“There are three things people say about the centre of Bedford these days,” announced Peter McCormack, the bitcoin tycoon and local football club owner, dressed like a retired skateboarder in his high-street coffee shop. “It’s a shithole, there’s nothing to do, and I don’t feel safe.” McCormack’s normal milieu is interviews with Liz Truss and the crypto-billionaire Winklevoss twins. But last Thursday, he was keeping different company: salon owners, women afraid to walk home at night, and septuagenarian Tory councillors with leather suitcases and cream trench coats.
Bedford, they had all been told by the police and local authorities, had been getting better, despite its post-pandemic troubles with crime and civic drift. But no one believed them. And now they were willing to listen to a man with a successful YouTube channel. For the next eight weeks, McCormack plans to self-fund a private security scheme in Bedford to guard the high street. The private security firm would act as “scarecrows” to deter vagrants and sex pests that had come to plague the town.
“Is there a danger,” asked one elderly woman in the crowd, “that we are bringing more shame on people who are already vilified? Do we have a long-term plan to help them?” Eyes rolled. “This is what I like to call suicidal empathy,” answered McCormack. “I care more about the working people of this town than criminals and drug addicts.” The crowd nodded in agreement.
This was the start of Project Bedford, a model of civic renewal and regeneration for Britain’s provincial malaise that McCormack has described to one American podcaster as a potential “political coup.” To put it differently, it’s the ethos of “you can just do things” brought to a small English town, where a broader national schism of mistrust and cynicism has manifested itself in angry shopkeepers and radicalised dads in Ralph Lauren shirts.
But this wasn’t just about men in high-viz jackets guarding the Lidl carpark. The stories shared at this beleaguered caucus pointed to some deeper cosmic disturbance in the natural order of a boring English market town. Shoplifters chased away with shovels, paedophiles using their business’s wifi to download unspeakable things, a lady who had locked herself in a cupboard, because the police wouldn’t come to deal with a man pursuing her. This was a moral degradation for which the hollow and mimsy hallmarks of modern English civil society — with its neighbourhood policing plans and community outreach initiatives — seemed unable to resolve.
On first impressions, rumours of civic collapse seem hard to believe in Bedford. “Somewhere in England,” was how evacuated BBC broadcasters referred to their new home during the Second World War. In trying to remain anonymous from the Luftwaffe, they had inadvertently stumbled on the perfect description of that parochial yet reassuring dullness you can still find by the banks of the River Ouse. This is an atmosphere that, over its 1,000-year history, has nurtured everything from Pilgrim’s Progress, the deepest work of devotional introspection in the English language, to what will soon be Europe’s largest theme park.
“On first impressions, rumours of civic collapse seem hard to believe in Bedford.”
Bedford is the spiritual middle of middle England. A town of 100,000 people, equidistant from both Luton and Milton Keynes, it now finds itself in some unwilling struggle between those two archetypes of modern England. At some point in the Sixties, its post-war architects lost interest in the idea of Bedford as a quaint county town, burrowing a concrete shopping centre right through its central hearth. Today, it’s home to a closed Marks and Spencers, haggard South Asian Deliveroo drivers, and delirious alcoholics. The town and its surrounds, Victorian suburbs, new build estates and genteel hamlets, tend to avoid the place altogether. Visitor numbers to the town centre have fallen by half a million a month.
Walking through the old centre, you can still feel the spirit of the curtain twitcher, the bossy parochial council, that stifling and sinister provincial mystery that promises to hold the place together for eternity. Now it’s been put to the test, with disorder so hallucinatory and surreal it appears like a paranoid apparition for a town that once dreamt of being in The Sunday Times property supplement. The morning of McCormack’s meeting, I watched a topless crack addict barrelling through a shopping arcade filled with families and their toddlers licking ice cream. A mid-morning frenzy of lolling eyes and semen-stained trousers.
Further up the high street, there was more disorder. “Someone causing trouble with a knuckleduster,” said one bystander with morbid glee. Two police cars had pulled up outside the Natwest, and in the ruckus a suspect was bungled away. In the brief return to normality, the topless man took out his pipe, rubbed it on his wobbling belly, then lit up in relief.
