“Fucking hit him, hit him, hit him! Now now now! Take his fucking head off you prick! Teach him a fucking lesson!”
What lesson? What might we learn from the young people who, every eight weeks or so, fill Rochester’s Casino Rooms, Kent’s largest nightclub, for evenings of violence?
You do not do this – mixed martial arts – without good reason. The Bloodline Fight Series is an amateur affair. The cage fencing is looser than it should be, so instead of bouncing back into the ring, retreating fighters fall back into an evil hammock, cradled in place for the knees and fists of their opponents. After one pummelled victim threw up, the canvas was roughly mopped, and the next fight began almost immediately.
None of Bloodline’s competitors will make a living from fighting. If there were any chance of that, they would not be here. After fights they come out to the smoking area, their faces cherried and lit up. Alfie Smith grinned at me with an eye swollen shut and offered a hand still wrapped in boxing tape. He had lost his fight, but it had been “Lovely! Brilliant!” He would do it again, “100 per cent!”
Rochester’s centre celebrates the fallen of the Second World War and Charles Dickens’s historic residence. Under red, white and royal blue bunting on the high street, you can visit Oliver’s restaurant, Little Dorrit’s piercings studio, Sweet Expectations sweet shop, Peggotty’s Parlour, and Tiny Tim’s all-day breakfast.
But it is easy to stray off the edge of the postcard. In 1998, Rochester became the first city in the history of the UK to fail to protect, then lose, its status as a city. Outside the Casino Rooms is a fragment of the castle wall built a millennium ago to keep out invaders. From the castle, you see chalk cliffs, much like those along the English Channel, which in the first half of this year saw 19,982 illegal immigrants land by small boats. Other than Clacton, now Nigel Farage’s constituency, Rochester and Strood is the only seat that Ukip ever won. After that by-election, in November 2014, Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury, attracted opprobrium after posting an “image from #Rochester”. The picture showed a terraced house with a white van outside and the St George’s cross hanging from the window. Earlier this month, a Rightmove survey found Rochester to be the fourth-most unhappy place to live of the 220 locations surveyed.
In the garden of the Ye Arrow pub on the afternoon before the fights, talk (“Fuck off! If that’s Watermelon Ice, I’m Chinese!”) subsided into applause as a fighter arrived. Lucas Dunia, a self-employed scaffolder, flexed his biceps and joined his friends. It was to be his first fight. With a shaved head, Venum-branded MMA clothing, a lean face and a non-alcoholic beverage, Dunia looked distinct in the pub garden – more glamorous and more intent than the rest.
Hours later, Dunia used his back to defend a tackle with a headlock. Wriggling free from the subsequent attempt on his neck, he gave away his arm, by which he was pulled back down to the mat. His opponent mounted his back – decisively this time – and wrapped his elbow across Dunia’s neck. If held, such chokes can kill people. Dunia kept breathing until just ten seconds remained in the fight, at which point he submitted by “tapping out” on his opponent’s arm.
In MMA, fans find something like truth. As Dunia suffocated, a child in front of me zoomed his iPhone camera in on the fighter’s skull. A map of veins emerged on his skin: life brought to the surface. On the large screen high on the wall was a quotation from Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the largest MMA promotion company in the world. “Fighting is in our DNA. We get it and we like it.”
This has been a weekend of popular violent spectacle. This Friday (19 December), Watford-born boxing champion Anthony Joshua fought American influencer Jake Paul. Tonight (20 December), Luton-born manosphere guru Andrew Tate, who first rose to prominence as a kickboxer, will fight another American influencer, Chase DeMoor. Those contests are boxing, because it is easier for influencers to learn, but MMA is the ascendant combat sport of 21st-century Britain. The number of UK MMA gyms increased 32-fold between 2009 and 2019. The sport is especially popular among the young: in one survey, almost a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds called themselves fans of the sport.
In fact, you can understand MMA’s popularity by examining how it differs from the sport it replaces. When MMA emerged, boxing had long been the most popular combat sport. Modern boxing still follows conventions issued in Victorian Britain. The Queensbury Rules, drafted in London in 1865 and endorsed by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, aimed to instil sportsmanship and fair play. They prohibited all wrestling and insisted that a fallen fighter have ten seconds unassisted to recover. “You must not fight simply to win,” the rules instructed, “no holds barred is not the way; you must win by the rules.”
