Prompt: I’d like you to help me make a satirical political cartoon. The idea of the cartoon is that right-wing British men who erroneously consider themselves to be “patriots” are spending energy blocking desperate and disenfranchised people into the United Kingdom while malign foreign interests are allowed to meddle in the politics and the economy of the country unimpeded, and to the detriment of British people.

I’d like the cartoon to feature a nighttime scene on a beach on the south coast of England, with the cliffs of Dover visible in the background. In the lower left of the image we can see a gang of men, menacing if also in some instances sporting beer bellies, clad in black outfits and balaclavas, blocking the way of a group of dishevelled and exhausted refugees who are trying to disembark from an inflatable dinghy. This is an allusion to the blockade of the Port of Dover recently staged by the group who call themselves “Patriot Platform”. I’ve included an image of the group as a reference.

Meanwhile, a little further along the coast, behind the backs of the gang of so-called “patriots”, we can see Labour government figure Angela Rayner welcoming into the country Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sam Altman, whose arms are full of various things for building data centres, including some construction tools as well as pieces of hardware, part of a robot, and a rolled up blueprint with “Data Centre” visibly printed on it. This is an allusion to the current British government’s enthusiastic reception of foreign businesses attempting to use UK resources to run their data centres. I’m attaching photos of Rayner, Zuckerberg, Page, and Altman.

And then further down the beach still, we can see Reform party leader Nigel Farage rubbing his hands, puckering his lips, and raising his eyebrows as George Cottrell holds a basket full of dollar bills and ushers in Bassim Haidar and Elon Musk, who are holding bags marked with dollar signs, the word “crypto”, or the phrase “for Nige”. This is an allusion to the foreign money accepted by Farage’s Reform Party to forward allegedly “patriotic” causes. I’m attaching photos of Farage, Cottrell, Haidar, and Musk.

Model: ChatGPT (specific version not specified).

Context: On Saturday and Sunday 5 and 6 of September 2026, a group of men identifying themselves as “Patriot Platform” gathered first in Dover and then in Portsmouth on the South Coast of England in order to attempt to prevent refugees from entering the United Kingdom by way of the English Channel, or, failing this (and they did fail), to cause disruption and generally create a spectacle (and in this they succeeded). Clad in corny black uniforms including face coverings, outfits no doubt intended to intimidate but reading more like a teenage gamer’s fantasy of what 21st Century fascism should look like, these thugs have presented themselves as nationalists with a selective interpretation of Christian values. They are obsessed with the idea that they are defenders of some perverted notion of Britishness that is a manifold circulated by sexist, racist notions posturing as a coherent senese of cultural unity.

Meanwhile, the British political apparatus overtly courts foreign intervention in the United Kingdom. Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government for the current Labour government, has emerged as an enthusiastic proponent of data centres built in Britain by foreign companies in order to push emerging technology on a captive market, making a compound profit by taking both data and structural resources off the public and then converting these very resources back into a product. In the cartoon we can see American techno barons Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Larry Page of Google, and Sam Altman of OpenAI being welcomed into the country.

At the same time, Nigel Farage, leader of the xenophobic Reform party and MP for Clacton, has welcomed contributions to his party as well as directly to his personal finances from a host of foreign interests. In the cartoon we can see Farage bringing a haul of booty into the country along with his enabler George Cottrell and his supporters Bassim Haidar (of Lebanon) and Elon Musk (from South Africa, by way of the United States).

The idea that people who abandon their homelands and, at great risk to themselves, come to another place to make new lives are in any sense “invaders” seeking to import the societies of the very countries they fled is so self-evidently flawed that it is embarrassing to even need to spend energy discrediting it. With this in mind, this cartoon illustrates the idiocy of a movement that is a conduit channelling its membership into a machine which repackages latent insecurity about an unstable world as more digestible content reframing that insecurity in terms of hatred for what is perceived as otherness, at the same time priming a target audience who have effectively self-identified as deeply persuadable as remote control consumers.

Context: In the course of reading up about the Patriot Platform fiasco on the South Coast of England (see my last comic), I encountered this quote from Beatriz Lopes Buarque of the University of Manchester in an article in the Guardian:

“Racist conspiracy theories are profitable to tech companies and, consequently, there is little incentive on their part to reduce their amplification.”

It’s hardly the first time a version of this point has been made, but I found Dr. Buarque’s phrasing particularly on-point, and it got me thinking about the way that hateful online messaging becomes a very convenient lure in a nasty form of bait-and-switch marketing.

I’ve made this comic in reaction to a process I’ve noticed where some people who consider themselves to be “independent thinkers” turn out to be, ironically, especially susceptible to being told how to behave, not only as thinkers but also as consumers, workers, communicators, and just in general. The process tends to begin with some kind of isolating incident where some event that happens on a national or global scale impacts an individual in an especially negative way - Covid seems to have been a watershed moment for this, as far as I can tell. The individual in question will find alternative, typically conspiratorial explanations for the damaging event, explanations that inherently support the narrative that they have suffered unfairly. It may not always begin with some kind of overt adversity, and the instigating incident may be more of an ongoing situation than a moment, but regardless of how it starts, these individuals find themselves in a kind of funnel that propels them towards a more general world view in which they increasingly see themselves as isolated truth-seekers in a world befuddled by complacency in the face of false complexity.

Once they’ve begun to slide into the trap of simple solutions to complicated problems, these folks tend to begin to see conspiracy and calumny everywhere. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other modes of bigotry become tragically convenient devices for amalgamating these individuals into a unitary demographic that can be targeted for manipulation. People who have bought into basic explanations that cast some “other” as a root cause of an issue in their lives are accordingly primed to be targeted with “solutions” that are really about manipulating their behaviour, not fixing their problems. To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything much more intentionally sinister than standard marketing practices going on here: everything any of us encounter through social media and online content exists to support getting us to behave in a certain way with our money, our endorsements, our votes, and most of us know this even if we choose not to think about it too much. But there is a vicious correlation between the people who are willing to be led down a garden path, the people who are ready to blame someone different for their problems, and the people who can be coerced to act in a certain way out in the marketplace, and the market, being the apathetic optimiser that it is, identifies this and acts on it.

But if you detect a hint of ambiguity in the conclusion to the comic, that’s not entirely accidental. I don’t think it’s my place to single out a specific group of people or a particular set of beliefs as especially wrong or daft - even if I have done this anyway in my comic by way of telling a specific story about a general phenomenon (and I will say I do think bigotry is pretty daft, no matter how it’s dressed up). And so when I say we all need to find a way to really see one another, I do really mean that for every one of us: we’ve got to find a way to give each other a break and put the innate human ability to see things from more than one point of view to good use. Otherwise other forces will use it for us, and then bad things happen.