No, an AI rapper is not re-shaping politics

‘Danny Bones’ is an AI-generated rapper developed to promote the fringe right-wing party, Advance UK. Created at the behest of Advance by a collective called the Node Project, Bones appears in short-form videos, rapping about immigration, crime and national decline. His often hard-right messaging sometimes attracts large view counts on TikTok and Instagram.

Advance UK, launched in 2025 by former Reform UK deputy leader Ben Habib after he fell out with Nigel Farage, is a politically marginal groupuscule positioned to the right of Reform UK. It has no parliamentary presence, no clear membership growth and barely registers in the polls. It is precisely the kind of party likely to experiment with unconventional tactics in a bid for some sort of attention.

And attention is precisely what Britain’s political and media classes have given it, largely by taking Danny Bones far too seriously. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has talked darkly of Advance’s online efforts heralding a future ‘AI election’. Assorted academic ‘experts’ have warned that it could mark the ‘beginning’ of a new era of AI-driven extremist propaganda. Heron Lopes, a researcher at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, suggested such tactics could ‘diffuse more widely’.

Politicians have gone even further. Green deputy leader Rachel Millward has labelled it ‘corrosive to democracy’, while new Green MP Hannah Spencer has warned that these sorts of AI gimmicks will ‘undermine the integrity of our democracy’.

There’s little substance to the Greens’ claims. During the Gorton and Denton by-election, Advance repurposed Danny Bones’ content to promote its candidate, Nick Buckley. And it had almost no tangible effect. There was no evidence of changed voting behaviour, increased support or even voter awareness. Advance’s vote share was so marginal, at 155 votes, it barely registered, leaving the party trailing even the Official Monster Raving Looney Party’s Sir Oink-a-lot. It seems Danny Bones is no match for a man dressed as a pig.

Much of the hysterical reaction to Advance’s experiment in AI propaganda rests on mistaking online ‘engagement’ for actual support. Some Danny Bones vids might well get ‘millions of views’, but views are cheap. On short-form platforms like TikTok, videos autoplay before distracted, scrolling users. So a post may have lots of ‘views’, but that doesn’t mean someone’s watched it properly, let alone agreed or been influenced by it.

The data bear this out. Danny Bones’ best-performing Instagram post – ‘This Is England’ – has around 48,000 likes and 2,200 comments. Another has reached roughly 16,900 likes. However, most posts struggle to break 1,000 likes, with comments often numbering between 50 and 100. This is not traction. It is sporadic, low-level interaction.

The YouTube figures are even more revealing. The Node Project’s upload of the song ‘This Is England’ has around 141,000 views. The official Danny Bones channel fares worse for the same song: roughly 35,000 views and 1,000 likes. These modest numbers indicate a failure to convert attention into an audience.

It’s a failure that should surprise no one. A brief look at the content itself shows why Danny Bones is unlikely to persuade anyone beyond an already narrow audience. Rather than offering insight or solutions, the videos lean heavily into blunt, inflammatory claims and assertions. In one post, he declares:

‘I’m watching my country’s culture, demographics rapidly change, and I’m supposed to just be cool with it? Nah, fuck that. This is England. I am England.’

In another, he warns that ‘Manchester’s anthem’s gonna be the call to prayer before we know it.’ These lines are paired with imagery depicting parts of Britain as effectively Muslim-occupied.

Of course, questions around immigration, integration and cultural change do concern the public. Polling consistently shows voters choosing immigration as the single most important issue facing the country. The problem is not the subject matter, but the approach to it. The skinheaded, bovver-booted Danny Bones looks like a pastiche of the late-1970s National Front scene. He raps in clichés and soundbites. Who exactly is that meant to appeal to?

Here we have a fringe party running a fringe campaign that appeals to very few. This is hardly a case of AI re-shaping politics. That some among our political and media elites have been portraying it as such tells us more about their fear of any challenge to the status quo than it does AI.

Stephen Sidney is a spiked intern.