Keir Starmer’s sickening libels against the British people

Something truly callous happened in London on Saturday. Shortly before the grieving mother of a young woman who was murdered by an illegal immigrant was about to go on stage and share her heartbreak, activists flashed the slogan ‘Immigration makes Britain brilliant’ on a huge screen. As the mum was no doubt going over her notes, steeling herself for her nervous speech about the horrors inflicted on her daughter, ‘progressives’ decided to remind her and her dumb admirers that actually immigration is fab. And there it was: the iron fist of cruelty in the velvet glove of ‘Be Kind’.

The mum was Siobhan Whyte, mother of Rhiannon. In 2024, Rhiannon was murdered by an ‘asylum seeker’ from Sudan called Deng Majek. She had been working at the very migrant hotel where Majek was staying. One evening, after she finished another day’s graft of cooking for Majek and the others, he followed her to the railway station and stabbed her 23 times with a screwdriver. He then danced with glee over her bleeding body. Siobhan, in her speech at Saturday’s Unite the Kingdom rally, fumed against the politicians who have let our borders go to rack and ruin. Keir Starmer is an ‘abhorrent excuse of a leader’, she said. He has ‘failed us’.

The ‘progressives’ who intruded into the Unite the Kingdom rally with their pro-immigration taunting were from Led By Donkeys, the turbo-smug, craft-beer tosser collective that was born from the middle classes’ imperious disgust with the vote for Brexit. As Siobhan and thousands of others made their way to Parliament Square, Led By Donkeys carried out one of their cunning stunts, flashing their ‘brilliant immigration’ slogan on a digital billboard by the roadside. The bourgeois press lapped it up, loving this vision of graduate leftists from leafy London ripping the piss out of the gammon-hued working classes who dumbly worry about our broken borders.

The rest of us, though, those of us whose moral compasses are not yet cracked, were left with two striking images from Saturday. On one side, a shattered mum giving a faltering address on the awful fallout from unchecked immigration, and on the other, well-fed Guardianista wankers saying immigration is the best. On the stage, a harrowing tale of working-class suffering at the hands of a cruel man and an apathetic establishment – in the crowd, the digital scoffing of a privileged middle class that thinks riff-raff whining about immigration is basically fascism. Working-class pain and bourgeois jeers – rarely has our moral divide, our moral chasm, been so grimly on display.

These are the battlelines in modern Britain. There are the cold, insular elites for whom mass immigration is a source of moral virtue and cheap labour – and there are the concerned communities who worry that our withered sovereignty is undermining the sanctity of the nation and the security of its people. There are the chattering classes who have made being ‘pro-immigration’ into a cheap pose designed to demonstrate one’s moral fitness for high society – and there are the working classes who must live with the consequences of this sacrifice of our territorial integrity at the altar of bourgeois virtue. People like Siobhan Whyte, whose daughter’s precious life was lost to the post-sovereignty mania of her supposed betters.

Saturday really did shine a light on The Two Britains. There were two protests in London. There was Unite the Kingdom, called by Tommy Robinson, at which a mostly working-class audience waved the Union flag and aired their grievances over the slow death of British identity. And there was the ‘Nakba Day’ protest, at which a mostly middle-class audience waved the Palestine flag and aired their fury against the world’s only Jewish nation. One gathering wanted to repair a kingdom, the other dreamt of destroying one – the Jewish one. ‘From the river to the sea’, they chanted, and we know what that means: erase the Jewish State, every last inch, all the way from the river to the sea.

The Palestine demo was an orgy of bigotry dolled up as virtue. It was proof that the middle-class left, bereft of ideas for Britain itself, now derives its sense of meaning almost entirely from hating Israel. Masked in their culturally appropriated keffiyehs, they barked for the globalisation of the intifada and wrung their untoiled hands over that sneaky, bloodlusting ‘Zionist entity’. The vibe at Unite the Kingdom could not have been more different. It was more mellow, more serious, more devoted to fixing the land in which we live rather than annihilating the land in which the Jews live. One side cried out for the restoration of
Britain, the other for the obliteration of Israel.

And yet it was Unite the Kingdom that was tarred as fascistic and dangerous, including by Keir Starmer himself. Was there bigotry in some of the speeches at Unite the Kingdom? Unquestionably. There were flashes of anti-Semitism at the rally, too, with one white-supremacist banner calling for an end to ‘the Zionist occupation of Britain’. Yet as the Campaign Against Antisemitism says, that vile far-right hate was ‘absolutely dwarfed by the anti-Jewish hatred [on the Palestine march]’. ‘Hang every ZOG pedo cunt’, said a placard on that ‘kind’ demo, ZOG meaning ‘Zionist Occupied Government’. The Palestine demo was infused with dreams of anti-Jewish violence (intifada) and a longing for the vaporisation of the Jewish State.

On what planet is it the grandmothers with St George’s flags who are the Nazis, while the masked mobs hollering for apocalyptic violence against the Jewish nation are ‘progressives’? In what moral universe does it make sense to denounce proud working-class Britons as fascist scum, while letting the lowlife celebrators of the 7 October pogrom pose as good guys? This is moral inversion of the most staggering kind. It is a crime against truth. If you’re working class and want to live in a safer, happier nation, you’re scum; if you’re a keffiyeh loudmouth who thinks the rape and murder of Jews is ‘resistance’, you’re good. Future historians will marvel at the lies and sheer moral bankruptcy of our times.

Starmer’s televised address on Friday, in which he railed against Unite the Kingdom as if it were the second coming of the Luftwaffe, was the most shaming moment of his premiership. The vast majority on that rally were good people who just want proper working borders, a tougher clampdown on Islamist extremism, and a tad more national pride. For Starmer to defame them as a threat to the nation, as a ‘stark reminder of exactly what we are up against’, is repulsive. We now have a prime minister who defines himself in opposition to his own people, like some mad, drunk monarch marooned in his remote tower. Those chanters on Saturday were right: ‘Keir Starmer’s a wanker.’

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.