Why are protests erupting in Dover, Portsmouth, and elsewhere? It’s a question that’s on the mind of many British people right now. And it’s a question I explore on this week’s episode of The Silent Majority Podcast, in which I walk you through a series of bombshell revelations about what is really going on in Britain’s broken asylum system and explain why people are being gaslit and misled by the system.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the second episode of the Silent Majority podcast, the place where we like to push back against establishment narratives. We like to ask questions that very few people are willing to ask.

And more importantly, we like to give you information and evidence you’re probably not going to hear today anywhere else.

Now, this week, we’re going to be looking at the disturbances, the eruption of protests and demonstrations in the United Kingdom, in Dover and Portsmouth. Of course, those are related to migration.

But I’m going to be asking what actually lies behind the simmering public anger in the country, because I do think we are approaching a very dangerous place.

But before we get going and discuss all of that, before we start, I just wanted to say, if you’re listening as one of our free subscribers, if you’re listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts, our early episodes are going to be completely free and open to everybody.

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Now, enough of that because it’s time to get going with what we really want to talk about today. And that is the eruption of significant protests and demonstrations in Dover and Portsmouth.

Many of you will have seen the scenes.

These were highly coordinated events, public protests in two major places in the UK. We saw hundreds of people, in some cases dressed in black, wearing balaclavas, taking to the streets, blocking off essentially the port of Dover.

And then just a few hours later, the next day even, we saw those extraordinary scenes in Portsmouth where a small boat, a mega dinghy, carrying around 140 illegal migrants arrived off the south coast of England.

And when it became clear that that mega dinghy—and of course, this is significant because most of the dinghies and boats do not land at Portsmouth, they go around to Dover—hundreds of protesters started to gather, not just locals, but people from organized networks.

And they proceeded to block roads. They tried to block the boat from arriving, and they tried to prevent the police from taking those illegal migrants and asylum seekers to be processed.

And Britain was once again this week confronted with, I think, a level of anger, frustration and tension around the immigration issue that is now becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Many Labour politicians quickly proceeded to criticise the protests, demonise the protesters. Prime Minister Andy Burnham described “poison” being brought onto Britain’s streets. The Labour Policing Minister described the protests as being unacceptable. Labour Minister Emma Reynolds described them as being “thuggish”, as dealing with or bringing intimidation.

And I do think it’s interesting because for the last few years, we have had a political class in this country, a ruling class, that has been more than happy, more than willing to allow mass protesters to march through the streets of London, Hamas sympathizers, anti-Semites, all kinds of extremists.

And they’ve barely said a word.

But here we have working-class British people protesting peacefully so far—and I’ll come back to that point—and yet Westminster and much of the left in British politics has had a complete nervous breakdown.

I do see a significant amount of hypocrisy.

Now, before getting into what’s caused these protests, what lies behind them, the chaos in the asylum system and some absolutely remarkable figures and evidence that we’ve discovered over the last seven days—and I’ll walk you through all of it—and I’m going to talk a bit about where I think this could be taking British society if we do not get control of the borders, obviously I’m just going to insert the caveat at the top of this podcast.

I do not support violence. I don’t think anybody who’s involved with our newsletter supports violence. We do not support intimidation. We do not support people breaking the law. We do not support people—well, I don’t support people wearing balaclavas. I don’t think they’re particularly useful.

I agree with some politicians this week who have said the best move for Britain is to ban all face coverings, including the burqa and the niqab. We are entering a society here, if we’re not careful, where face coverings are being normalized and becoming mainstream.

But let me be crystal clear at the top of this podcast. Let me tell you what I do support. What I do support is the right of the British people to peacefully protest against what is happening to their country.

And rather than simply condemning these people, rather than simply calling them far-right extremists, misinformed, and then quickly moving on, as much of the political and media class is doing, I think we need to ask a much more important question, which is what I’m going to answer today.

Namely, why is this happening?

Why are people becoming so angry in Britain?

Why is the country being pushed to the very edge?

Why are we seeing so many protests and demonstrations in recent years?

Because it’s not just Dover and Portsmouth. It is Epping. It is Bournemouth. It is Dundee. It is Falkirk. A number of towns and cities now have seen significant public protests and demonstrations against a specific policy that is being imposed on this country from above.

Britain now feels like it’s on the edge. In fact, only recently, the credible pollsters YouGov asked the British people—this is a mainstream pollster—to what extent do you think it is likely that there will be civil conflict in Britain in the next 10 years?

