Old notions of class are redundant here. Credit: Mary Turner/Getty
The best place to watch the drama of Britain’s fastest changing postcode is next to Rainham’s 12th-century Norman church. At quarter past six, a tube-carriage haul of glum commuters is dumped at the station, where Essex meets the London sprawl. The final slog home is a curious walk of shame: past the gated Georgian pomp of Rainham Hall, and a sign for the Prawn Hub takeaway, mocked up in glaringly familiar colours. Barrack rows of new builds await them, following the pylons out to the desolate Rainham Marsh, where once upon a time, the Britain of the Nineties dreamt of building its own Disneyland.
What’s it like living here? I ask two men skulking off to the pub through the graveyard, past a pair of Lithuanian builders drinking cans. “It used to feel like a lovely English village,” says one. “Now it’s a fucking shithole and I can’t wait to get out.”
That night, the local branch of Reform UK met to plot their revolt against this New England. In the seedy light of the local working men’s club, the rebellious bourgeoisie of Essex shook hands with their exiled London counterparts: retired City bankers, tradesmen, medical students, labourers, and a softly spoken NHS worker from India. On stage was a map depicting the theatre of war: Barking and Rainham and Havering, the gap between London and shires, and the new fault line of British politics.
“The people gathered here are terrified for their children’s future,” explained Philip Hyde, a veteran of Havering politics, before taking to the stage with his mic. “You won’t believe the things I’ve been researching,” he teased his sullen audience. A litany of misery poured forth: cuts to police; IMF reports on public sector austerity; bankrupt councils; young families being raised in collapsing flats. A new mosque planned in Romford. A cavernous pause was left to allow the audience to groan. “We’re the bloody minority around here now,” someone heckled from the back.
Just 40 minutes away on the tube, Westminster is facing the prospect of a seismic revolt. Should Reform hold its polling momentum through 2029, a thick seam of light blue will reorder the old electoral map, spreading from the suburbs of East London, across the safe Tory seats of Essex, and out towards Nigel Farage’s holdout in Clacton. Barking and Dagenham — a Labour stronghold — is set to fall too. Here, amid the inter-war housing estates, the proportion of the white British population has fallen by 51% in two decades. The last election saw a 17.6% swing to Reform, and a slight Labour drop.
The defeat of the BNP in 2010, then the 2012 London Olympics, were supposed to remake the area into a confident multicultural district. Now, though, Reform’s revolt is set to be levied by two forces well beyond the comprehension of that long-lost decade. Demographic anxiety in the face of historic mass immigration has unearthed the folk memory of an exiled cockney diaspora, forced even further into the Essex shires. Old notions of class are increasingly redundant in these shifting hinterlands. Mass migration and downward social mobility have created a quasi-ethnic voting bloc, one that regards the British state as defunct, broken and entirely alien to its interests.
At the Rainham working men’s club, Hyde’s romp through national decline had driven the audience into an embittered fugue. Midway through an excoriation of the council, the master of ceremonies was interrupted by an angry mother. During a protest in Whitehall after the Southport stabbings, she claims her son was jailed for 13 months simply for standing there. “Where was Nigel Farage when they were sending innocent boys down for nothing?”
“Bring back Rupert Lowe,” someone heckles in the ensuing fracas. The tension’s been brewing all night: between a party in search of professionalisation and a lagered-up, pissed-off crowd. The bickering is only broken by a young man, taking to the stage and seizing the mic. “There’s no point squabbling,” says Kai Cunningham. “Reform is our only chance. The country is broken. Barking and Dagenham is broken, and all the lefties need to hear us say it’s broken, and realise we’re still here advocating for our country.” The loudest cheer of the night bellowed out.
Cunningham is representative of the new Reform. Twenty-one years old, confident, brisk, cheeky: fluent in both the fall of modern Britain and hope of its renewal. He has seen something like it with his own eyes. Jordan Kukabu, a friend from school, was stabbed in the heart with a machete outside Dagenham Heathway Station. “If I had gone down that route,” he says, as we walk past the day after the meeting, “I could have ended up like him.” A boxing club turned him around. Then came a political awakening while undergoing basic training in the army. At night, in the barracks, Cunningham would watch “atrocities taking place across the country” on his phone.
A plan was hatched. A degree in law would get Cunningham credibility. It would force those in Westminster to take him seriously. “We need more white working class men going into education, because let’s be honest, no one is going to listen to some brickey from Dagenham.”