In MMA, fighters may wrestle, kick, elbow, knee, grapple, strike downed opponents and the backs of heads – none of which is permitted in boxing. In July 2019, a fight ended after five seconds: wrestler Ben Askren ducked for his opponent’s legs; striker Jorge Masvidal leapt for his opponent’s face. A flying knee hit a diving skull and Askren fell into a flat, rigorous sleep. As is standard, Masvidal rained hammer fists on to Askren’s skull until a referee pushed him off.
As MMA became more popular, boxing advocates derided it as a less skilful version of their sport. In 2007, Floyd Mayweather said cage fighters were “guys who didn’t make it in our sport”. Several MMA fans directed me to a video of Joe Rogan, who has been a UFC commentator since the company’s early days, arguing with a boxing promoter. Rogan dismissed boxing’s rules as arbitrary inhibitions: to say “we hate each other, we’re gonna fight, we’re gonna duke it out man to man – but we’re only going to use our hands” was, for Rogan, “a silly agreement”.
And MMA fans always had another, blunter argument: theirs was a truer, more effective violence – they would win in a fight. A young man at a London UFC event this June told me that only an MMA fighter could walk into a room and declare, “No one here is a threat to me.” In boxing’s Eighties heyday, Mike Tyson was nicknamed the “baddest man on the planet.” In 2023, heavyweight champion Tyson Fury (named after Mike) was ridiculed for claiming the same mantle. Fury once said he could beat a UFC heavyweight “in a room, on our own.” Yet, facing down a much smaller MMA fighter soon after, he quailed. “I ain’t going in no cage! I’m a straight-up boxer. Queensberry rules!” For all its claims to being “the sweet science,” boxing’s legitimacy rested on its approximation of real, lawless violence – but it was displaced by a closer match.
In America, fighting doesn’t just have an audience – it has a politics. At UFC events, President Donald Trump has received the ring walk of a superstar fighter. After the most gifted fighter of all time, Jon Jones, left his opponent, Stipe Miocic, broken on the canvas in November 2024, he mimicked Trump’s signature dance and then offered his heavyweight championship belt to the President, who was ringside, having won the election just 11 days earlier. American liberals call the UFC a gateway drug to right-wing radicalisation – while to Maga, it is something of a national sport. Both phenomena are young, macho and violent; the synergies are clear.
The President is connected personally to the UFC’s top brass. When Trump appeared in West Palm Beach, Florida, to accept his victory over Kamala Harris, he was followed on to the stage by four family members – and then by Dana White. Weeks earlier, Trump had appeared on the podcast of UFC commentator Joe Rogan, who endorsed him days later. At the dawn of the UFC, Rogan was a little-known comedian providing commentary for free, and in 2001, White could not find venues that would host his shows. Trump offered his Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. As he told the UFC Unfiltered podcast: “They couldn’t get a venue because of the danger. People thought it was so dangerous… I supplied them with a venue.”
But there is also a textural match between Trumpian populism and MMA. Both surged past complacent incumbents with irreverence and brutal tactics that flouted established rules. As each succeeded, their supporters felt a collective glee at the sight of ancient, revered, complacent disciplines humiliated by franker methods. It felt, to fans, like a triumph of honesty. Rogan has said that what fans like about MMA is how clearly one can tell winners from losers. Next year, on the 250th anniversary of Independence Day, there are plans to host a UFC event on the White House lawn.
The UFC met resistance when it first came to the UK in 2002. Labour MP Derek Wyatt protested: “We have been campaigning against fox hunting, bear-baiting and cockfighting, and this is the human equivalent.” Today, MMA is hugely popular in the UK. The UFC heavyweight champion, Tom Aspinall, is from Salford. The company made its 30th UK visit in June this year, filling London’s O2 Arena. The cheapest tickets on the night were £283.25.
“Fucking love MMA,” a young fan at the O2 told me. “It’s the ultimate form of fighting.” Another, who had done an amateur fight himself, said MMA was “the most unpredictable, exciting sport there is.” The arena’s satellite venues advertised smaller, local fighting promotions. In a pub during the preliminary fights, a dad squealed in horror and pointed his daughters to a screen, where a deep gash above one fighter’s eye was visible.
But if Britain has a similar appetite for MMA, the political consequence is much less clear. It is hard to know, for instance, which party could speak to the Bloodline fans.
The moniker “Britain’s hardest MP” belongs to Labour. Will Stone, MP for Swindon North, is a former rifleman in the British Army and a jiu jitsu fighter. He saw Starmer as a leader who could realistically take power and “get things done.” When we met in Westminster’s Portcullis House, Stone cheerily told a member of his team, “He wants me to assault him!” – then delivered an MMA leg kick on me. He claimed it was only “20 per cent,” but the kick nonetheless produced a concussive sequence of blooming, psychedelic pains in my leg and then my gut, disabling me for much of the morning.
