The working classes have rebelled against the death cult of globalism

In the run-up to the local elections, the silence finally shattered: suddenly it was acceptable to talk about the problem of men without proper vetting crossing international borders. That v-word that working-class communities are so severely reprimanded for using was on the lips of every Westminster hack. Across SW1, manicured hands were wrung over the scandal of an unscreened bloke getting a cushy house and government money in a country that isn’t his own. Of course, none of this chatter was about the men from distant, regressive lands who rock up on England’s shores every day – it was about Peter Mandelson.

Rarely has the moral gulf between the elites and the people been so strikingly on display. In their cloistered palaces of power, they gabbed endlessly about the horror show of Mandelson’s botched vetting for the position of UK ambassador to America. How did this friend of a notorious sex criminal end up as our man in Washington, they wondered, referencing Mandy’s old cosines with Jeffrey Epstein. Meanwhile, ordinary Brits were asking how hundreds of men who’ve had no vetting at all, not even of the shambolic kind, can sail into England every week and instantly receive four-star lodgings and three meals a day. Some of whom aren’t just mates with sexual abusers – they are sexual abusers. There’s been a surge in horrific assaults on women and girls by these men from countries awash with misogyny.

I looked it up: in the week when the Mandelson story broke in mid-April, more than a thousand people, mostly young men, arrived on small boats on England’s shores. Maybe some of them are now in the hotel in your town. Perhaps some will one day show up in those jaw-dropping stats where foreign nationals now account for one in seven convictions for sexual crimes. If any of your non-British friends asks why Labour got such a drubbing in the local elections, tell them this – that this is a government whose luminaries, functionaries and court reporters fret more over backroom bungling in Whitehall than they do over the systematic dismantling of our national frontiers by the cult of globalism they all bow to.

This is the divide now: between a chattering class that obsesses over the reputation of the regime and ordinary people more worried about the safety of the realm. Between the walled-off high priests of consensus opinion whose life’s ambition is to fine-tune the bureaucracy and your average Brit who longs to repair the nation itself. Labour’s diagnosis of its calamitous performance in the elections is laughably oblivious. It’s because we didn’t do enough to fix the cost-of-living crisis, says Angela Rayner. We need to offer ‘more hope and optimism’, says Keir Starmer, as if Brits were a traumatised blob in need of a therapist’s hug. All of them ignore the central grievance of working-class Britain – nationhood itself, and its steady erosion under a ruling class more interested in buffing its own virtue than policing our borders.

It is plain as day why Reform UK – with its promise to detain and deport illegal immigrants and to abolish indefinite leave to remain – swept aside the Labour Party in town halls across working-class England. Of course the go-to explanation of the credentialled classes is that these voters are pig-ignorant, as befits their ‘gammon’ hue, having never darkened the door of a university and had their eyes prised open to the wonders of diversity and genderfluidity and Gazology. In truth, our broken borders are frequently cited as the No1 topic of concern by voters – in a YouGov poll last year, 58 per cent of Brits picked immigration as one of their big worries, compared with 51 per cent for the economy and 22 per cent for crime. And it’s not because they’re racist – it’s because they know that the nation that is blasé about the pouring of hundreds of men over its borders every week is a nation in name only. They know that such reckless indifference to the sanctity and security of the nation endangers not only women but Britishness itself. They know that the thing they cherish above all else – their identity as Britons – will be entirely emptied of meaning if Britain cannot even define and defend its boundaries.

Working-class Britain has had a gutful of the fashionable national shame of the elites. They see this establishment shrug its shoulders over our territorial integrity, and dry-heave at the sight of a St George’s flag, and spout on a loop that soulless tripe about how ‘Britain is all about diversity’, which is another way of saying Britain stands for nothing, and it makes them sick. They know Starmer is far happier in Davos talking platitudinous bollocks with the gold-collared superclass than he is in Darlington, with its pesky Reform voters and its nurses who’d rather not see a cock in their changing rooms. And they know the burning contempt that both Labour grandees and the pink-haired upstarts of the Green Party feel for them, and their communities, and their flags, and their longing to take pride, once more, in Britain. They know these people look down on them as pig meat (‘gammon’) who can be swayed this way and that by the demagogic trickery of populists. Their voting in the local elections was less a plea for better bin collections than a stirring ballot-box revolt against a morally apathetic regime that has overseen the scandalous withering of the nation.

Anyone who is shocked by the working class’s rejection of Labour has not been paying attention. It is a revolt completely without mystery. This is what happens when you demean entire communities as flag-shagging bigots, and call them racist for not wanting a thousand men from fuck knows where in the hotel at the end of their street, and tell them that the rape of girls in their communities by gangs of mostly Muslim men is just a ‘far-right dogwhistle’ that they should shut the hell up about. This is what happens when you strip a people of their flag and their sense of national identity and their means of social solidarity and then mock them as racist trash when they push back. Starmer’s legacy will be as the gravedigger of two-party politics.

The extent to which Starmer doesn’t understand any of this is staggering. Indeed, his very first response to his drubbing at the ballot box was to drag poor old Gordon Brown out as his new special envoy on global finance. Brown! This is the man who, as PM in 2010, damned Gillian Duffy as a ‘bigoted woman’ after she challenged him on the economy and immigration. They really don’t get it. And they never will. The withering of this class of ostentatiously ashamed preeners cannot come soon enough. Not only the security of the nation but also of women and Jews requires the removal of these fools who sold off our sovereignty for a pittance.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.