Should Reform win — either in upcoming council elections or in 2029 — the party will inherit an area on the brink of even greater change. On the council website, a video of drone shots shows the up-and-coming district in the shadow of the London skyline: neo-Georgian municipal buildings, built in the days of Fifties full employment, overshadowed by a burgeoning vista of tacky high-rises, their garish plastic facades glowing in the estuary sun. Thousands of jobs are promised for a population set to jump by a half in the next decade.
But walk the streets below and a parallel city emerges. Britain’s fastest changing district, it’s ground zero for the historic wave of migration now set to define Britain’s 21st century. Every year, 18,000 people come here, and another 18,000 leave. “I have no idea who lives there,” says Cunningham, pointing to one of the newly built high-rises. At street level, arrivals from India, Nigeria and Afghanistan shun the worn-out shopping parades and high-street shops, opting instead for thriving open-air markets: an unnerving hum of a fringe non-place in a new global city. Transient, eerie and mysterious are how other locals describe it. It all speaks of a demographic upheaval so vast, says one social worker from nearby Ilford, that the state can barely conceive of the pace of change.
Glimmers of the past remain. The Becontree Estate — once the world’s largest social housing project — still offers a stubbornly suburban image of privet hedges and satellite dishes. Here are the cues for Cunningham’s vision of renewal: he speaks of his father and granddad’s generations, stretching back to the Ford Factory that opened back in 1932. They enjoyed simple things: a job, a home, a place to raise a family. Can Reform restore this? Cunningham mentions the party’s policy on apprenticeships, but there’s some deeper grievance, one beyond the exhausted sparring you see on Question Time. “It upsets me when people say they’re leaving, that they’ve got no one around anymore,” he says, recalling the family and friends that have packed their bags. “But there’s a younger generation that wants to stay and put up a fight.”
The loss of young people like Cunningham irks both the local party and its grandees. “Really, that’s the sort of young man we should be attracting back to the Labour Party,” says Jon Cruddas when I tell him about our tour. The former local MP is currently writing a social and political history of Britain through the lens of Dagenham, exploring how the “dynamics of modern capitalism” ran through the area. Here, he explains, was the Fordist utopia that inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, then the steady unravelling of social democracy across the 20th century. The prospect of having to conclude his book with a Reform victory would be grimly ironic, especially for a man who’s helped keep the area Labour against the odds. The seat was supposed to fall with the Red Wall in 2019, but a hyper-local political machine kept the bricks here intact.
Cruddas became the area’s MP in 2001, at a time when 40,000 local manufacturing jobs were in the process of disappearing. The next two decades formed an almost moral crusade to stop the area from being forgotten completely. He once tried to get Ed Miliband to watch Fish Tank, a film set on an estate in Dagenham that might, as Cruddas puts it, explain crumbling class constituencies, worklessness and the importance of human flourishing. “He told me it was too depressing to watch.”
Cruddas sees Dagenham in almost novelistic terms: a place at the vanguard of change, seeming doomed to exist beyond the comprehension of Westminster — until all it can offer is hubris and warning. For him, it all started with the 2001 census, which failed to pick up on demographic change ahead of the BNP’s short-lived local triumph.
Now another reckoning is coming. “What’s at stake in the area is not just the future of the government, but the future of the Labour Party,” says Cruddas. In some sense, No. 10 understands this. Blue Labour, forged in the area, has been courted by Starmer, hoping to cobble together a coalition of Britons who want security, community and common sense. At the helm is Dagenham veteran Morgan McSweeney, rolling out set pieces once reserved for Nick Griffin. That involves the basics — repairing potholes, civic pride, neatly tailored patriotism (this time with an eye on the Donbas) — all glossed up with deportation spectacles and lively graphics on social media.
But Dagenham is not just a political lesson in staving off Right-wing populism. Just like Huxley’s interest in the area, a quieter, more tangible dystopia is being formed in this hinterland of London. Here is a vision of a radically different 21st-century Britain, an upheaval slowly emerging round its towns and cities: precarious work, ersatz apartments, a churn of neighbours, all gazing out over a solemn, unknowable sprawl, offering barely an echo of the lively, globalised, multicultural Britain promised to the country in the Blairite pomp.
