The Anglosphere, France and the coming war in the British Party in the media

This article illustrates and analyses right-wing opinion-formers’ threat perceptions concerning national cohesion within and across the Anglosphere in the immediate post-Brexit period among the British ‘party in the media’. This influential part of the right-wing milieu in Britain is an integral extension of the Conservative party and, increasingly, radical right politics. By analysing opinion on the Anglosphere in ‘the party in the media’ with a focus on the announcement of AUKUS, the Ukraine war and Gaza, this article analyses the worldview promoted by the Anglosphere’s advocates in the face of both external and internal challenges. First, the analysis reveals a novel ambivalence towards the Anglosphere itself. Although the Anglosphere is presented as a natural security community superior to anything that Europe could create, it is also portrayed as being undermined from within by the rise of ‘woke-ism’ across its constituent nations. This perceived challenge created a paradoxical attitude towards France amongst opinion formers. France was depicted simultaneously as an unreliable security ally and at the same time as a model of national cohesion worth emulating. Thus French republican nationhood offered a counterpoint to the self-critical, ‘woke’ tendencies seen as weakening the Anglosphere at a time of impending geostrategic conflict.