Andy Burnham could be about to call a snap general election. Or at least that’s the view among a few people who I rate in Westminster.

Such as James Johnson, the pollster, who has just put forward a compelling case for why Team Burnham should hold a snap election and extend Labour’s grip on power until at least 2031, if not longer.

The argument rests on three key points, all of which should be noted by people who are seriously interested in the future of this country: a consolidated Left; a divided Right; and a closing window of opportunity for Andy Burnham and the Left.

First, ever since Andy Burnham’s appointment as prime minister, Labour’s been gradually pulling ahead in the polls. Since Keir Starmer announced he was going, Labour’s average in the polls has crept upwards by close to five points, to 25%.

While this is still nearly ten-points lower than what Labour polled at the last general election, in 2024, amid a fragmented political landscape it’s still enough for Labour to return to the top of the polls, forcing Nigel Farage and Reform UK, who have been sliding since January, into second place.

What explains the shift? Crucially, it’s not just a ‘Burnham bounce’. Labour’s getting stronger because it is consolidating the left-wing vote.

We saw this first in Makerfield, where despite being in government Labour increased its share of the vote while both the Greens and Liberal Democrats lost roughly 10-points between them. And now we are seeing it nationally.

In the last three months alone, the share of Green Party voters switching to Labour has surged three-fold to 16%. The share of Lib Dems doing so has more than doubled to 12%. And the share of people who voted Labour in 2024 and now plan to do so again at the next general election is up more than ten points to some 60%.

While it’s still very early days, what all this suggests is that left-wing and socially liberal voters are starting to consolidate in a significant way around Andy Burnham as a way of not only signalling their socially liberal values but fending off what they see as the growing electoral threat from Reform UK.

And this could be just the start of a much bigger strategic shift on the left. As James Johnson rightly points out, if you look at who these voters think would make the ‘best prime minister’ – Andy Burnham or Nigel Farage – then it’s not even close.

More than three-quarters of Labour and Lib Dem voters, and more than seven in ten Greens, say Andy Burnham. Throw in a general election campaign that will inevitably see much of the left and the media class in Britain portray Nigel Farage and Reform UK as posing a severe existential threat to democracy, as heralding the return of ‘fascism’ or some kind of ‘extremist’ takeover, and it’s not hard to see what happens.

While such claims are obviously nonsense, they will further encourage socially liberal and left-wing voters to make a strategic calculation and flock to Burnham en masse. And this is especially important given a second crucial point, which I’ve already pointed to. A divided Right.

Consider the last two general elections in this country.

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Here’s a story unfolding in Britain that deserves a lot more attention.

Over the weekend, The Daily Telegraph broke the news that the FBI in America believe that one of the largest Muslim charities in Britain, the Al-Khair foundation, has been used to bankroll the banned Islamist terrorist group Hamas.

The FBI claims the Foundation, which is a partner of the UN refugee agency, has been used as a front to send money to Hamas under the guise of ‘humanitarian aid’.

Last week, its global director, Mohammad Yousef Hasna, was arrested in London and now faces extradition to America on charges of financing and conspiring to support terror activity.

While the Al-Khair Foundation has distanced itself from Mr Hasna, the sheer scale of the organisation means that we should all be watching the case closely.

Last year, the Foundation reported an income of some £74 million. In the last five years, it has claimed more than £9 million from the British state in Gift Aid. It runs Islamic schools in Britain. It delivers welfare programmes. It has worked closely with the British government. And then last Friday, the Charity Commission opened a full statutory inquiry into the Foundation and restricted its financial transactions.

I do not know if Mr Hasna is guilty.

And I do not know whether the Al-Khair Foundation has engaged in criminal activity, or violated its legal duties as a charity.

We will have to let the inquiry, and the FBI investigation, take their course.

But what I do know is that this story should not be viewed in isolation because it points to a much bigger problem that very few people in Britain are willing to discuss.

It is what we might call the Islamist charity complex.

Because for years now, Britain, like many other Western nations, has been failing to deal seriously with a broad and diffuse subculture of organisations, networks, and charitable foundations that seemingly operate under the respectable banners of ‘charity’, ‘community representation’, and ‘social cohesion’ but which behind the scenes are indirectly or directly providing support to Islamist extremists.

Just look at what we have learned through a string of official reports.

Eleven years ago, the British government’s official review of the Muslim Brotherhood — an organisation that is still legal in Britain but banned in countries such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Russia — revealed how this highly secretive organisation has not only been operating in Britain for fifty years but has become deeply embedded in our country’s charitable sector.

As the official review noted:

‘A complex network of charities associated with the Muslim Brotherhood has developed here over many years. Whilst some of these seem to be raising funds only for the Brotherhood in the UK others have been linked to Hamas … Though never publicly acknowledged by the Muslim Brotherhood charities in the UK are an important part of the Hamas and Brotherhood infrastructure in this country’.

In fact, that particular report not only warned that groups and people in Britain linked to Muslim Brotherhood ‘held out the prospect and ambition of an Islamic state in this country as elsewhere’, but concluded the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies were wielding ‘significant influence’ on student organisations, groups claiming to represent Muslims, some mosques, and charities.

Astonishingly, despite that review concluding that ‘aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to British values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security’, David Cameron refused to ban the organisation. As of today, the only mainstream party committed to proscribing Muslim Brotherhood is Reform UK.

That review was eleven years ago. Now fast forward to 2023, when William Shawcross published his independent review of the counter-terrorism ‘Prevent’ programme.

Yet again, he too found that many charities and civil society organisations in Britain are failing to challenge Islamist ideology.

Even worse, Shawcross pointed to charities and civil society organisations that were openly promoting Islamist ideology and associating with known extremists.

Such as the leader of a Prevent-funded civil society group who was found to have publicly sympathised with the Taliban in Afghanistan and described militant Islamist groups – whose military wings are banned in Britain– as the “so-called ‘terrorists’ of the legitimate resistance groups”.

Pointing to these and other shocking examples, Shawcross warned the British state that it has become far too focused on individual terrorist groups while ignoring the way in which non-violent civil society organisations, including charities and community projects, are helping to cultivate Islamist narratives and networks.

In particular, he pointed to networks around Hamas: “Going beyond proscription, the government should pay greater attention to the pernicious impact of Hamas’s support network in the UK. These companies and charities operate legally”.

Then, three years later, in 2026, came a third major report which found remarkably similar things. Published by Lord Walney, former advisor to the government on political violence, the report points to several charities operating in Britain which exhibit ‘patterns of ideological alignment, structural linkage, and interaction with institutions and individuals associated with the Iranian regime’.

We’re talking about senior figures in UK-based charities who support the likes of Hezbollah or Hamas. Charities promoting ideologies that are aligned with the Iranian regime’s revolutionary worldview, or which organise rallies and events that advance this anti-Western ideology, and feature anti-Semitism. And charities that despite all this are claiming HMRC Gift Aid or even Covid-19 grants, backed by British taxpayers.

What all this amounts to is yet another shocking example of suicidal empathy — forcing the hardworking, law-abiding, decent British people to subsidise civil society groups that are directly or indirectly promoting Islamist ideologies and movements that would, if given half a chance, destroy Britain and/or transform it into some kind of Islamist caliphate.

Suicidal empathy is the Charity Commission formally investigating the Islamic Centre of England over alleged ties to the Iranian regime while the very same charity, astonishingly, is allowed to sponsor visas for migrants coming to Britain.

Or the British state giving nearly £500,000 in GiftAid to an organisation like the Islamic Human Rights Commission Trust, which is being investigated by the Charity Commission for alleged links to the Iranian regime and making inflammatory views.