Down by the river, you can find this new Dagenham being built on the ruins of the old Ford factory. Cranes tower over the estuary horizon, tending to a highrise village of 3,500 flats, part of the 50,000 planned for the area. Here, the place seems trapped by the weeping Thames sky, the dismal orbit of the A13. The end not just of London, but of the world itself. “Dagenham is home to a proud and diverse community that reflects the industrious and pioneering spirit of its heritage” boasts the construction site billboard. “This place is driving accelerated support for Reform,” Cunningham says. “On the doorstep we have a simple message that works well: improve the lifestyle of the people here rather than just adding more.”
In 2025, faced with a disastrous start, Labour seems finally to have heard Cruddas’s concern for human flourishing in Dagenham. Last year, a Demos essay by Chris Naylor, the former chief executive of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, portrayed it as the platonic form of the New England coming into being. This, he wrote, is a place where “vast changes in expectations, the erosion of trust” in politics meet the decline of “old world power paradigms” and collide with “new technologies” and ”rapidly changing demographics”.
But if Naylor’s essay is an accurate reading of Dagenham as it is, and Britain as it may yet be, its purported solutions also offer a warning for Starmer. Here the administrative state’s buzzwords around hubs, community engagement and multicultural success run up against reality, one that may yet spill over to rout not just Labour, but the entire Westminster establishment.
One issue is money. The local council is in worse financial straits than bankrupt Birmingham. The relocation of Smithfield and Billingsgate market to Dagenham Dock, and the arrival of 2,700 jobs, was recently scrapped due to rising costs. Amid that epic demographic upheaval, meanwhile, locals are increasingly resentful of how many foreign-born households are given social housing — especially when the wait for a four-bedroom home here is 67 years.
Outside an abandoned pub, Chloe, in her early thirties and pregnant, walks carefully with her two year old near the indifferent hum of the A13. She spent six years on a council waiting list for a house, while living in a “rat-infested flat” where the rent rose to nearly £2,000 a month. “I was basically the wrong colour,” she says wryly. “It’s not just English people, but second- and third- generation Asian and black families that are fed up and want to leave. I don’t want to sound awful, but it’s just not England around here anymore.”
Walking back to Rainham, certainly, there is a sense of exodus. Gated bungalows, guarded by stone lions and Union Jacks, dream of Deep Essex. In Orchard Village, the regenerated estate where Fish Tank was filmed, Mia*, a data and systems manager, points out the flats of people who’ve left: for Chelmsford, for Billericay, for Basildon. “You’d like to see Nigel Farage’s party around here to be quite honest,” she says. Hailed as a regenerative success after being rebuilt in 2009, the estate has drifted back to the despair Ed Miliband once ignored. “I feel sorry for the young people around here now,” says Rob, semi-retired, wearing his knackered Tesco outfit, rolling a cigarette in a stone patio full of gnomes. “I just can’t see a way to get on, have a life.” He’s never voted, but next time might well pick Farage.
The train takes you away from Dagenham and towards Rainham once more. Silent rows of new houses line the tracks, stretching out into the expanse of the silent Thames marshes until they become part of the forgotten landscape itself. Back on the high street, not far from Rainham Hall, I meet Greg*. A small business owner, he was a reluctant Reform voter at the last election. “The change I see in the area frightens me,” he says. “When people don’t know what the future will look like, they can do strange things.” As we talk, in the dusk of the spring evening, there is birdsong and daffodils, traces of the suburban escape that was.
*Some names have been changed.
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SubscribeDo you see any hope? Reform is the last throw of the dice, but I don’t see any miracles happening. Britain decided to throw open the doors to the Third World for reasons I don’t understand and the final act is inevitable.
As an American, I just don’t understand how this slow kiss of death was given to such a once great country like the UK. What is it about the native collective psyche that allowed this to happen, to keep electing feckless fools when it’s been clear for years, even from our shores, that your country is not, nor could or should be, a melting pot for the world’s ethnicities? Is there not a sizable enough demographic to just absolutely not play ball? Can England not get angry?
The UK’s fate is sad beyond words, and confounding. Not that we don’t have our own absurdities in the USA. But at least there’s a strong vein of ‘screw it, not taking this ** anymore’ and then doing something about it.
When all parties in the Uniparty and their cheer leaders throughout the media continually ram home the elite message that unlimited immigration is a good thing it is easier to see why any other political view is hard to get across. Any criticism of the elite view has been denigrated for decades especially the state sponsored BBC which dominates broadcast media here.
