What the FT Gets Wrong About MAGA

An article by a Financial Times (FT) columnist, Edward Luce, has gone viral in South Africa.

Luce takes aim at MAGA, a permanent target of his sneering newspaper’s editorial policy, echoing the lie that the only reason President Donald Trump’s support base hates the United Kingdom (UK) capital is because it is less contradictory than the United States, so, by inference, more “successful”.

The FT has a magnificent history. Founded in 1888, it became a fixture for the curious, a reliable source of evidence-based market analysis that championed trade and avoided generalist reporting. Few other newspapers could inform readers so generously.

In 2015 the FT was acquired by Japan’s Nikkei from the UK’s publishing giant Pearson for north of £800m; since the event, its columns have shifted from sharp financial insight into bland collectivism, affording people such as Luce and Gideon Rachman the opportunity to defend the blindingly obvious decline apparent through the European continent or attack Donald Trump. Here the theme of decline is shared between shrugging and cheerleading – the former consistent with the idea that globalisation happens whether one likes it or not, a point that the newspaper could make more often were its patronising staffers less addicted to insulting people.

In the piece, Luce’s defence of London ranges from incongruent comparisons to outright lies. Perhaps lies could be “misunderstandings”; Luce, you see, doesn’t actually live in London – he is based in Washington, where 92.5% voted for Kamala Harris in 2024’s election. In the face of the cold facts for which his newspaper was once famous, London, but more importantly the UK, can’t be defended.

Statistics

Some of these facts emerge from London itself, namely the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Last Thursday, the ONS released a suite of economic indicators, highlighting (repeated) sluggish growth amid mixed sector performances for the fourth quarter and December 2025. Key releases included GDP estimates, Index of Services, Index of Production, UK Trade, Business Investment, and real-time indicators on economic activity and social change.

The first quarterly GDP estimate showed real GDP rising by a pathetic 0.1% in the fourth quarter of 2025, matching the third quarter's growth and contributing to a measly 1.3% annual increase for 2025 – marginally up from 1.1% in 2024. Manufacturing was up 0.9% – courtesy of, one assumes, laughing gas – considering that’s all Yookay high streets are selling these days. Meanwhile services were flat (0.0%), and construction fell 2.1%.

The overpromising and underdelivering Labour government, led by hopeless, nervous souls, is dithering while an ongoing cost-of-living crisis now affects 60% of the UK population. Caution, the ONS urges, must be emphasised in examining energy trends – a polite way of saying that things are going to get even bumpier as the country descends further into its net-zero delusion.

This is what Luce – the son of an aristocrat – and his friends don’t understand: things flatlining while simultaneously becoming more expensive is not success. That is called decline. And contrary to his remarks, decline is not actually that popular.

Easy to dismiss

For all their indiscretions, hypocrisies, weaknesses, and nagging, MAGA – the populist movement behind Donald Trump’s electoral success – knows decline. They know imposter-led decline too; McKinsey didn’t go to Washington to aid corrupted doctors flog the Sacklers’ OxyContin to lobbyists or careerists, but to Appalachia and places where people were already trapped in debt cycles and employment crises.

It's easy to dismiss MAGA and its views as conspiracy-addicted knuckle-dragger sister-shaggers because it's the least exhaustive of journalistic pursuits, much like the fact that the British Broadcasting Corporation once replaced a segment that featured market indicators on the broadcaster Jeremy Paxman’s show – with a weather briefing. But it knows decline – some of its proponents paid the prices of imperial folly for wars the country stood no real chance of winning and for the excesses of the global financial crisis, prompted in part by political decisions (made by Democrats) to lend money to people incapable of servicing loans. When eggs and gas become more expensive, when people are rewarded with roles beyond their capability, these people make a noise, and it works.

There are now over five million Americans visiting the UK each year, many of whom would qualify as “MAGA”. A more reasonable explanation for why frustration is being aired as it undeniably is, or why so many Americans view the UK government as something of a paedophile conspiracy (which, on the basis of current events, isn’t quite the smear it sounds) is maybe because they possess the capacity to recognise symptoms.

Inclusivity

The most awful excuse beloved by Luce and co and millions of establishment unipartiers is that in order for places to become more “inclusive”, a drop in standards or quality of life is essential – “to share resources”. Acquiesced, this excuses the absence of law enforcement, the rise in council taxes, or garbage collection being exploited as a union bargaining chip. Last year a Canadian politician confessed that one of the objectives of the ruling party there was to balance society out by eliminating the convenience to which many had become accustomed – “We’ll make everything crap – and you’ll enjoy it.”

Were the issue of “inclusivity” made real and raised to practical from ideological, the most obvious solution to resource sharing would be the dismantling of the nanny state and all its constituent parts, as well as the dismissal of millions of civil servants. Because that isn’t even considered, we can only reduce that there’s a kind of establishment sadism in practice, a pleasure in witnessing despair.

This applies elsewhere. Decline is completely avoidable, but evading its grips requires the sort of logic captured by Ludwig Erhart, Germany’s first post-World War II Minister for the Economy. Against the advice of the British, Erhart trashed the control doctrine he inherited from the Third Reich and laid the foundations for recovery, growth, and enhanced standards.

Boomer progressivism is very bad for places, be they Cape Town or Toronto or Sydney, but the only thing worse than the experience of decline is commentary masking it up as acceptable, necessary or “better than”.