And one-third of all British people, one third, one in three, felt it is very likely that there will be civil conflict, potentially even civil war, in Britain within the next 10 years.

So in this episode, I want to really interrogate this and explore this, focusing in particular on what we’ve learned this week about the absolute chaos that is unfolding in Britain’s asylum system.

Because while all of these protests were taking place, all of the demonstrations in Dover and Portsmouth, something really important was happening in the background over the last seven days.

One story after another broke, one bombshell after another, involving an asylum system in this country that increasingly looks completely overwhelmed and out of control.

And I’m going to walk you through the big revelations because when you put them together, I think you begin to understand something critically important.

The small boats, the more than 209,000 people who have arrived now in Britain illegally on the small boats—and remember, in some polls, immigration is still the number one issue in the country.

It’s why I talk about it perhaps more than other issues.

But the small boats are only the most visible part of the crisis that is unfolding in Britain because behind those boats—and this is the important point—sits an asylum system that is simply not working. Sits a government machinery, the blob, the establishment, that is simply not in control of what is happening in this country.

So let’s go through what we’ve learned over the last seven days, because I think it has been quite a week.

I want to start here with the whistleblower, with a government insider that has blown the whistle on what is really happening behind the scenes. And I want to start with what they have revealed to the British people.

Just 1% of asylum claims in Britain, according to somebody who is working on asylum claims, just 1% are genuine claims for asylum.

That is what they told the Times newspaper. One in every 100.

This is not a fringe. This is not out on the margins or the extreme. This whistleblower went straight to one of the biggest newspapers in the country and said just 1% of asylum claims that they can see that are being processed are genuine.

Now, of course, this is not an official Home Office statistic. This is not an official report. But this is somebody who says that they have personally assessed thousands of asylum claims. And what they have seen is nothing short of astonishing.

They have talked about what people inside the system apparently call package claims. The same stories, the same supporting evidence, the same circumstances, the same excuses, the same motivations for seeking asylum come up time and time again.

In other words, you’re talking about widespread fraud.

The examples they gave: hundreds of Iraqi Kurds all saying they’ve been in a relationship with the daughter of the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan region. So either the daughter of the Prime Minister of Kurdistan really gets around, or these guys are gaming the system.

So many people made the claim, according to the whistleblower, that it became a running joke inside the Home Office.

Another example: hundreds of Pakistani applicants claiming that their lives are at risk because they are in a gay relationship with the same man. That’s right. Hundreds of asylum seekers from Pakistan claiming to be in a relationship with the same man supplied letters supporting the claims.

And many people, by the way, who have applied for asylum claiming to be gay also happen to have been photographed at the very same gay nightclub, which it turns out is now closed.

Now, of course, we’ve heard allegations like this before. Some of you will remember in recent months we had an undercover BBC investigation which found that immigration advisors and immigration lawyers—it’s a real racket—have offered to help migrants manufacture false sexuality-based asylum claims. They have helped them to pretend to be gay, essentially.

So when somebody who actually works inside the system comes forward and says that there is indeed widespread fraud, shouldn’t we be asking some very serious questions?

Because this is supposed to be a credible, reliable asylum system. It’s meant to protect people who are genuinely in need, genuinely fleeing persecution. To some extent, Britain should protect a small number of those people.

Although many of us, myself included, would argue that through helping refugees from Hong Kong, helping refugees from Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people—

Not only of genuine refugees, but the taxpayer, the British taxpayer. And we’ll come back to the costs later on because it is frankly absurd.

Another example was people from Bangladesh who claim to be now under persecution because they happen to belong to a particular political party. But when they were asked about the policies and the beliefs of that political party, they couldn’t answer the officials.

You know, we are being completely gamed in this country. And it is the hardworking, taxpaying British people, members of the silent majority, who are being forced to pay billions of pounds every year for this fraudulent scheme.

Now, that whistleblower, that wasn’t the only story this week, because that was followed very quickly by a second story, which also pointed to the absurdity of the system.

The United Nations Refugee Agency, which I don’t think you can describe as a right-wing organization, to put it mildly—it is definitely a member of the woke industrial complex—looked at how Britain has been conducting asylum interviews. And what did it find?

Well, it found that there was a real risk that Britain was giving people asylum who were not entitled to it and that it was making many mistakes. It was refusing people who genuinely needed some protection while also granting asylum to people who are not actually entitled to it.

In fact, it found that in nearly 30 of the 60 interviews for asylum that it examined, there were important credibility issues which had not been resolved. In another 19, the full basis of the asylum claim remained unclear.