When I asked if Labour had a firm purchase on martial sentiment, Stone had a neat answer: “Well, I’ve got the Union Jack tattooed on my bicep.” But it is harder than that to deny that frustrated political energies in Britain have generally been flowing to Reform, not least in Rochester. In this year’s May Kent County Council elections, the party took 57 of 81 seats, wiping out a Conservative majority that had held for almost three decades. The county is something of an unofficial heartland for the insurgent party: Labour won Rochester and Strood in 2024, but only because Reform and the Conservatives split their vote.
Lauren Edwards, the MP, declined to speak to me; her team expressed concerns that a piece including Reform and Bloodline would be too negative. The new chair of the local Green Party, supposedly the repository for disaffected young voters, was forthright enough to tell me that Reform’s policies “not only will not work, they are talking absolute shit.” But she conceded that she had never spoken to anyone who had, for instance, put up St George’s crosses this summer or attended Bloodline.
In June, the local Reform branch held a meeting in the George pub. Outside, a biker with a “Skinhead” badge sewn onto his leather jacket sat near homemade poppies. Attendees voiced frustrations about the NHS and immigration. There was a sense of momentum at the meeting, with hopes that Lee Anderson would attend the coming “BBQ & Banter” event. But one demographic was still markedly absent. There was an appeal for help recruiting young members through debating clubs, beach picnics, and football matches – they wanted “all the youngsters you know.” Reform, it seems, also doesn’t know where Rochester’s young people are.
TThe young people who congregated at Bloodline weren’t interested in conventional politics. Across the road from the Casino Rooms was an abandoned social club; across the bridge, the local Reform branch looked deserted, piled with dust, unopened mail and forsaken coffee cups. One lifelong resident was supporting his friend in the 18th fight. I asked which party was in government. “I wouldn’t even know, mate,” he said.
One 18-year-old I spoke to was excited to spot gymfluencer Willow Gait – known for her “get-dressed-with-me” videos – in the audience. But when I asked him about politics, he replied: “Piers Starmer? I ain’t know that dude. No one knows who the fuck that is. I thought it was still Boris Johnson. Everyone knew him because he was a meme. Is it not Michael Farage?”
If politics is the resolution of conflict without bloodshed, then the Bloodline fans were well past politics. There was no sense that the state might improve their lives. All their instinct for struggle flowed inward, toward training themselves. Asking about parties and policies, I felt about as relevant as Dickens’s Miss Havisham, who had sat frozen in time in a house five minutes from the Casino Rooms, “lost in contemplation of the ashy fire.”
“Politics? They don’t care,” Christopher “Granite Chin” Garnett told me of the young people who come to his gym, Chatham’s Granite Gym, housed in a disused 11th-century church. MMA has “absolutely nothing to do with politics,” Garnett said. His students ranged from “police officers and estate kids,” and you might joke with an opponent, “Oh yeah, I bet you’re one of the stop-the-boats fellas, aren’t you!” But though all sorts enter his gym, Garnett noted, “What I’ve noticed over the years is this: anxiety is a thing.”
Advocates of MMA often elaborate on how the discipline empowers trainees to improve their lives. But Bloodline felt more nihilistic than that. Garnett said that when he looks at new students and realises, “you want to close that gaping hole of insecurity that you’ve got,” he always wonders, “Shall I tell them? It won’t go away.” Blows to the skull and the restriction of oxygen to the brain offer not amelioration but absorption, or, at best, acceptance. This isn’t American UFC, with its triumphal Coliseum that Donald Trump surveys like a Caesar and fighters who become millionaires. It’s something sadder.
Before Lucas Dunia tapped out to the choke, the air was frantic with possibility. His limbs flailed, and his coaches screamed out escapes he might try. After he submitted, there was a sudden calm, and it seemed, obviously and peacefully true, that there had never been any escape. Fighting offers brutal honesty and honest brutality, but its extreme violence is a gentler introduction than others to man’s destructibility. It was Dunia’s first ever fight; he stood up disappointed, but less disappointable.
Alfie Smith, the young fighter who had lost his match but would fight again, was not sad because he had lost, but happy because he had fought. “It is what it is, bruv. I left everything in there. I put everything in.” As the night’s 20 or so bouts flowed past, his meaning became clearer: the results mattered less, the action more. Bloodline was not about winning. It was not even really about not losing. It was just about fighting.
[Further reading: The English have begun to hate]
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