Time and time again, in these reports, we read of charities, foundations, and civil society groups, often subsidised by the British people, being used to promote ideologies, movements, and narratives that are not just incompatible with British values but fundamentally opposed to key aspects of our national life.

Clearly, none of this means that every Muslim charity or foundation is suspect, or aligned with extremism.

Nor does a statutory inquiry mean there has necessarily been wrongdoing. As I say, we will have to wait for the various inquiries and investigations to run their course.

But what is becoming clear is that dismissing all these cases and controversies as isolated incidents is no longer plausible.

Because in Britain there is now a seemingly well-organised infrastructure or ecosystem of charities, foundations, schools, religious institutions, cultural groups, and more that is undermining our own nation from within.

In only twelve years, we have had an official report warning about how the highly secretive Muslim Brotherhood is exerting significant influence over our national life, an independent review warning that the very same civil society groups that are supposed to be countering terrorism are promoting extremist ideologies, a former government advisor warning that hostile states like Iran are wielding influence through civil society groups, and now also, to return to the story this weekend, a major investigation into one of Britain’s biggest Muslim charities over alleged links to the Islamist terrorists Hamas.

Some politicians have grasped there is a problem. Earlier this year, in March, the government announced plans to give the Charity Commission, the main regulator, new powers to close down charities that ‘promote extremism’.

But I’m really not convinced this is enough, or that this issue is getting the attention it deserves. If, for example, a series of official reports revealed that right-wing extremists were using charities and foundations to funnel support into their groups I suspect there would be an intense national debate and a very strong policy response.

But on this issue, once you look past a handful of whistleblowers and one or two people who have produced reports, there is just deafening silence.

For the last two years, the political class in Westminster has been happy to take a lead on restricting our free speech when it comes to Islam, ushering in a definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’.

But it has said next to nothing about how this ecosystem within that is operating within Britain is working, who is funding it, and how to shut it down. I don’t know about you but I’d like to hear a little less about ‘Islamophobia’ and a little bit more about how the charitable sector in our own country appears to be enabling Islamism.

Because the fight against Islamist terror is not simply about finding and arresting terrorists; it is about shutting down the much wider system facilitates this terror, or what the scholar Shamit Saggar once described as the ‘circle of tacit support’.

The charities that are not really charities. The foundations that are not really foundations. The ‘community representative groups’ that do not really represent anybody beyond extremists.

It’s only when we start turning the screws on this wider non-violent network by ushering in much greater scrutiny, transparency, and tougher action that we will be able to dismantle it. Because the one thing that we will never be able to say is that we were not warned.

There will be no Live this evening as I am travelling back to the UK this evening. Our Live discussions will resume next week at 7pm on Mondays.

A brief note today because I’m travelling.

I took a long walk this morning and thought about how even though it’s not yet over this year has been the most difficult of my life.

Fighting the parliamentary by-election in Gorton and Denton at the start of the year was an extremely valuable learning experience. But finishing second behind the extremist Greens and amidst the rise of sectarianism was difficult.

I then faced an avalanche of attacks for publishing a book that dares to tell people the truth about what is about to happen to Britain if we don’t change course.

And I then took that book on a pretty gruelling tour around the country — visiting more than sixty cities, towns, and villages to spread the message to others.

There’s no doubt I made mistakes along the way. The learning curve for me this year when it comes to politics and campaigning has been extraordinarily steep.

We are all works in progress.

But what struck me throughout it all is how many people stayed with us, how many newcomers joined us for the journey, and how out-of-touch many of the people who attacked us are from the country they claim to understand and represent.

Last night, my new assistant Jack messaged to tell me we have officially passed 1 million followers (1.1 million to be exact) across all platforms — Substack, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others, making this one of the largest political communities in Britain.

Day after day, we are cascading our evidence, arguments, and analysis, which rail against the status-quo, to all these people, and many more.

And the book, despite being criticised by those who clearly don’t want the people to know the truth, just passed 2,000 reviews on Amazon, where the people have given it an average rating of 4.8 out of 5.

Even more importantly, what is becoming clear is that many of the ideas, arguments, and evidence that we have been discussing together are no longer just confined to newsletters like this.

They are going mainstream.

Only this morning, the Tory party released a policy that our longer-term readers will recognise from this newsletter (see here, here, and here). Namely, ending social housing for foreign nationals and ensuring that Britain puts British military veterans and British families first.

The Tory version of this policy is nowhere as robust as Reform’s version, as I noted this morning, but you can see the direction of travel.

This is just one of many examples of how the principle of ‘national preference’, otherwise known as putting your own people first, something we have repeatedly made the case for, is now going mainstream in many areas of our national life.

Look, too, at the way in which leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, which will now be advocated by not one but two mainstream parties at the next general election, is becoming the mainstream view. Something else we have constantly been calling for since the creation of our newsletter (see here and here).

Look, as well, at how our calls for greater transparency on the relationship between criminality, nationality, and migration are going mainstream, with countless columnists, politicians, and others now making similar demands of the British state.

Or look at how key concepts that help people make sense of what is really going in Western nations, such as ‘suicidal empathy’, first coined by psychologist Gad Saad and pushed repeatedly into the British political debate by newsletters like ours, is now also entering everyday conversations.

Clearly, we are not directly responsible for all these changes. Lots of people are playing their part, too.

But I do believe that given the size of our community we have become an important platform for pushing these things forward and helping bring about wider changes in politics, culture, and the national debate.

Even if a single battle is lost here or there, take a bird’s-eye view and it is clear the terms of debate in Britain and across the West are now changing in major ways.

Ideas, concepts, policies, theories that were once considered fringe or not even known at all are now entering and reshaping political life.

And if this community has played even a small part in that wider shift, then it is only because people like you made the decision to support us.

So, as we are hopefully all having a little downtime and rest during the summer I wanted to not only remind you of this progress but say thank you for reading, sharing, subscribing, commenting, and helping us build something that is making a difference and which I really do hope gives you a sense of community and belonging.

Because we are in this together, whatever the future might hold.

And I’ve got a feeling that the immediate future, in the next few months, is going to be very interesting indeed.

An extremely difficult Labour budget. Perhaps an early general election. Seismic elections in France, Sweden, Germany, America, and elsewhere.

And the ongoing battle to save Western nations like Britain from managed decline if not being lost altogether. Best wishes and see you next week. Matt

Paid subscribers can join Matt Live EVERY Monday evening at 7pm UK time on the Substack App to discuss the big issues of the day. Tonight we will be discussing the arrival of Andy Burnham, what it means, what to expect, and YOUR predictions!

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If you want to know where Britain’s migration crisis might be heading then stop looking at Dover and the Channel and start looking at Ceuta.

Over the past few days, this small Spanish city on the North African coast has become the latest symbol of Europe’s ongoing migration crisis.

In truly harrowing scenes, 60,000 illegal migrants overwhelmed authorities, engaged in violence, and exposed just how quickly national borders can unravel.

Predictably, much of Europe’s political and media establishment then spent the following days not addressing the issue but trying to gaslight its own people.

“Ceuta isn’t really Spain,” they say, because it happens to be located away from the mainland.

But as commentator Konstantin Kisin rightly points out, this is a ridiculous argument. Pearl Harbor sits in the Pacific Ocean, but nobody argues it is not American territory. If Spain cannot control its sovereign territory, then Spain has simply lost control of its borders.

Others tell us not to worry because many of those who entered Spain have now been sent back to Morocco. Nothing to see here.

But again, they miss the point entirely. That some migrants have returned home does not change the fact that a Western state completely and publicly lost control of its own territory in only a few hours.