In other words, in many, many asylum claims that are being made here in Britain, those claims, those applications, are not even meeting the quality threshold that has been set by our own government.

I mean, this is absolutely outrageous. We’re not talking about somebody on social media, an opposition politician. We’re not talking about a Substack writer even, although they’re great. We’re talking about the United Nations Refugee Agency flagging serious concerns about the quality of decision-making that is currently taking place inside Britain’s asylum system.

And the Home Office’s own numbers tell us something else indeed, because what we’ve also seen this week is a series of revelations that really do need to be known by everybody in the country.

The initial asylum rate, the rate at which people are being granted asylum after applying, has certainly fallen in recent years.

Now, back in 2022, that success rate, that grant rate for people applying for asylum in Britain, was 77%. Almost everybody was getting it, right?

They were just rubber-stamping applications left, right and center.

Today, it is 38%, so nearly 40%.

So we’ve gone from granting more than three quarters of all asylum claims to about four in 10.

Now, Labour politicians will sit on television and say, well, look at this, the system’s working, and they’ll gaslight you, a bit like they’re gaslighting you on the hotels.

Because what they tell you when it comes to the asylum hotels—and you’ve seen it all week again—they’ll sit on Politics Live or Question Time and they’ll say, well, the number of asylum hotels are coming down. Well, on the surface, that’s true.

But what they’re doing behind the scenes is they’re just moving people out of asylum hotels and they’re putting them into HMOs, housing for multiple occupancy, where they put upwards of 10 people in the same house, and they’re moving them into private accommodation.

And then you have private companies like Serco, who are offering landlords more favorable contracts if they take on illegal migrants and asylum seekers than if they take on British people. So they offer landlords, for example, things like no council tax, lower bills, instant repairs, all of this kind of stuff.

But here’s the kicker. Those private companies like Serco are bankrolled, are backed by money from the government, by money from the British people.

So what they’re doing is they’re using your money. They are using your money to outbid you in your own housing market. That is what is going on. That is why I find this so grotesque. It’s why I find it so utterly outrageous.

Which raises another obvious question. What on earth has been happening before these asylum claims have seemingly dropped? Are we actually now getting more decisions wrong? What exactly has changed?

Well, whichever way you look at it, these are not actually the numbers of a system that is inspiring confidence.

If you go back before 2022 into the 2010s, even the 2000s, the number of asylum claims were much lower than they are today. So even at the 40% grant rate, we are still processing and accepting many more applications for asylum than we did in previous years.

It’s a bit like when they say, well, the small boat numbers are down 40%, so therefore everybody should just relax and not be concerned. Well, that’s not the metric.

The metric is what happened before 2018.

And what happened before 2018 is we had no small boats. We don’t want the small boat numbers coming down 40%. We don’t want any small boats. That’s the metric.

But what you see is, through this debate, they are trying to normalize illegal migration. They are trying to get people to accept that this is now a permanent feature of our national life.

When Andy Burnham says, I’m going to move processing centers, detention centers, from poor areas to rich areas, the debate then becomes about redistributing illegal migration when the debate should be about stopping illegal migration.

But the reason they’re gaslighting you is also because they’re not telling you about the appeals process. And this is what we also learned this week.

Let me just bring this one up because this is another unbelievable thing. That’s a great story, another unbelievable piece of evidence that came out this week.

Because even when the Home Office declines an application for asylum, when it rejects that application, that doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody instantly leaves Britain. They can appeal that decision.

And this week we learned much more about what is happening in that appeal process.

Close to 6,000 appeals against rejections were allowed. Another 10,200 cases were withdrawn, normally by the Home Office. And when those outcomes are combined, it turns out that two-thirds—and this is in the Times newspaper again—two-thirds of rejected asylum claims are overturned on appeal. 64%.

64% of asylum claims that were initially rejected are overturned on appeal. Nobody will tell you this on BBC Question Time.

Think about what that really means. So the Home Office makes a decision. It says no. The case moves into the appeals system. And then a very large proportion of those cases either succeed on appeal or they are withdrawn immediately.

Again, what is going on?

Either large numbers of initial Home Office decisions are wrong to begin with—I would not be surprised by that—or new information is entering the process later on, or the system is simply struggling to reach consistent decisions.

Either way, it is a complete and utter joke.

Whatever explanation you prefer, the consequence is the same: more delays, more immigration lawyers, more tribunal hearings, more administration, more money being spent by the hardworking British people during the worst cost-of-living crisis pretty much since the Second World War, going on something they never asked for, they never voted for, and more time before Britain finally establishes whether anybody has a right—

The time, the clock just ticks on.

