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Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war

Chaos, distrust and so many sex scandals … Ahead of his epic new series Shifty, the great documentarian charts the UK’s slide towards Whitehall’s worst nightmare

Two weeks ago, Dominic Cummings gave an interview to Sky News prophesying violent uprising, then wrote on his blog that there is “Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political … Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare.” Fascinatingly, Clark showed how from that came all the ways of ordering the world that we today accept as eternal – not just the political structures of left and right but fundamental ideas of our time, like social class. We sat in a darkened room, with a thunderstorm raging outside, as he told me firmly that human beings didn’t just follow their own self-interest when they were buying and selling stuff; they were driven by it all the time.

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