Then comes the final excuse: this was neighbouring Morocco’s fault.

There’s no doubt that Morocco fuelled the crisis. As Spanish author and security expert Rafael Bardaji points out in an insightful essay in The Spectator, Morocco has long used migration to coerce and try and influence Spain, turning the taps off and on depending on what it wants from its neighbour.

This is why, as Bardaji notes, we should no longer immigration as just a humanitarian or economic challenge. Because today it has morphed into an instrument of geopolitical competition — used by the likes of Morocco, Turkey, Libya, Belarus, and other hostile states to try and bully the West.

This is right. But it still doesn’t paint the full picture. Because ask yourself: what does it really prove? That European nations have now become so weak, their borders so soft, their leaders so distracted, that they can be so easily manipulated in this way by hostile states and organised criminals? I don’t find that very comforting. Do you?

The real lesson from Ceuta, I think, lies elsewhere. What I see unfolding in recent days is not just about Spain. It’s about Europe. Because for more than a decade, Europe’s politicians have been failing to resolve an ongoing and intensifying migration crisis at the border that is not only undermining the sovereignty of European Union member states but will increasingly impact Britain, too.

Politicians will tell you they’ve “regained control” since the initial peak of the crisis, in 2015. But the numbers say otherwise.

In the decade since, according to official data from Eurostat, the European Union received nearly 9 million first-time asylum applications — with most asylum-seekers now coming from Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey.

While the numbers have fallen a little since the peak, step back and look at the bigger picture, as shown below, and the long-term trend becomes clear. Europe is not resolving this crisis; far from it. The numbers are steadily rising over time.

Meanwhile, illegal migration continues at speed. Increasingly organised criminal people-smuggling gangs have flourished, and Europe’s borders are being exploited.

Since 2015 alone, the EU border agency Frontex says it has detected more than 3 million illegal — sorry, “irregular” — border crossings at the EU’s external borders. But the real number, as we know, will be much, much higher.

At the same time, EU member states have become openly divided on the issue, failing to find a consensus between socially liberal leaders who now view mass immigration as an unalloyed good, and conservative leaders who can now see what’s coming unless they take urgent, radical action.

Many of the latter, rightly, point to what lurks on the horizon. Such as the fact, shared earlier this year by the respected Gallup agency, that some 33 per cent of all adults in sub-Saharan Africa and 25 per cent in the Middle East, would like to move to another country if given the opportunity.

That’s equivalent to more than 300 million people who say, if they had the chance to move, like the chance that emerged in Ceuta in recent days, they would grab it with both hands.

Of course, most never will and we should be careful about confusing desire with intent. But what these findings point towards is the sheer scale of the potential migration pressures that are building up around Europe — and by extension Britain.

The established political class will scoff at this. But then had you suggested twenty or thirty years ago that Britain’s political class and entire armed forces would soon find themselves powerless to stop an invasion of more than 200,000 illegal migrants on rubber dinghies then I have no doubt they would have scoffed at that, too.

While hostile states are already exploiting these weaknesses — including Iran sending operatives into Britain on the small boats — so too are the criminal gangs.

Already, according to The Daily Telegraph, people-smuggling gangs are slashing the price of small boat crossings to Britain in an effort to exploit the crisis in Ceuta.

While EU politicians convene pointless video summits or, in the case of Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, go on holiday during a major migration crisis, criminals are responding in real time. This week, in the shadow of Ceuta, Channel crossings to Britain were being offered for as little as £513.

What I’m suggesting is that instead of dismissing Ceuta as some kind of crisis in the distance, Britain should instead see it for what it is: a major warning of what’s to come. Because the small boats crossing the Channel are just the start.

If we really want to avoid scenes like those in Ceuta, and the failures that are visibly humiliating EU member states like Spain, then we urgently need to start constructing something new: Fortress Britain.

I’m not talking about a country that is completely closed off from the world. I’m not talking about one that does not accept a small number of legitimate refugees every now and then, such as those who we helped from Ukraine or Hong Kong.

I’m talking a country that is genuinely sovereign, where parliament and the British people — not foreign courts, international conventions, activist lawyers, and NGOs — determine who enters the country, who stays, and who leaves.

Fortress Britain means getting ahead of what is about to hit Europe in the coming years and decades. It means getting the appropriate legal architecture in place.

It means leaving the European Convention on Human Rights — the ECHR — so that we can genuinely control our own borders, our own laws, and our own country.

It means repealing Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, which enshrines the ECHR into domestic UK law and prevents us from detaining and deporting those who do arrive illegally, and the more than 12,000 foreign national criminals in our prisons.

And it means reconsidering our obligations under things like the Refugee Convention which were built in a completely different era and are no longer fit for purpose.

Fortress Britain, in a nutshell, means removing any and every legal framework that prevents democratically elected governments and, in turn, the British people from securing their own borders.

I say this because we are no longer just engaged in a rational debate about immigration policy, nor only facing threats from beyond our borders. What makes all this especially pressing is a final factor that lies within Western nations.

Across Europe, we have entered a much deeper debate about whether we actually want to remain self-governing nations, whether we want to defend Western civilisation, and whether we want to preserve this place we recognise and call home.

This debate is not simply being stoked by ‘far right culture warriors’. It has been forced on us by a radicalised political establishment within our own nations which, on both the centre-left and centre-right, has come to view the display of empathy to people from outside our nations as the supreme virtue in politics — no matter the consequences.

From Spain’s socialist government granting an amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants, to Andy Burnham’s Labour Party refusing to stop the boats while opening even more ‘safe and legal routes’, from one-nation liberals on the centre-right who sold out their nations to serve the interests of big business, to European Union globalist bureaucrats who have become dangerously disconnected from national citizens, for too long Europe has been in the hands of a political class that has come to view mass immigration as an objective in its own right.

To return to Rafael Bardaji, who aptly summarises this political shift:

“Across much of the political spectrum — and particularly on the contemporary Left — immigration is no longer treated merely as a phenomenon to be managed. It has become a political virtue in itself. Openness is assumed to be morally superior to restraint. Borders are often regarded less as expressions of democratic sovereignty than as obstacles to universal rights. The distinction between legal and illegal migration is progressively blurred beneath a broader language of inclusion”.

Increasingly, leaders are abandoning the responsibility they have to their own people in the name of showing empathy to others.

They have forgotten that the first duty of the state is not to signal virtue to the rest of the world but prioritise its own citizens, without whom the state will collapse.

What we are left with — what Ceuta and its aftermath reveal — is a glaring contradiction that now sits at the very heart of Britain and Europe.

A political class that claims to be working to defend our borders but whose members often no longer believe in borders at all.

A political class that assures us our concerns about borders are legitimate but which is now filled with activists who view neither borders nor nations as legitimate.

A political class that says welcoming illegal or “irregular” migration is in the interests of the wider national community while ignoring the fact that for many people in politics this is about creating new voters on only one side of the political divide.

And a political class that now defines itself foremost by how much empathy it shows to outsiders, even if this means showing little or no empathy to its own people.

The choice before us, then, is clear. We can either continue down this path of suicidal empathy — led by a political class that has become so obsessed with showing empathy to the rest of the world that it would allow the collapse of our borders along the way.

Or, instead, we can choose to save our nations by openly rejecting this extreme ideology and replacing the members of this political class before they replace us.

This means electing politicians and parties that reject suicidal empathy and will do whatever is necessary to restore full control of our borders, our laws, and nations so we can prioritise the safety, security, and survival of our own people.