We saw during the lockdowns how people can easily be persuaded by state propaganda to follow the elites’ line. They even have specific departments to carry out the propaganda. This was first openly acknowledged by Cameron-Clegg who boasted about what they tweely called The Nudge Unit. These programmes are now bigger and laws have been passed to limit the range of opinions which may be discussed.
JD Vance was right but maybe he under estimated the degree we have lost free speech.
What is emerging unnoticed (in particular by those that do not wish to notice )
There is now a whole generation of young voters who are part of the “multicultural experiment” from school age and beyond .
They no longer pay attention to the slogans but rely upon their own experiences.
The ‘liberal’ establishment that has sold the country down the river is now terrified both about what they’ve done and that people have noticed.
As someone once said: wars happen when the government tells you who the enemy is; revolts happen when you work it out for yourself.
Yes. The liberal establishment is like those parents of ‘trans’ children, who affirmed and encouraged their child, and cajoled and bullied all those about them to accept what they had helped create.
The awful reality that they have mutilated something beautiful is too horrifying to bear, so they persist aggressively with the lie. They will never give it up.
The Conservative Party is moribund and the Labour Party is heading that way. The Lib Dems are only attractive at a local level. Which party can represent the Liberal Establishment?
I expect we will need a (genteel) Trumpian reduction in state run organisations before the authority of the Liberal Establishment is cut down to size. It won’t be pretty.
The Lib-Dems are clowns.
Indeed. It won’t be pretty because state run organizations never respond to “genteel” reform efforts.
There is no such thing as ‘genteel’ reforms any more. The rot will have to be ripped out of Westminster, it won’t be pretty but it is glaringly needed and soon.
There is something creepy and sinister about how our country is being taken over. It smells rotten of underground slime. Devious and malign. I would rather the Germans had won in open air combat than this slow strangulation, revealing cowardice and corruption by our “leader”.
“‘Dagenham is home to a proud and diverse community that reflects the industrious and pioneering spirit of its heritage’ boasts the construction site billboard.”
Reads like a Red Guard poster in Beijing circa 1966.
There is a shocking neglect of attention to the Greater South East outside London (and whilst Dagenham is in London it is really the border area with the Greater South East like many London Boroughs where there was a big vote for out in the EU referendum). Very little social science done on these areas – almost no real ethnography – and not much decent journalism. This piece is good but there is a need to look further. I suggest attention to Bedford, just one of the towns now a commuter zone for London. The Greater SE is the largest region by population in the UK when you include Hertfordshire, Essex and Bedfordshire which were put into the Eastern Region to even up numbers. This is where UK elections will be decided and deindustrialization is the major cultural driver of voting.
Labour is caught between two stools. Does it seek to recapture the disillusioned white, working class of the Red Wall, or seek to hang on to the Muslim vote that is leaking away to Corbyn’s Independents? It can’t do both.
It’s certainly ground as fertile for radical Right as there is going to be. It shows the direction we are heading, and have been for some time but with an acceleration driven by Austerity and the Pandemic, is increasing starkly obvious – growing inequality of opportunity and thus outcomes. The juxtaposition of private affluence, public squalor as documented 70 years ago in another Country, pulling apart that which bonds us.
The question for Reform is what solution do they offer other than the red meat on migration? (Let’s assume for the moment we all want massive reduction in illegal migration and less legal because we’ve invested more in training/developing our own etc). What is the coherent Reform offering? I read the Policy section of their website – it, to be fair like most Parties, ducks how it’s really going to pay for changes or whether it’s at all interested in addressing growing inequality. It needs revising in light of Trump’s approach too.
The Farage/Lowe fight is more personal and ego driven but there are elements that relate to major Policy tension. Is this a Party that really rejects neo-liberalism and thus would, ironically, share some of the Corbyn/McDonald economic view (which wasn’t unpopular with red wall Voters), or a Party that just uses migration concerns to gain power for the same old elite benefit that the Tories did? For now that tension may not prevent it winning protest Votes, but anyone truly interested in solutions to our many problems, rather than just a nihilistic attitude, needs Reform and others to properly grapple with the choices we face. Desires and slogans are not Policies that then really deliver the outcome wanted.
The question for Reform is what solution do they offer other than the red meat on migration?
Electoral reform?
