PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, says that he understands why some people say, "What we need is a revolution." But the challenge is not to burn things down - rather it is to walk things back.

As more and more people become frustrated by our seemingly inexorable national decline, I am increasingly hearing a common refrain.

“What we need is a revolution.”

I don’t think any of those saying this to me have literally been suggesting that I should immediately reach for my pitchfork and march with them to Westminster. But they are emphatically expressing despair and an underlying belief that the usual methods won’t work.

The key idea is that we need to burn down and destroy a lot of things to get our country back and then seek – somehow - to rebuild Britain from the ground up.

But before delving further into the fears, the hopes and the strategies of these near-revolutionaries, let’s consider the mindset of those who are determined to maintain the present constitutional status quo.

Call them what you like. The Left. The Liberal Metropolitan Elite. The Lanyard Class.

This cohort believes Britain has made progress over the past twenty-five or thirty years. Sure, the economy has performed a little disappointingly and Brexit threw a bit of a spanner into the works.  Overall, however, although there are bumps in the road, we are travelling in the right direction.

The theory is that we have successfully altered our legal and constitutional arrangements to encourage – and reflect – Britain becoming a more diverse, tolerant, cosmopolitan and inclusive sort of place. The horrors of white supremacy, the Empire, racism and Little England must exist only in the history books. We are now a different country. In fact, barely in some ways are we a country at all, more just a land mass that is part of an “international community”.

The enlightened elite are having to lead the way, of course. Graduates had the wisdom and common sense to vote Remain, Leave only triumphed because the ignorant, the prejudiced and the ill-informed voted for it. Whilst that is to be lamented, the great unwashed will either die out or be educated (perhaps cajoled) into changing their ways. It’s only a matter of time.

There is a strong undercurrent of Fabian thinking here. The country is on an incremental, benign and linear path and we keep marching forwards to the progressive, joyous, sunlit uplands. There might be the odd stumble but the journey must continue. Those who don’t march in lockstep are “on the wrong side of history”.

The group who don’t much like the look of the sunlit uplands are starting to revolt. They are spoiling for a fight – usually metaphorically, sometimes literally. They are ridiculed as wanting to stop the world so they can get off. Insurrection is in the air.

But British history isn’t like the Earth continually spinning at 1,038 miles every hour. Nor is it a predictable straight line, even in retrospect. Our history is messy. It is littered with pathways not taken and a fair few journeys down cul-de-sacs.

Of course, trooping one’s way down a road that turns out to be a dead end can be frustrating, but at least you have no real choice but to turn back.

More worrying is when we take an unmarked route which is seemingly endless and also fraught with dangers. It may take you a while to realise you’ve taken a wrong turn and an argument is likely to ensue within the travelling party about whether to press on regardless or retreat.

This is where Britain is today. We ambled blindly – perhaps even willingly – down a road of judicial activism, the empowerment of experts, supranationalism and the diminution of the powers of Parliament. When we first took that route (Blair, 1997), some of us may even have been excited about it. Certainly, barely a handful expressed any real concern.

Increasingly though, we now see where it has led us. A disillusioned electorate who have realised that they can’t get the things they vote for. A two-tier justice system in which those with the “wrong views” can expect different treatment to those who are “mission aligned”. An economy which is barely even flatlining as it is increasingly suffocated by the straitjacket of ever higher taxes and tighter regulation.

You can see why Britain feels like a tinderbox and why revolutionary talk is simmering – barely even below the surface.

But, as the great historian David Starkey has taught us, the challenge is not to burn things down - rather it is to walk things back.

In contrast to many other European countries, Britain has form here. When we take a wrong path, we don’t torch the country to the ground and start again. We repair things and reset.

If we can’t bring about another great restoration in Britain, I fear for what follows. If the next government fails as quickly and as decisively as those of the past two decades, it is no exaggeration to say that representative democracy may be imperilled. I don’t think the stakes have been higher at any stage in my lifetime.

To stop the risk of a revolution, we need swiftly to map out - and then execute – a way to pilot the country away from its current path.

We need a constitutional and judicial overhaul on a scale perhaps unseen since the seventeenth century.

That’s why we must all urgently reach for our pens, not our swords, and our toolboxes not our flamethrowers.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!