But let me reiterate: you cannot have both these things. You can either have more suicidal empathy, more loss of control, and more scenes like those in Ceuta. Or you can replace the political class and save your country. The choice is yours.

Paid subscribers can join Matt Live EVERY Monday evening at 7pm UK time on the Substack App to discuss the big issues of the day. Tonight we will be discussing the arrival of Andy Burnham, what it means, what to expect, and YOUR predictions!

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For the first time in more than a year, the Labour Party is ahead in the polls. This week, under the new leadership of Andy Burnham, Labour replaced Reform UK and pushed Nigel Farage and his insurgent party into second place.

And it’s not just one poll.

Ever since Burnham’s appointment as Labour leader, several polls — by YouGov, Survation, More In Common, and Deltapoll — all suggest the race is narrowing.

But isn’t this just a ‘honeymoon’ for Andy Burnham, some will ask? A brief bounce that won’t really last?

Perhaps. After all, despite a blizzard of policy announcements, there’s little if any evidence that Burnham’s Labour has what it takes to fix Britain’s problems.

Labour still has no strategy for growth. No restraint on spending. No serious appetite for welfare reform. No answer to Britain’s spiralling debt crisis. No end to the small boats. And no desire to slash the Net Zero policies, rising taxes, and regulation that are draining business and the economy.

Talking about ending rough sleeping, funding social care, and getting more kids into technical education is fine; but none of this will resolve the deeper, structural problems facing Britain. None of it represents a fundamental change of direction.

Once people realise this, once a ‘summer of vibes’ is replaced by another winter of discontent, or perhaps even a major debt crisis, then Andy Burnham’s honeymoon will come to an abrupt end and Reform will once again push ahead.

That’s one theory.

Another is that Reform is struggling because of Project Fear 2. Coming after the first Project Fear against Brexit, in recent weeks Reform has faced a sustained attack by the media and political class that are using questions about a £5 million gift to Nigel Farage, billionaire crypto bros, and parliamentary standards to try and destroy Reform.

The attacks are not surprising. Lawfare, media investigations, alleged leaks of confidential information by parts of the British state, and direct attacks on the leader and his closest aides are all part of the same playbook that was used against anti-establishment politicians in America, France, and Romania.

And there’s no doubt the British people do not like what they are hearing about Reform – and the party should be honest about that.

Recent polling by YouGov suggests Nigel Farage is now, by far, the most likely of all leaders to be seen as “sleazy” – a view close to three-quarters of all people in Britain, including 40 per cent of Reform voters, now hold. The share of people who view the Reform party in the same way has also jumped by nearly 20-points to 70 per cent.

So, there’s no getting around this for Reform: it is an issue, and it is one that needs addressing. But I’m also not convinced Project Fear 2 is as fatal for the party as some think, or is even what lies at the root of its current slide in the polls.

In America, remember, large majorities of voters were just as likely to say they held unfavourable views of Donald Trump and did not think he had the personality or temperament to serve in high office – shortly before they gave him two terms. In 2024, before Trump’s second victory, a large majority of Americans openly said they thought he’d committed ‘serious federal crimes’ – yet Trump still won a landslide anyway.

And as the experience of America also suggests, the constant attacks against Nigel Farage and Reform alongside one or even two by-elections in Clacton could spectacularly backfire. It’s not hard at all to see how all this could yet allow Farage to cultivate the same image of Westminster that Boris Johnson curated shortly before he won a huge majority in 2019: an establishment that is in cahoots to stop the people.

The bigger problem for Reform, I think, lies elsewhere. And I write this as somebody who has stood for Reform, is close to Reform, and wants Reform to succeed.

If you look closely at the polls …

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You all know that I’ll always speak up for the decent, silent majority of hardworking people who are sick and tired of watching Western nations be destroyed.

Which is why, yesterday, I gave a major keynote speech to the CPAC-GB conference in London — a big meeting for conservatives across America, Britain, and Europe.

There were people from President Trump’s administration, former prime ministers, current ambassadors, Members of Parliament, and more. Nigel Farage, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are giving their speeches today, so it’s a big stage.

I’ll be cascading some short clips from my speech around social media in a couple of weeks but first — exclusively — I wanted to make the full speech available right here for our paid subscribers — who make our work, influence, and reach possible.

It’s fair to say I don’t hold back. I outline the key trends, issues, and explain why, for those of us who want to change the direction of travel, time is rapidly running out.

I also outline two key principles that I think give serious shape and weight to the growing pushback against the establishment.

Our paid subscribers can access and watch the speech below, after the paywall.

And if you’re not yet with us as then now’s a really great time to join, which you can do right here with a 20% discount that will expire on Monday.

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Because aside from being able to access every bit of exclusive content like this, you’ll also be able to join — every week — our live discussions and new group chat.

That’s right.

Our weekly live meeting with paid subscribers will now take place every Monday evening at 7pm UK time so that more of our subscribers who are not working during the day, or who live in North America, can join us, too.

The new Substack lives will start this Monday (there will be no live today).

PLUS I’m opening up a new group chat for our paid subscribers where you can join with me to share comments, ask questions ahead of our weekly lives, and join together in another format to make it a bit more interactive for our paid subscribers.

This will also help inform our writing and the direction of our work.

For instance, this morning I’ve just asked the group for their predictions about how Prime Minister Andy Burnham will do, once he officially begins the role on Monday.

So, in short, there’s a lot of stuff for our paid subscribers who hopefully not only feel a strong sense of community here with us but can see they’re supporting work that is getting the big, counter-cultural messages out there into the wider debate.

So do please consider joining and supporting us — it would really help.

Here’s the speech along with some private thoughts from me on about what I’m trying to get across and achieve:

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The first time I met Ann Widdecombe was actually rather terrifying.

It was at one of my first ever speaking events for Reform UK, in Kent, where Ann was speaking ahead of me.

If you were ever fortunate enough to see Ann speak live, then you’ll know how the sheer force of her oratory vastly exceeded her small frame. She was a powerhouse.

She used no notes. She pulled no punches. She was totally authentic. She spoke from the heart. She knew exactly what she believed—and why. She proceeded to tear the house down. It was a masterclass in how to rally a crowd.

As I stood at the back of the room watching this little old lady have complete command of the room, I remember thinking to myself:

“Crikey. How on earth am I supposed to follow that?”

The truth is, I couldn’t.

I was merely a former academic who had only just entered politics. I didn’t really understand the importance of simplicity, emotion, and being in tune with the crowd.

Ann, in sharp contrast, was a genuine political heavyweight who had spent decades refining her craft through public life. She knew precisely what to say, when to say it, and how to connect with an audience. Her timing was impeccable.

While Ann and I exchanged emails from time to time — particularly when she was considering starting her own Substack — the next time I saw her in person was only a few weeks before she was murdered, at another Reform event in Torquay.

That evening we spent much of our time standing side by side, signing books and talking to people. Once again, when it came time to speak, Ann stole the show.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the speech. It was the way she treated people.

It didn’t matter whether somebody was a party activist, an MP, a branch organiser, a member of the hotel staff or simply somebody who had turned up out of curiosity.

If they wanted to speak with Ann, she gave them her full attention. She listened. She never appeared rushed. She always seemed interested. And she never made people feel they were an inconvenience.

I remember noticing that because, if I’m honest, it’s something I’m not naturally very good at. I’m usually rushing around, juggling too many things at once, thinking about the next interview or speech.

Looking back now, I specifically remember thinking on the way home that night: I should be more like Ann. A little kinder. A little more patient. A little more generous. A little more courteous.

Which is one reason why news of Ann’s murder hit me — and so many others inside Reform and across Westminster — so hard.