Ask yourself: why is a Labour government piling ever more taxes onto working people, small businesses and farmers and taking benefits from disabled people whilst you and everyone you know are still collecting £tens or £hundreds of thousands every year in artificial property price inflation, unfunded pensions and all the rest of it? Because Labour need your vote more than they need those of the people they are taxing into oblivion and whose lives they are destroying with mass illegal immigration and all the other globalist scams designed to enrich the suburban middle class at everyone else’s expense. A de-centralised electoral system along Swiss lines could fix that.
That said, I have as little confidence that Reform is the answer as you do.
THERE SHOULD BE NO electoral reform. FPTP is what we need. Look to Germany and the EU for the impossibility of clearing out the Augean Stables with PR. Germany’s population is increasingly moving to the right, BUT PR elections mean the Government is moving to the left. It forms a coalition with the far left & Greens in order to keep the popular vote suppressed,. FPTP would ensure these parties DO NOT GET IN. Reform are insane IF they scrap FPTP they have now hit the watershed, and they will only achieve what they want via FPTP because that ensure the demise of the Uniparty. Go for PR and Reform will be in opposition watching the Uniparty Coalition destroy the country.
You might be right. What we really need is decentralisation.
“Right-wing populism”
Disappointing.
I would have hoped for a more nuanced and intellihent anlysis at UnHerd. Not more of the same .
Stopping and then reversing the spiral of decline will not be easy. In fact it will be damned hard. Dropping the lunatic deindustrialising policy called Net Zero will
help but beyond that we have to start repaying our ever increasing national debt which must involve attracting private investment to stimulate sustainable growth and curbing the Welfare State. That means lower taxes and lower benefits – both of which can be divisive. It will take exceptional political leadership to deliver this.
The quickest way to recovery is to scrap vast swathes of European Napoleonic style legislation, and the Public sector and QUANGOS and the mindset you can ONLY do what is allowed. Revert to the English Common Law and the attitude UNLESS it is banned, you can do it. For example. the insanity of rules re energy when selling houses. The law re contracts and honesty plus Caveat Emptor should be the aim. Free the people to achieve what no Government can, to revive economies.
AND stop the vast waste of tax-payers money. We could save a fortune IF we stopped funding arts – Why fund them? Did the Beatles need funding? No, in fact they even wrote a song about the taxman and his 90% demands Does Banksy get funded? Tho it wouldn’t surprise me to find he did.
IF Reform are brave enough the UK could be turned around FAR faster than the pessimists on here think.
The liberal establishment and their lapdog media have several years to destroy Reform. Their agents will be joining, ready to be activated.
I am afraid Britain cannot no longer be saved via the ballot box.
That is possible,m BUT Net Zero is going to destroy any party that backed it AND possibly the very country itself as NO modern society can survive without a reliable grid, AND windmills and solar will NOT provide that. In fact I believe even National Grid is now aware of how close failure could be. Last week they actually sent me an email asking if I was prepared for Power Cuts!
Sad consequence of our political class caring more about virtue signalling than dealing UK voters’ needs and aspirations.
Mass migration and the loss of well-paid jobs in manufacturing is a lethal combination. Add to that a political establishment that seems to be complacent and not listening, and people become desperate enough to vote for anything.
So what happens when people work out that their new Reform councillors are as hamstrung and ‘useless’ as the Tory and Labour councillor they replaced? What then?
“Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons !
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons ! “ etc, etc.
i believe, as Charles Stanhope infers, we are beyond the point of “voting for anything”. Violence seems a possibility based on the febrile nature of the country as it descends into the third world. The article, with its uncompleted multi-vignette approach captures the identity-covulsing experience of Britain 2025. Pop collapsing public services, sustained real-term economic per capita decine, and the loss of any hope of a life that just one generation ago was a Briton’s expectation, and you have the ingredients for major conflagration. Since a new settlement is required between state and citizen (rather than resident) and that path cannot be negotiated – as evidenced by refusals to implement and attempts to overturn the will of the people – the ballot box appears to have been exhausted. I doubt that Reform can represent “containment” at this stage.
“…refusals to implement and attempts to overturn the will of the people…”
This, Remoaners and Establishment Blob, is what you’ve brought us to, laid bare in this and other articles setting out the reality of life for the majority of the indigenous population, which includes 3rd/4th/5th generations of settled immigrants from the mid-20th century. They too, have major qualms about the more recent opening of the floodgates since it threatens their feeling of being settled in their country of birth.
It can’t continue. Those who wilfully ignore the populace at large will have their day of reckoning.
Keep in mind that only the state is armed. The folly of bringing knives and clubs to a gunfight is clearly known at this stage of history.
