One pictures the scene in the corridors of power this past weekend, as the reports filtered through: Keir Starmer, lips pursed in that characteristic expression of pained rectitude, staring at footage of ordinary British families processing through London with the sort of horror usually reserved for discovering one has invited the wrong sort to a garden party. Here they were, these dreadful people—workers, pensioners, mothers pushing prams, even a smattering of ethnic minorities who had failed to read the memo about their own oppression—expressing concern about the country they foolishly believed still belonged to them. The sheer cheek of it. One almost expects the Prime Minister to have demanded a recount of reality itself.
Matthew Goodwin, that tireless cataloguer of the bleeding obvious, did his best to describe what actually occurred at the Unite the Kingdom rally. No rivers of blood, no pogroms, no impromptu book-burnings of The Guardian. Just people. The sort who pay taxes, obey the law, and have begun to notice that their streets, schools, and hospitals increasingly resemble the arrival lounge of an especially chaotic international airport with no departures board. Goodwin called them patriots. The establishment, with its customary lightness of touch, called them far-right. One wonders what the term "far-right" is supposed to mean these days. Once upon a time it denoted chaps in jackboots yearning for a spot of genocide before tea. Now it appears to encompass anyone who wonders whether importing hundreds of thousands of people a year, many from cultures with rather robust views on integration, might eventually have consequences.
This semantic inflation is a marvellous political technique. It is rather like declaring that anyone who complains about the weather is a "climate denier" while simultaneously insisting that rain is a social construct. Stretch the elastic far enough and it loses all useful tension. Starmer and his colleagues—Sadiq Khan among them, that noted enthusiast for London's vibrant diversity until the wrong sort of vibrancy turns up with Union flags—have been particularly energetic stretchers. They have expanded "far-right" to cover the views of roughly half the native population, or at least those who lack the good grace to applaud their own demographic displacement.
One must admire the sheer brass of it. Here is a government presiding over record net migration, strained public services, grooming gang scandals swept under various carpets, and neighbourhoods where English is increasingly the second language of the street. And their response to citizens noticing these minor details is to denounce them as extremists. It is gaslighting on an industrial scale, the sort of thing that would make Orwell blush at its crudity. "Nothing to see here," they intone, while deploying thousands of police officers, facial recognition technology, and pre-emptive bans on foreign speakers, just to be on the safe side. One pictures the Met's command centre: a hive of activity not unlike the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, except instead of Klingons the enemy consists of retired accountants from Essex waving flags.
The spectacle has the delicious absurdity of a Whitehall farce. The political class, comfortably insulated in their Islington redoubts and heavily policed constituencies, lectures the working class about 'hate' while pursuing policies that amount to a slow-motion cultural lobotomy. Uncontrolled mass immigration is not, apparently, the threat. The real danger is the far Left's curious alliance with certain imported theocratic tendencies that view Western freedoms as decadent abominations. But no—best not to notice that. Better to smear Dave the plumber from Bolton as a fascist for wanting his grandchildren to grow up in something recognisably like the country his own grandparents knew.
Starmer himself emerges from this episode looking rather like a man who has mistaken his own propaganda for reality. There he stands, the great defender of working people, the former human rights lawyer, the solemn guardian of British values, casually writing off swathes of the native population as beyond the pale. It is a remarkable transformation. For what we see is not mere political calculation but a deeper, more revealing indifference—an autocrat's chill. He appears to possess no particular affection for the historic British people, those stubborn islanders who built the place he now governs. Their concerns are not to be addressed but pathologized. Their patriotism is not celebrated but pathologized as 'hate.' Their very existence as a coherent demos seems an inconvenience to the grand project of managed demographic change.
One suspects that in the quiet hours, when the red boxes are closed and the spin doctors have retired, Starmer contemplates the electoral mathematics of the future with something approaching private rapture: the prospect of a new, more reliably grateful electorate, less inclined to awkward questions about free speech, women's rights, or why the local park now requires separate hours for different communities. The traditional British working class, with their tiresome attachment to things like fairness, history, and the rule of law, can be dismissed as relics. Far-right, naturally. Problem solved.
This, of course, is where the satire curdles into something bleaker. The real threat to the traditional British way of life has never been a few thousand flag-waving patriots on a Saturday afternoon. It is the combination of ideological fervour from the far Left—eager to dissolve national identity in a warm bath of multiculturalism—and the sheer scale of uncontrolled immigration that makes such dissolution inevitable. The former provides the intellectual justification; the latter supplies the numbers. Starmer's government, like its predecessors, seems content to let both processes accelerate while policing the complaints rather than the causes.
The march exposed the lie, as Goodwin suggested. Not because the attendees were saints or political philosophers, but because they were so manifestly ordinary. The establishment's hysterical reaction revealed more about its own disconnection than any supposed extremism on the streets. In the end, one is left with the image of a Prime Minister lecturing his own people on hatred while demonstrating a profound lack of love for them. It is not an attractive sight. Britain deserves better than to be governed by men who view its native population as an obstacle to progress rather than its foundation. The patriots, for all their rough edges, at least understand that much. The autocrats, it seems, never will.