At first, like millions of others, I felt confused. I knew from the outset that what we were being told about Ann’s horrific murder was not right.

Nobody travels 300 miles to murder a well-known right-wing politician such as Ann unless it is premeditated and motivated in some way by political beliefs.

That’s just common sense. That’s just obvious.

And yet here were the police, in the immediate aftermath, not only claiming there was “no evidence” it was related to terrorism or politics, but displaying a complete lack of self-awareness by publicly praising their own police work.

How could they possibly know so soon? Why are they not simply saying: “it’s too early to know?” None of it made any sense to me — or millions of others.

And then, as I watched the reaction to Ann’s murder unfold across social media and Westminster, my confusion made way for an intense, unyielding anger.

Anger because of how an assortment of left-wing activists — Peter Tatchell, commentators on the BBC, and university staff — have such little class they decided to use the murder to make utterly horrific remarks about Ann and her legacy.

What we’ve seen, yet again, is an especially nasty and repulsive intolerance on the left of politics that simply has no equivalent on the right — the very same intolerance and hatred that we saw after the repeated attempts to assassinate President Trump and then the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Why is this concentrated on the left? Because as American academic Thomas Sowell pointed out, people on the left and right have completely different ‘moral visions’.

Whereas people on the right think people on the left are misguided, people on the left view people on the right as down right evil and so they will often celebrate violence against them, and think this violence can be justified (as the evidence clearly shows).

But I feel angry, too, because of how the instinctive reaction of the political class to Ann’s murder was not to question why the initial police response was so visibly dismal but, instead, berate the British people for daring to “speculate” about what might have happened.

Here’s an idea: if you don’t want people to “speculate”, then don’t try to gaslight them into thinking that somebody driving for three hours in a straight line from Rotherham to Devon to murder Ann Widdecombe has nothing to do with politics.

Only now, as evidence that the suspected murderer held communist literature and may have been linked to left-wing extremism has come to light, have the police finally changed their ridiculous tune, acknowledging that not only was Ann deliberately targeted but that she might have been part of a wider plot against Reform politicians.

In which case, why not just say at the very outset of the investigation: “We don’t know what caused this - we do not know if this was connected to politics”?

Because what we see during awful moments like this one is a much deeper problem in British society, which is the steady collapse of public confidence and trust in the police and indeed the entire criminal justice system. And much of this decline of trust in the institutions, I think, is entirely justified.

If you don’t want people to openly question what they are being told by the police and the establishment then don’t continuously gaslight and mislead the country in the aftermath of major atrocities and murders like this one.

If you don’t want people speculating or questioning the official narrative, then stop treating the aftermath of every atrocity as some kind of PR-exercise, trying to make us believe, for instance, that somebody such as Axel Rudakubana was “a nice British choir boy from Cardiff”, endlessly delaying the details of crimes when they happen to involve illegal migrants or people from minority backgrounds, or telling us to hold hands and sing songs, praise diversity, and do anything except look at the actual cause of major atrocities and terrorist attacks.

If you don’t want people questioning the state then stop using shadowy government units to subject them to ‘psy-ops’, using mainstream media to deflect our attention from the real issue. Focusing on the families of victims that, strangely, always seem to make statements in support of immigration and diversity while selectively ignoring other families – such as Rhiannon Whyte’s family – who challenge the narrative by calling on government to stop the illegal migration that killed their daughter.

If you want us to trust the political class and the institutions then don’t tell us that it’s fine for left-wing politicians to attack and vilify ‘the right’ after the murder of Labour politicians like Jo Cox, but then accuse Nigel Farage, leader of Reform, who simply wants truth and justice for Ann, of trying to “politicise” the tragedy.

Don’t allow the death of somebody in America such as George Floyd to be exploited and used to justify a full-scale cultural revolution against the West, but then accuse Reform politicians who are merely asking questions about what happened to their friend and colleague of “exploiting” the situation.

And while we’re here, don’t corrupt our police organisations and criminal justice system with the extreme, divisive, and unBritish ideology of Critical Race Theory, which deliberately pits different racial and ethnic groups against one another, and then claim there is “no such thing” as politically-biased, two-tier policing.

If you don’t want the people to “speculate” and ask questions, in other words, then I would suggest that the state urgently finds new ways of restoring public confidence and trust in police and the criminal justice system before things really get out of hand.

Which means? Rooting out two-tier policing. Rooting out diversity, equality, and inclusion policies. Stopping the endless psy-ops and social engineering tactics that are deliberately designed to gaslight and mislead people in the name of promoting “social cohesion”, or “community relations”.

Telling people the truth about what is really going on, which means if you don’t know what is behind a crime then just say “we don’t know right now”. Just be real with us. Be honest. Be open. Be direct. Be transparent. Talk about the actual cause, what actually happened. Just stop the endless gaslighting and obfuscation.

And, most important of all, get back to what used to guide this country before it was hijacked by an utterly divisive identity politics — equality before the law. Treat people equally before the law — irrespective of their race, ethnicity, or religion.

Do some of that and you may well find that the next time a tragedy like this unfolds – which ended in the brutal murder of our friend Ann – the British people might be less willing to “speculate” about what happened, may be more trusting of the police, and feel a lot less suspicious of the official narratives than they currently do.

The Ann Widdecombe I knew would never have wanted people to have been frightened or lectured into silence, or told not to ask difficult questions.

She believed politics required courage, honesty, clarity, free speech, and good faith debate. Those qualities are also the only way our institutions will rebuild the public trust they have now spent many years losing.

Until that happens, people will continue to ask questions — not because they enjoy speculation, but because they no longer believe they are being told the whole truth.

And until people start to see changes they have every right to feel this way.

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Tomorrow, I’m taking my first proper holiday in a very long time. I’m taking my family away for a week. There will be no posts.

It’s my first proper break since standing at the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election, releasing my book Suicide of a Nation, and completing a national tour that’s since taken me to more than fifty places across the country.

To be honest, I’m pretty exhausted.

Last night, after finishing the tour on Canvey Island, Essex, I was thinking about some of the highlights of the year so far.

Defeating the Labour Party at a national by-election in Greater Manchester. Helping set the stage for sweeping gains in northern England at the local elections in May.

Highlighting the real and growing threat from sectarianism in our politics. Watching an openly counter-cultural book that had zero support from a mainstream publisher and the establishment rocket to number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list.

Defeating the Tories at a big debate about the future of the British right. And taking on the broken establishment at the University of Oxford.

Not to mention constantly taking on the establishment narrative in this newsletter — giving people the truth, the evidence, the information, that is often hidden from them.

All this is really memorable and goes to show how this community of ours is now having real and serious influence. But to be honest — and I really do mean this — none of it was as special as something else.

Meeting, spending time with, and getting to know the countless number of people in this country who are using what little spare time they have away from work and their families to try and save this place we all call home.

The decent, silent majority of hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding, patriotic British people who are sick and tired of being treated like second-class citizens in their own country, who are utterly fed-up watching the ongoing destruction of their home, and who are willing to put their heads above the parapet to say: enough is enough.

I’m thinking of people like Sarah, in Beaconsfield — a busy professional mum who has children with health issues yet still, somehow, finds the time to build a local community group and help organise her fellow citizens.

People like Chris, in Bromsgrove, who kindly invited me to a summer reception in his own garden to help raise funds for his local community.

People like Michael, in Devon, who whizzed me around the country lanes before arriving at an amazing event at a beautiful hotel overlooking the sea.

And people like Tanya, in Hereford, who was understandably nervous about organising her first ever community meeting but brought together a few hundred people who are now connected and, hopefully, have a greater sense of belonging.