Twas always thus. Certainly since medieval times. But Civil War, “Glorious’ Revolution, French and Russian Revolutions still happened. The circumstances need to be extreme I grant you, but given that, even some lower level – but nevertheless armed – agents of the State might be driven to don the Phrygian cap.
Depends on who the electorate believe are most likely to cut the legal, political and bureaucratic gordian knot that is preventing positive change.
Hint – no-one believes it will be Labour or the Tories
Reform is not the answer with a Muslim as its Chairman and with Farage deliberately avoiding the elephant in the room.
But the Reform Grass roots can sort that ONCE Reform are in power. We have too many dangers threatening UK society to waste time and give the MSM an opportunity to atack to bother with sorting the leadership now. Get into power, start scrapping all Blair’s reforms, Net Zero etc and then we can sort out our leadership.
Net Zero alone is capable of destroying the very state itself. The Grid WILL fail if Miliband keeps up his insane drive for windmills and solar panels AND if the Grid fails for any length of time, what’s left of the economy will AND JIT food supermarkets will run short of food for long periods.
You also wouldn’t want to be in many modern UK Hospitals where vast areas have NO natural light and where modern medicine rests on electric and electronics. We have had THREE warnings of what power failure for only a few hours means for chaos. Manchester and Heathrow AIrports and
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-46371271
National Grid now advertise on the bcak of buses where I live AND possibly because I’m a shareholder, they emailed me last week with the SAME message “Are you prepared for Power Cuts”
Their website has this,
https://powercuts.nationalgrid.co.uk/power-cut-advice
and ironically on the very day the Tories called the last GE, ths Government webpage went up.
https://prepare.campaign.gov.uk/get-prepared-for-emergencies/
It isn’t just immigration threatening the fabric of the UK Society. Lets get Reform in first, then sort out the leadership. What could the leaders do IF 300 MPS all changed party IF it gets that bad? It is not impossible it will, so plan to change from a position of power not as wannabbees
Yes I probably agree with this, Bill. I don’t agree with a lot of what Farage has been saying recently, but I can hope he’s smart enough to be focused first on winning, and then starting to pull us back from the abyss.
The WEF loving globalist government must do an about-face, fast. You need oil, gas & coal. Net Zero is, and always has been, a scam.
Look to Africa and Syria. Southport, Manchester Arena, the so far non-existent inquiry into Islamic rape gangs are a sign of what is to come. Even if the English don’t start a revolution, Militant Islam will. Christians are massacred in Africa daily, Syria and parts of the Middle East too, BUT no one in the MSM (or even Unherd as far as I can see) ever likes to mention it. The fact that the UK is far from Christian makes no difference. Hindu, Buddhist none will be acceptable to Militant Islam.
Our Prisons are more often than not being run by Islamists AND that in some cases IS reported in the MSM. Ironically Tommy Robinson in jail and isolation for his own protection has highlighted it in the MSM. Perhaps Pakistan is the State we should look to to get a glimpse of the future England, and perhaps the whole of the UK. Israel may end up the only safe place from Militant Islam.
“neatly tailored patriotism (this time with an eye on the Donbas)”
The idiocy – it burns!
How can anyone argue, with a straight face, that British patriotism requires us to get involved in a conflict between pro-Russian and pro-Western elements in the Donbas?
Putin is an unpleasant authoritarian; so is Starmer. Putin is content to throw thousands of young men into the meat grinder; Starmer also has no qualms about it.
One of these two villains is intent on demographic change for Britain that is unlikely to be reversible without violence.
Against whom should British patriots direct their ire?
I’m definitely no fan of Starmer… but to lump him together with Putin?!? That’s absurd.
Opponents of Starmer do not have a nasty habit of falling out of high windows. Nor do we have a secret police force to keep people in order (although our police officers do have tendencies in that direction). Nor do we have a policy of assassinating dissidents in other countries.
Opponents of Starmer do have a nasty habit of being sent to prison on trumped up charges, or having the cops break down their door for having the wrong opinions.
Putin is right however. Check out how many Ukrainian brigades, NOT just those labelled Azov, are basically Nazi and only accept like minded Bandera recruits. Putin steps in to protect ethnic Russians, he didn’t take over ALL Georgia or anywhere else, he effectively gave protection to ethnic Russians caught on the wrong side of Soviet drawn borders. Now in Ukraine he may take more than those areas, a land-bridge to Transnistria, everything East of the Dnieper perhaps NATO cause this and now reap what it sowed.
