building the systems of control are never the ones who will live under the worst version of them. This is point where "no" simply has to become "fuck off". 

They will have exemptions. They will have workarounds. They will have the power to redefine what 'behaviour' looks like when it becomes inconvenient. We were not asked. That remains the point. Everything else is just the long, darkly comic process of watching a political class try to sell the public their own subordination as an upgrade.

Time for that revolution, methinks.