From one town to the next, from Redruth to Sunderland, from Halifax to Worcester, I just kept meeting the very best of our country.

Real, ordinary, down-to-earth, hard-working people who are taking time out of their busy and demanding lives to try and make a difference in their own way.

This is what matters. This is what is truly inspiring. And this is what is the most motivating thing in the world — when you see just how hard others are working and campaigning to try and stop the endless nonsense coming out of Westminster.

And that includes you — the people who support and share this newsletter.

We have built something truly incredible here. One of the largest counter-cultural newsletters in not just Britain but Europe.

You never really know what exact impact you are having on culture and politics but I think it’s fair to say given our numbers and reach on social media that we are helping, inch by inch, to push the culture and politics back towards common sense.

So, I would like to thank everybody who helped me during the first half of 2026 by organising these events, picking me up from train stations, dropping me off, bringing local people together, and supporting and sharing this newsletter.

Of course, I would also like to give special thanks to our small number of paid subscribers who make all this work — the travel, the social media, the hotels, the team members — possible. Because without them none of it would be possible at all.

See you in a week when I will have some exciting news about the rumours of a podcast some of you have been asking me about … Best wishes all, Matt

As always, I welcome your comments. I’m looking forward to joining our Inner Circle and Paid subscribers for our weekly Live discussion on the Substack App at 2pm today. Upgrade now to join us.

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If there’s one thing the liberal class love more than debating ideas, it’s inventing arguments their opponents never made.

Such as the argument that I want to live in a world where women who have no children pay much higher rates of tax.

That was the charge levelled against me during the Gorton and Denton by-election, when left-wing media including The Guardian and The Canary made this false claim to try and derail our campaign among women voters.

And now it’s reappeared thanks to somebody called the Guilty Feminist (real name Deborah Frances-White) who you might know from her disastrous debate with Konstantin Kisin on the popular YouTube show Triggernometry.

That debate has been watched some two million times and led The Times newspaper to describe the Guilty Feminist as “a cartoon of progressive intolerance: patronising, hectoring and censorious”.

Anyway, last month Deborah Frances-White shared a post titled ‘Why women should never vote for Reform UK’, which included the false claim that somebody called ‘Robert Goodwin’, alongside a picture of me, had ‘said he wanted a negative child benefit tax for those who don’t have offspring’.

It subsequently went viral.

When I messaged Deborah to point out this was inaccurate she promptly released my direct message as some kind of ‘gotcha’ moment for her supporters and appeared to revel in all the likes she was receiving from other progressive ‘feminists’, including Green MP Hannah Spencer, Carol Vorderman, and countless others.

When Deborah is not pulling stunts like this she also appears to spend a great deal of time online, campaigning against ‘the far right’, Nigel Farage and Reform UK, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and calling on people to support Palestine and vote Green.

You get the picture.

So, I thought I’d take the time to respond to the charge while also explaining where, I think, liberal feminists are going wrong today. I think it’s important that you, my readers, know what I genuinely think about this issue because it is important.

Let me start by being as clear as I can be:

As the son of a single mother, and father of a daughter, I will always be among the first to advocate for women’s rights and choice. Women must always be able to choose what they do with their own bodies. End of story.

I am also intimately aware that some women who desperately want to have children struggle with infertility. I want to be clear how much I empathise with those women.

Because I really do.

But what is also true is that rather than engage with what I actually said, my liberal feminist and left-wing critics prefer to attack a caricature because they appear to find that easier than confronting the more nuanced argument I am making.

I never called for women without children to pay higher rates of tax.

What I did call for — in this post — is for Western nations to debate a whole array of policies and measures that have been put forward by leading demographers around the world to try and solve our rapidly worsening demographic crisis.

Why did I do this?

Because Western nations like Britain are in the midst of a severe demographic crisis.

Fertility rates have plummeted to record lows – 1.39 in England, 1.25 in Scotland – and are forecast to keep falling unless we take urgent, radical action.

Rates are already well below the so-called ‘replacement level’ of 2.1, which means that unless we find a way of encouraging families to have more children then Western nations like Britain will simply not survive.

This, of course, might be what some people on the left want.

But I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people – including most women – do want Western nations to endure, not least because they are the only nations that have actually developed and protected broad-based rights for women.

There are also many reasons why liberal feminists and my friends on the left should take this demographic crisis far more seriously than they are currently doing.

Denigrating those who talk about it, and who dare to suggest ways of fixing it, as ‘far right’, ‘reactionary’, or ‘anti-women’, is curious given two points.

The first is that many of the things liberal feminists want will not be possible unless we all find a way of solving this demographic crisis and having more children.

If you are a liberal feminist who wants a functioning National Health Service then somebody has to staff it.

If you are a liberal feminist who wants a well-funded welfare state that supports the most vulnerable in society then somebody has to work and pay for it.

And if you are a liberal feminist who wants to live in a society with well-functioning public services then somebody will have to produce all the teachers, the civil servants, the nurses, the scientists, the workers, and the taxpayers to make it all possible.

You cannot simultaneously demand all these things while treating the only thing that makes all this possible – having children – as somebody else’s problem.

And you cannot demand all these things while attacking people who want to support and strengthen the very families that will make them possible.

This is not a serious response.

Nor is calling for mass immigration as a replacement for the failure of successive governments, both Labour and Tory, to support British families.

Mass immigration is not a serious answer to ageing societies; it is a Ponzi scheme.

Why? Because immigrants get old, too, so by importing masses of migrant labour you end up needing more and more people to service more and more pensioners.

That just pushes nations into a ‘population trap’ - which is what happens when the state can no longer provide public services for an ever-expanding population.

This is what we are now starting to witness in Britain with the glaring lack of available housing, quality healthcare, strong borders, and so on.

By ignoring this demographic crisis and calling instead for more immigration and porous borders, liberals are only undermining their project over the longer-term.

They are pushing us into a society in which the state will no longer be able to provide decent public services, while disillusioned British citizens will no longer be willing to pay tax and fund things like welfare because they will no longer feel any sense of solidarity with who is in the country.

The more diverse societies become, the less trusting they become; the less trusting they become, the less willing people become to fund welfare.

The fact that a quarter-of-a-million Brits left Britain last year suggests this weakening of the social contract is already underway and yet liberals appear blind to it.

Furthermore, I would say there is nothing particularly ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’, or ‘fair’ about what the likes of Labour, the Greens, and liberal feminists are doing.

They are asset-stripping the best and brightest from low-income nations and putting them to work in the National Health Service while refusing to invest in young British people who want to become doctors and nurses and then forcing the British people to send the same nations that just got exploited billions of pounds in foreign aid.

And there is nothing particularly ‘feminist’ about refusing to address the demographic crisis while importing millions of people who are — as the evidence makes clear — far more likely to hold misogynistic, patriarchal, outdated, and grotesque views towards women, and also far more likely to rape and sexually assault them, too.

Green politicians such as Hannah Spencer say they are ‘feminist’ while importing nationalities that are far more likely to commit sexual violence against women, and while turning a blind-eye to the fact that her party’s Muslim voters have consistently been shown to be far more likely to think women should stay at home, obey their husbands, be kept separate from men, and assume traditional roles.

How is this ‘feminist’, exactly? And how is this ‘liberal’?

Attacking people like me who want to defend women’s sex-based rights while directly undermining the rights of women through these extreme policies appears rather odd.

It’s also not a serious response to a specific and growing problem that liberal women face, too. Those who are trying to shut down debate about how to boost birth-rates in the West are precisely the group that should be taking this crisis most seriously.

