There’s a certain thrill in saying, ‘I told you so.’ We all relish the moment when our warnings are vindicated, when the world finally catches up with our foresight. But this time, I genuinely take no pleasure in it. I said Britain would begin to crack, and now it is.
I’m exhausted by those who, years later, grudgingly admit that I was right. I’d much rather be mocked for overreacting, my words dismissed with a snarky ‘this aged well’. At least then, the worst wouldn’t have come to pass.
The recent Unite the Kingdom demonstration, led by Tommy Robinson, brought this into sharp focus. Figures like Laurence Fox and Katie Hopkins, who you might consider to be gobshites, addressed the huge crowd. Yet, despite the decades of provocation fuelling it, the march was remarkably peaceful, even hopeful. Protests aren’t my scene, but I know many perfectly reasonable people who attended, and their presence reflects a growing desperation; we are now way past the point of being picky about who we’re seen with. When the so-called Good People have stanned for Hamas, their sanctimonious finger-waggings about your unsavoury associations lose their sting.
What did politicians expect? If you don’t like Robinson, Fox or Hopkins, how about not handing them ammunition? Stop making them right, maybe? For years, the public’s concerns about mass immigration have been ignored, or dismissed as bigotry. Both Labour and the Tories stumbled about, pouring fuel on the fire with one hand while flicking a lighter with the other.
The scale of their failure is almost too vast to comprehend. It is a horror-comedy. Vital institutions, corrupted by the divisive DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) industry, have lost all credibility. The police, once a symbol of order, are now a punchline – dancing to the tune of a handful of vexatious transsexuals while minor crimes such as shoplifting and serious crimes such as rape go unchecked. Legislative time-bombs from Blair and Brown’s Labour era, like the Human Rights Act and Equality Act, keep detonating.
It’s the Tories, however, who must take the biggest share of the blame. They had years to act, and yet the will to confront these issues never materialised. Dominic Raab’s attempt at a Bill of Rights fizzled quietly out; instead, on the Tories’ watch, the resentful mediocrities of identity politics and grievance culture were handed the keys to the kingdom. And most disastrously, Boris Johnson was elected with a huge majority in 2019 on the explicit promise of reducing immigration – and increased it to its highest-ever level.
The Tories seemed to believe that it would be a bit gauche, somewhat beneath them, to notice all this. Too much bother, might be uncomfortable, and people would say nasty things. Ignoring the problems, staying polite, and hoping for the best would magically resolve everything. Can they really be surprised by Unite The Kingdom?
I want to be wrong. I want to be mocked for overreacting
It wouldn’t have taken much to change course. A month of bold Commons legislation, reversing Blair’s constitutional vandalism, could have drawn clear lines in the sand.
Clare Coutinho MP recently said of the Equality Act: ‘The British people believe in meritocracy; judging people by their character, not their characteristics. We must not fall into the trap of treating legislation as flawless just because it has a nice name.’ It’s taken the Tories 15 years to articulate this basic truth, apparent to everyone with a working brain in 2010.
Watching footage of the march, the words of Thomas Sowell occurred to me: ‘The real motives of liberals have nothing to do with the welfare of other people. Instead, they have two related goals; to establish themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rather distasteful population of common people, and to gather as much power as possible to tell those distasteful common people how they must live their lives.’ The Unite The Kingdom march is an obvious reaction to exactly this. Yet the establishment persists, even now, in hurling about slurs such as ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ that have lost nearly all meaning. Starmer says he will not ‘surrender the flag’ to Robinson. Such bluster is desperate.
The public’s patience is spent. Is it any wonder people are turning to figures such as Tommy Robinson or parties such as Reform? The jury’s still out on whether Reform can deliver. Too many false dawns have left us wary, but the alternative – more of the same, and a sinking into much greater social strife – is unthinkable.
I want someone to read this article in a decade and chuckle, dismissing it as ‘a textbook example of mid-2020s alarmism’. I want to be wrong. I want to be mocked for overreacting. I want to have people laugh at the notion that Unite The Kingdom meant anything much in the long run. I really, really don’t want to be saying ‘I told you so’ in 20 years’ time.
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