It is also worth noting how Ukraine basically removed the self-determination aspect of the Crimean Republic, so to claim it is Ukrainian is equally historically incorrect. NATO was warned for decades to abide by the promises not to expand East or risk War. The 2014 US coup started this war. Putin is likely to finish it. As Hungary’s Orban pointed out months ago. Ukraine is a failed state only surviving on Western handouts. We in the UK should have nothing to do with that war.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html
Ukraine has many faults and is bedevilled by corruption. As indeed is ALL the ex Soviet Union, Russia included.
But Putin invaded ALL Ukraine with the aim to change the regime into a puppet state and annex the entire country. Only Ukrainian citizens willing to fight and Western military aid stopped that happening.
I am not from the London area but when you consider that in 1961 London (and I guess that part of Essex now in Greater London) was 97% white British but by 2021 that percentage had fallen to 37% the rise of the Reform party should not surprise anyone. Even if Reform were to form a government in 2029 (by which time a further 1,5 million may well have joined our shores) I doubt whether the party would be able to do much about it. Even in its darkest days of 1983 and 2019 the Labour Party still had 200 or so Members of the House of Commons. In any event the parties which are either left or left leaning i.e. the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Nationalists and the Greens will do anything to prevent a Nigel Farage premiership possibly by encouraging tactical voting in a multitude of constituencies. The eminent historian Dr. David Starkey believes that the only way forward is to introduce what he calls ‘The Great Repeal Bill’ removing all of what is deemed contentious legislation i.e. the Human Rights Act, remaining in ECHR etc. which has been enacted since 1997 and which would be a mammoth task given all the obstacles. The question is then : If the Reform Party had a comfortable majority would they have the stomach for such a fight?
Many overlook how demographic shifts can intensify over time. Ethnic minorities tend to have higher birth rates and often bring extended family members with them. As certain areas become more diverse, some white residents may choose to emigrate, possible to leave the UK.
I know this might come across as harsh or prejudiced, but it’s the reality I see unfolding.
Tactical voting would NOT work IF ALL BREXIT voters voted for Reform. Farage proved that in the THREE effectively Brexit votes we’ve had. 410 constituencies out of 600 had a Brexit majority. No tactical vote could have beaten them. Farage won a referendum, a European election , then let Boris borrow (then betray) the Brexiteer vote in a General Election. 3 votes, under 3 different voting systems, straight majority, D’Hondt (European Elections) and FPTP for Boris. AND Brexiteers won every one. The ONLY thing that can stop Reform is the Tory voters who think the Tory part is conservative and so vote for them.
Quite frankly, there were more Just Men in Sodom and Gomorrah than there are conservatives in the Tory party (or perhaps in Reform’s leadership, but we can deal with them ONCE in power, NOT before.
Sorry but I don’t accept your argument. It is a fact that since the Referendum in 2016 a fair number of those who voted for Brexit have passed on and I doubt whether they would have been replaced in sufficient numbers. In 2019 yes the Brexit party gained the most seats in the European election but only polled 33% of the vote. And if I remember correctly Nigel Farage disappeared for two years immediately after the referendum. Using phrases ‘such as we can deal with them ONCE in power, NOT before ‘ is simply bully boy tactics more likely to repel any waverers rather than attract them. Like it or not Reform is going to need former Conservative voters if it is to get into power so a period of reflection on your part might be advisable.
A sad but accurate indictment of the Dagenham and Barking that gave us among others, the legends of Greaves, Venables, Brooking and Moore….and the Cortina.
Nigel and his Asian friend look set to make Reform another branch of the post-Partition British uniparty.
Then the party members should plan to stop it. BUT not until they get into power. Reform getting in may also end up producing a REAL conservative party , patriotic enough to attract the White Working class AND Reform voters, The White Working Class who by the way appear to refusing to join the military. Tommy Atkins 2025?
Veni vidi vicit
What benefit to the UK was there in letting the rubbish of the world into England? It was either incompetence or intentional. Both are unacceptable. Only a radical solution can possibly save the country from further decline and stem the decline of the natives
History repeats itself, first as Griffin then as Farage. The ugly soulless urban sprawl and the associated existential vacuity has long been with us. I would be more interested in hearing about the new immigrant economy thriving outside the mainstream which the writer alludes to and then ignores.