Consistently, across the West, liberal women on the left are having much fewer children than their Brexit-voting, Trump-supporting counterparts on the right.

We are rapidly entering a world, in other words, where there will be far fewer Hannah Spencers and Guilty Feminists and far more Suella Bravermans and Sarah Pochins; far fewer AOCs and far more Sarah Palins.

Liberal progressives like to think they represent the future and they are on the ‘right side of history’ but if current trends continue they will soon represent the past while history will be written by the people who are actually having children.

Ideas do not reproduce themselves – people do.

By constantly promoting the very bad ideas that all men are toxic, children are unnecessary, and Western nations do not deserve to survive, liberal feminists and the ideologies they encourage are only setting the stage for their own demise.

More fundamentally, while liberal feminists are fond of lecturing the rest of us about ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, I would also ask them this: on what planet is it ‘fair’ or ‘equal’ to demand that the women who bear the enormous costs and burden of having children are treated the same as women who do not bear these costs at all?

It’s not fair.

It’s not fair at all.

Women who have children face much higher physical, financial, and mental health costs than women who do not — and we should live in societies that not only acknowledge this fact but respond to it.

And what about living in a society that actually helps women get what they want?

The vast majority of women — 92 per cent in Britain, according to one recent survey — hope to become mothers one day.

Liberals should not be making it harder for women to have children by shutting down debate and framing policies that are designed to help women achieve this as ‘reactionary’; they should be working to help women get what they want: children.

Personally, I would not go as far as suggesting that we should have a higher tax for women who do not have children. This was merely one of several ideas that were put forward by a leading demographer and which I merely said we should debate.

But what I do think we should introduce is sweeping tax allowances and other benefits for women who do choose to have children – especially British women and families who choose to have more than two children.

While liberal feminists like to portray all this as being something akin to the The Handmaids Tale, they are clearly not aware of the fact that we already do this.

It’s called child benefit. It’s called free childcare, tax-free childcare, maternity and paternity provision. All of which mean the principle that women who have children are treated differently is already established and should not be controversial.

The debate we should be having is whether this goes far enough. Clearly, given our rapidly declining birth-rate, I do not think it does. It needs to go much, much further.

I’d like to see the return of far more ambitious tax allowances for women and families that have children and which Britain used to have.

I’d like to see us replicate the pro-family tax policies in countries like Luxembourg, France, Germany, Canada, Hungary, Poland, and Cuba (presumably Hannah Spencer and liberal feminists are fans of Cuba?)

But I’d like to go even further.

Why not prioritise British families that have more than two children when it comes to housing and giving them far more favourable mortgage rates, for example?

Instead of giving scarce housing to the First Lady of Sierra Leone, we should give what housing we have to British women who have more than two children.

We should also teach children far more about the biological reality of having children, including the very real risks that come with having children later in life.

We either believe in science and biological reality or we don’t. We either want to protect women, or we are happy putting them at risk in the name of ideology.

Personally, I stand with science. I’m not sure when so-called ‘feminists’ decided it was ok to put women at risk by ignoring science but it’s happened. And it’s wrong.

And we should also find ways of cultivating a far more pro-family culture. We’ve already dramatically changed our culture when it comes to everything from driving with seatbelts to reducing smoking, protecting the environment, and more.

There’s absolutely no reason why we cannot also change our culture so that it is more supportive of mothers, puts families at the centre of our national life, and makes it clear that those who have more children will receive extensive benefits.

This is not inflammatory; this is how a nation and a people endure.

Lastly, let me say something about Reform UK — the party for whom I stood as a candidate and which is often accused of being ‘anti-women’.

Reform UK has certainly not helped itself by standing a candidate in Makerfield who, in my view, should have publicly apologised to women for his awful comments.

I did campaign in Makerfield but only briefly, on two occasions, because I wanted to thank the many activists who helped my own by-election campaign in Gorton and Denton. This is how political parties work. But I did think that allowing our candidate to stand without that apology was the wrong thing to do.

But while we’re here, have Hannah Spencer, the pro-Green Guilty Feminist, and countless other ‘feminists’ apologised for campaigning alongside dozens of anti-Semites, Islamist extremists who want to treat women like sex slaves and second-class citizens, Hamas sympathisers, and rape apologists?

I’ll leave that one here.

At the same time, the wider accusation that Reform UK is ‘anti-women’ is wrong. It is actually the only party that is standing up unequivocally for women’s sex-based rights – rights which Labour and Tory governments have undermined in recent years.

A Reform government would bring forward the Women’s and Motherhood Protection Act that will give women stronger protections, clearer rights, and greater certainty – extended time limits for pregnancy and maternity claims, stronger protections against dismissal during pregnancy, enhanced redundancy protections for new mothers, protection for women undergoing fertility treatment, alongside explicit breastfeeding rights, and additional rights for women who tragically experience miscarriage and stillbirth.

All this is ignored in the wider public debate about Reform UK.

Not to mention full justice for the countless women and girls who were systemically abused by the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs and who liberal feminists, strangely, never seem to talk about.

Reform UK will also fix Britain’s borders so that more young mums like Rhiannon Whyte do not lose their lives at the hands of illegal migrants, and more children are not abused by people who should never have been in this country to begin with.

If liberal feminists want to pretend none of this is happening while attacking all those who want to protect women as ‘far-right’ then that’s their choice.

But I would suggest this is another reason why Reform UK is topping the national polls — with more support among women than the Greens and Labour.

What I would like to see — put simply — is a country that recognises the very serious demographic crisis we are facing by providing much greater support for women with children, making family life much easier and more affordable, helping women get what they want, and feel more culturally valued when they do become mothers.

This is not reactionary, extremist, or far-right. It is how a healthy, forward-looking, and prosperous society should act.

We can either continue pretending this demographic crisis does not exist and attacking all those who talk about it; or we can have a serious, honest conversation about how to tackle it while also doing something that as a father and son I care very deeply about: protecting women.

As always, I welcome your comments. I’m looking forward to joining our Inner Circle and Paid subscribers for our weekly Live discussion on the Substack App at 2pm today. Upgrade now to join us.

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Here are three seemingly separate stories you might have missed in the last week that, taken together, reveal something far more profound.

First, it has emerged that pro-immigration campaigners helped place and prepare illegal migrants in the audience on the BBC flagship debate programme, Question Time, to “test” pro-migration messages in front of the British people.

Second, at the same time, it’s been revealed that a writer who helped craft storylines on the popular BBC primetime soap Eastenders is a “migration and racial justice” activist who works on “changing people’s views” through popular culture.

And third, it’s quietly been revealed that the family of Rhiannon Whyte — a young mother who was stabbed to death by an illegal migrant from Sudan — was guided by state officials to “tone down” their statement after Rhiannon’s murder, because of fears it might cause unrest among the wider population.

Three seemingly different stories that involve three different institutions – the BBC, the creative industry, and the British state. What do they all have in common?

All three, I would suggest, reflect the rise of what I call the ‘Narrative State’ – a state that along with its ruling class and institutions no longer sees its main role as being to describe reality but rather to present a socially-engineered, alternate vision of reality that both reflects and reinforces its dominant ideology.

In the Narrative State, bureaucrats, politicians, and institutions appear much less concerned with governing society itself than with governing how society is perceived by its citizens. The aim is not to present a realistic portrayal of what is happening around us but, instead, to present society as the ruling class believe it ought to be.

On one level, we saw this reflected in how the creative class and the British state united around the Netflix drama Adolescence, aggressively pushing a deeply warped vision of reality in which we were invited to believe that the main threat to British society is posed by white boys from stable homes.