McCormack’s plan is popular. Nearly everyone I spoke to welcomed the scheme, with many noting that Milton Keynes already has its own private security run by My Local Bobby. The firm is increasingly operating across the country, after its success guarding central London and its affluent suburbs. But McCormack’s vision is less the preserve of a flashy neighbourhood watch, and more of a market town populist driving a wedge in the ongoing war over perceptions of reality in Bedford — between the people who live here and those tasked with running the place. Between those who say things are getting better and those who believe it is not.
In the aftermath of his event, John Tizzard, the local police and crime commissioner, accused McCormack of “exaggerating and spreading misinformation about the town’s decline,” arguing that official statistics showed that crime was improving. During McCormack’s meeting, a patrol car made a point of crawling past, promptly dismissed by attendees as a pathetic sop. McCormack is now in a public spat with Tizzard, who he has called a “weak man”, who must resign.
Speak to locals and it’s clear whose side they’re on. One shop owner, who runs one of the town’s longest-running stores and didn’t want to be named, said he had “stopped engaging” with officers — “if I tell them how it is,” he said, “then I’m scared I’ll get arrested.” Mark, a construction surveyor who has lived in the town for 35 years, shared a similar loss of faith. When I ask him to explain how the town has declined, he thinks long and hard before bringing up the former England rugby player and policeman Martin Bayfield, who used to work for the local force. “The problem is we don’t have people like him anymore,” says Mark of the six-foot-10-inch former officer. “Everyone knew Martin, and no one wanted to mess with him.”
This war over reality when it comes to civic decay is now playing out on the national stage, with Nigel Farage recently launching Reform’s latest “Britain is Lawless” campaign. Among other things, Farage points to erroneous statistics that exclude shoplifting, or else that fail to weight for high crime areas. In Bedford, one excellent example of revealed preference is the local mayor, now more than happy to lean on the philanthropy of a YouTuber.
“What does the mayor think of all of this?” a young man sneered during the meeting at Real Coffee. A large, jolly Dickensian man, the Conservative Tom Wootton, stood up and bellowed across the room. “In a few years time, less than three miles there’s going to be eight million visitors. We’ve got a short window and a short time and we’ve got to make it work.” He’s referring to Universal Studios Great Britain, a planned 700-acre theme park and resort complex just outside of town, one supporter claims could bring 28,000 jobs to the local economy.
It’s this looming deadline, to restore Bedford into a gentle site for tourists, that adds an unsettling urgency to McCormack’s campaign. Given his bleak outlook, five years seems a long time for a government he sees as pushing us towards state collapse a la Venezuela. And with Reform’s newfound councils discovering the legal and professional limits of their promise to overturn Britain’s provincial decline, it’s one McCormack believes could come to a head in Bedford.
“Speak to locals and it’s clear whose side they’re on.”
“The grievances of the colonies against the King were the same as we have now,” he had previously told an American podcast. When I ask him in the more sobering setting of Bedford high street if he’s serious, he doesn’t back down. “If enough people are angry enough we could look at the playbook of the Velvet Revolution,” McCormack says. “An entirely peaceful revolution no shots were fired and it brought down the Czechosvlakian government.” And could that start in Bedford? “Maybe, maybe so. I think we have enough reason to say that the Government is now illegitimate; they have no mandate. I’m going to walk up to that line and hover around it.”
All the while, the people of Bedford remain elusively discontent. Before I left, Mark took me on a tour. The night was drawing in, and wandering through the town centre like lost shoppers are scores of vagrants who line the boarded-up shops. “No one really knows where they’re coming from,” Mark says. And then we see a scene that sums up the war over reality taking place here in Bedford. There, outside what was once Clinton’s cards, is one of the council’s “Rapid Response” vehicles. Inside are two security contractors from South Asia, one with his feet on the dashboard, slowly herding a merry huddle of drunks through the derelict shopping centre in a bemused, ineffectual daze. “We love them,” says one of the drunks.
The last place Mark showed me was a lamppost outside a Greggs. It’s the spot where Thomas Taylor, just 17, was stabbed and stamped on by four youths and “left for dead” at the start of the year. That day, the front page of the local paper had the latest details of the trial. One of the 18-year-old killers had habitually carried a ten-inch knife, even into the Job Centre across the road. On the lamppost were no flowers, just a black piece of tape to mark the spot.
