There are dark whispers on the internet about Britain’s coming ‘race war’. The protests outside migrant hotels prove the ‘native English’ have had a gutful of these ‘invaders’, say nefarious actors on X. Others foresee a civil war: a showdown between a haughty left and a resurgent right over the very soul of the kingdom. I see something different: a class war.
‘Racists’, some shouted at the little people. Well, they’re uneducated oiks who like to wave the flag of their country – they must be racist, right?
Okay, maybe not a ‘war’. It’s not the Russian Revolution, or even a rerun of the Battle of Orgreave. But the class tensions in these clashes outside migrant hotels seem undeniable to me. On one side we have the keffiyeh-adorned, often quite plummy defenders of ‘open borders’. And on the other, working men and women, many of them mums, all wrapped in the England flag as they state their case for the restoration of our nation’s sovereignty. Tell me this isn’t the ‘left behind’ finally standing up to the turbo-smug posh left that loves to lord it over them.
Witness the clashes across the UK over recent days. In London, Liverpool and Bristol, and in parts of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland too, good people gathered to protest against the plonking in their communities of hundreds of unvetted men from faraway regressive cultures. And almost everywhere they were greeted by counter-protesters sporting the rictus sneer of people who know better. ‘Racists’, some shouted at the little people. Well, they’re uneducated oiks who like to wave the flag of their country – they must be racist, right?
Their differing paraphernalia spoke to the simmering class antagonism. The counter-protesters waved the Palestine flag, the ultimate vanity accessory of the middle-class left. They wore keffiyehs, the uniform of the self-righteous. The other side had on normal clothes – nothing culturally appropriated from Arabs. And their only banner was the St George’s or the Union flag. They expressed pride in the nation, whereas their mockers on the other side of the police line seemed consumed by pride in the self.
A grassroots longing for national restoration vs the hobby activism of the virtuous bourgeoisie: these are the battlelines today. For me, the migrant-hotel rebellion is the most thrilling showdown we’ve seen in years between ordinary people and the overeducated possessors of ‘luxury beliefs’. This is a revolt of ‘the plebs’ not only against the lunacy of giving four-star bed-and-board to the hundreds of illegal migrants who rock up on our shores every day, but also against the entire luxuriant moralism of an activist class blissfully blind to the struggles of everyday Brits.
Are we living through the twilight of luxury beliefs? The thin ideologies of the professional-managerial classes seem to be dropping like flies. Their neo-religion of open borders is under savage pressure from that army of mums saying the thing you’re not meant to say, the thing that was madly branded ‘far right’ for years: that borders are important. That the very first principle of sovereignty is you must know who or what is crossing into your territory. Centuries of common sense marshalled against the new and nuts idea that nationhood is outdated.
Before that, their post-truth ideology of trans took one hell of a beating. The Supreme Court’s ruling that a woman is a woman — duh – brought scientific reason to bear on that craziest of luxury beliefs: that you can have a penis and be a lady. Even Keir Starmer fell under the spell of that one. There’s been such a hearty uprising of British women sick of this sexist and unscientific nonsense that Britain has been christened ‘TERF Island’. Perhaps we’re the island where luxury beliefs come to die.
And let’s not forget 2025 is the year when people finally pushed back against the idea that it’s ‘Islamophobic’ to talk about cultural tensions. The grooming gang scandal was forced back on to the political agenda by everyday Brits sickened by the idea that it’s more important to maintain the ‘multicultural peace’ than to speak frankly about what was done to working-class girls. The luxury of silence on such a grave issue is one working-class communities cannot afford.
I wonder if it is the destiny of the English to do with peaceful protest what Donald Trump has done with executive orders – push out all the destructive eccentricity that has self-identified as ‘wisdom’ these past few years. There’s a brilliant gender-critical group called Sex Matters. To that we might now add ‘borders matter’. And ‘sovereignty matters’. And ‘communities matter’. That’s what I hear working-class communities saying right now to their too often indifferent superiors – we matter.
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