We also saw it reflected in the findings of a recent study which found that while black people represent only 4 per cent of the population in England and Wales they appear in close to 50 per cent of all advertisements on television — a deliberate distortion of reality so that it better reflects what the ruling class would like to see.

But on a deeper level it is also clear that something far more insidious is at work. Increasingly, the Narrative State is now using an assortment of legacy media, universities, charities, the creative industries, state broadcasters, and shadowy government communications units to try and influence public perceptions through “framing”, “nudges”, “narrative control”, aggressive censorship, and speech codes.

Constantly fearing a loss of control, constantly trying to retain its power, the Narrative State is continuously trying to influence which facts are emphasised, which voices or ‘experts’ are amplified or discredited, which arguments are considered legitimate, and which conclusions citizens are allowed and encouraged to draw.

Compare and contrast, for example, the British state’s response to the Henry Nowak and Rhiannon Whyte murders. Henry Nowak’s father, who called for greater action on knife crime, was amplified by the state and legacy media. Rhiannon Whyte’s mother, who called on the state to fix its broken borders and stop illegal migration — goals that were not consistent with the dominant ideology of the state — was ignored.

For years, the ruling class denied this was happening at all. The mere suggestion that we might be living in some kind of socially constructed reality was dismissed as the stuff of ‘conspiracy theory’, ‘paranoia’, or ‘extremism’. But as the gap between people’s lived reality and what they are being told by the state has morphed into an enormous gulf — especially when it comes to mass immigration, demographic change, Islamism, and crime — this denial has become impossible to sustain.

Put simply, millions of people now sense they are not being told the full story. Worse: they now sense they are being subjected to social engineering and manipulated by the very politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to tell them the truth.

And they’re not wrong to think this way.

In recent weeks, even major newspapers in Britain, such as the Daily Mail, reported on the shadowy government units whose sole job is to manage public perceptions in the shadow of Islamist attacks and atrocities that often involve immigrants and minorities.

Only a few weeks ago, that newspaper drew attention to the ‘Research, Information, and Communications Unit’, or RICU, which it notes uses an assortment of methods to manage the ‘challenges’ that arise from mass immigration and broken borders:

“Its techniques”, wrote the investigators, “range from planting stories in the media, using undercover operatives to lay flowers at the scene of terrorist attacks and even, in one case, sending a pop group to sing anti-extremist songs in Muslim schools … They are working with the Police Service of Northern Ireland's C3 intelligence unit to identify those posting the online 'calls to protest' in Belfast [after the latest hideous attack] and other areas, as well as giving strategic messages to the police to ensure that the protesters were portrayed as unsympathetic thugs, rather than activists, and effecting behavioural change”.

In the immediate aftermath of horrifying Islamist attacks in London, in 2017, the same state unit reportedly drove around the area plastering walls with hashtags that read #TurnToLove, #ForLondon and #LoveWillWin.

And after the grotesque beheading of British aid worker Alan Henning, in 2014, by Islamic State, the same unit reportedly used a ‘front operation’ to plant an image of a woman in a Union Jack hijab in legacy media.

What all this reflects is how the goal of the Narrative State is not only to ‘win’ national debates or ‘control the narrative’ but, at a deeper level, shape and influence the wider environment in which these debates take place to begin with.

When public concern over, say, immigration increases, the Narrative State no longer replies by asking whether that concern is justified, or responding to it. Instead, it works overtime to ‘manage’ or ‘reframe’ that concern, while trying to ‘nudge’ citizens to a different conclusion — one that does not threaten the regime and its ideology.

Time and time again — the murder of Sir David Amess, the Manchester Arena bombing, the Westminster Islamist attacks, the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, and the pro-migration statement that was issued by family members after the recent attempted beheading of their relative in Belfast — the goal of the Narrative State is not to address the grievance but try and police the reaction to it.

Do not challenge Islamism. Talk about unity. Do not criticise open borders. Celebrate diversity. Do not demand an end to mass immigration. Praise openness. All of it is designed to ensure the deeper project is never seriously challenged or overturned.

In this sense, the Narrative State helps us further understand another concept I have written about recently — anarcho-tyranny — which is what happens when the state is unwilling or unable to perform its most basic functions such as securing borders, enforcing laws, protecting citizens, and maintaining order, while at the same time clamping down on citizens by regulating their speech, behaviour, and opinions.

The Narrative State can be understood as the cultural and communications arm of anarcho-tyranny. Where anarcho-tyranny fails to prevent the problem, the Narrative State moves in to manage the public reaction to the problem. Where anarcho-tyranny struggles to maintain order, the Narrative State seeks to maintain legitimacy. They are not identical, but increasingly they operate side by side.

None of this is new. More than a century ago, Walter Lippmann famously warned that people “pick out what our culture has already defined for us”. Later, from the left, Noam Chomsky, among others, built on Lippmann’s work to warn that elites “manufacture consent” to protect their own elite interests.

Around the same time, writing in the 1980s, Daniel Hallin pointed to how journalists were no longer reporting the truth but shaping the ‘sphere of legitimate consensus’, deciding which debates and voices were legitimate and which were not.

And more recently, scholars such as Jonathan Rauch have warned that ‘experts’ are now more interested in shutting down views they do not support while trying to influence the ‘parameters’ of knowledge and truth, rather than pursuing truth itself.

What is striking today, though, is just how openly and brazenly the Narrative State is trying to socially engineer and influence its own citizens. The huge investment in ‘strategic communications’ or ‘strategic narratives’, which are used by the state and its institutions to justify certain policies and interpret political issues.

The rise of ‘nudge units’ and behavioural science, which the state now openly uses to try and change how we think and behave. The investment in countering so-called ‘disinformation', such as the British state’s RESIST toolkit. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which creates an activist class of ‘trusted flaggers’ — approved bodies that now report and control what people say online. The Online Safety Act in the UK. And the introduction of ‘digital identification’.

What we are witnessing is the rise of a large, expansive, and powerful ecosystem of state agencies and institutions that are working continuously to ‘manage’, ‘frame’, and ‘readjust’ what is considered truth, legitimacy, and the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ knowledge within our national debates — largely because the state itself can sense that it is now starting to lose control of its own populations.

This, I think, is why so many people feel they are living in two countries at the same time. One that is interested in reality; another that is interested in warping the representation of that reality.

One that is anchored in fact; another that is cultivating narratives to try and distort those facts. One that people experience on a daily basis, as they go about their lives; and another, completely different country that is presented to them by state broadcasters, television advertisers, charities, universities, the creative industries, public bodies, Netflix dramas, popular television soaps, and activist networks.

This is not only why public trust in legacy institutions is collapsing but why populist revolts are only getting stronger and stronger. Because citizens are not only rebelling against liberal immigration policies, open borders, and the ‘suicidal empathy’ that unites the ruling class; they are also rebelling against this concerted attempt to deceive, mislead, and gaslight them on some of the most important issues of our time.

What many people have realised, in other words, is that the very leaders who lecture them about the dangers of ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, or ‘post-truth’, are the very people who are now invested in spreading these things or who, worse, have simply abandoned truth altogether.

What this leaves us in is a highly volatile situation where one of the key dividing lines that is emerging in politics today is not just between Left and Right; it is between those who believe that the state and our public institutions should stay rooted in reality, versus those who believe they should construct and impose something on the rest of us that is not reality at all.

And the more ordinary people suspect that they are being managed rather than informed, the more they will continue turning against the very state and the very institutions that once claimed to speak in their name.

As always, I welcome your comments. I’m looking forward to joining our Inner Circle and Paid subscribers for our weekly Live discussion on the Substack App.