And now that backlog has completely exploded. This is what we learned also this week. In fact, we learned about this towards the end of the week.

It is, for me, the figure that best captures the total chaos in the system.

For months, ministers have been talking about clearing the asylum backlog. They’ve been talking about improvements. They’ve been talking about getting on top of the system, getting things moving.

You speak to anybody in Westminster, in the SW1 land, they’ll say, “Oh, isn’t Shabana Mahmood great? She’s doing such a good job.”

Except now we’ve discovered something that blows all of that apart because the asylum backlog has not disappeared. It’s just moved.

Because new figures show that at the end of June 2026, there were more than 90,000 asylum appeals waiting to be heard. 90,000. A year earlier, it was only 59,000.

So in just a year, under Labour, the asylum appeals backlog has increased by 51%. Think about that. 51%.

Now, the government speeds up the initial asylum decisions. You get more decisions being made, more people being rejected, but then more people appeal and the pressure just moves from the Home Office into the courts, a bit like the pressure is moving from the asylum hotels onto HMOs and private accommodation.

So if you clear one backlog, you’re just simply creating another somewhere else in the system.

In fact, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has already warned about precisely this problem, referring to repeatedly shifting backlogs rather than actually reducing them.

So it’s like a game of whack-a-mole. The system is just moving this problem from one part of the system to another. And again, it is the British people, it is the silent majority, who suffer.

Because we don’t really have an asylum backlog anymore. What we have in this country is a chain of backlogs running through the system. And the system is now completely incapable of dealing with this issue, of resolving this issue.

And that is why so many people out there, millions of people out there, are feeling so utterly frustrated.

There are now more than 155,000 outstanding asylum cases in this country. 155,000.

The government itself said only weeks ago that the average wait for an asylum and immigration appeal to be decided by a judge was around 67 weeks. More than a year.

This is why I think the political debate completely misses the point.

We are always hearing ministers boast about how many initial decisions they’ve been making, but who cares how many pieces of paper they are actually processing if the cases are just piling up elsewhere?

The real test of an asylum system, in my mind at least, is incredibly simple. Can Britain quickly decide who is entitled to remain here? And then crucially, when somebody is not entitled to remain, can Britain actually remove them from the country?

I mean, we’re now in such an absurd position that even the Times newspaper this week has now adopted the Reform UK position.

Now, the Times newspaper, in case you haven’t noticed, has launched an all-out war on Reform UK, targeting Nigel Farage and the people around him, spending basically the entire summer trying to derail Reform UK.

Now, whatever you think about Reform UK, it is a bit hypocritical for the Times newspaper then this week to adopt Reform UK’s policy, which it did, when it called for the immediate detention and deportation of all illegal migrants.

And anyone who enters Britain illegally, according to the Times, should not be given asylum. They should be immediately deported and moved offshore to a third country. And the Times suggests perhaps use the Falkland Islands.

Now, what’s the difference between Reform UK’s policy and what the Times newspaper is advocating? Very little indeed.

And this is the absurd position that we find ourselves in. The establishment attacks the anti-establishment party while parroting the anti-establishment party’s position.

So this is why, again, I’m optimistic. Those of us in, let’s call it, common-sense land, who have been arguing against the establishment now—

I would argue, by the way, if you look across Europe, that is what is happening.

The other thing we saw this week: the enormous election results in Germany.

What we are seeing there is hugely significant. The Alternative for Germany is replacing the failing liberal, established Conservative Party, the CDU. The AfD is replacing the dominant, historically dominant right-wing party while calling for a much tougher position on migration.

You look at France in the polls. Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, who I met last week at the Reform Conference, they are topping the polls, likely to be the next president and/or prime minister of France.

Look at Austria. The Austrian Freedom Party, number one in the polls.

Look across Europe, you see much the same. We are winning the argument when it comes to the issue of migration and border security because a lot of people looked at those scenes in Ceuta, Spain earlier this summer and they can see what’s coming.

They can see what is coming down the track if we do not change course.

And in Britain, as I’ve written previously on the Substack, what that means is building Fortress Britain.

It means leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. It means repealing Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, and it means immediately detaining and deporting anybody who arrives in this country illegally, turning back the boats and sending in the Navy, but fundamentally changing the legal architecture around this country.

There is no point being in the Refugee Convention in 2026. It was made in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is not fit for purpose.

There is no point being in the European Convention on Human Rights when we cannot control our own borders and our own laws and our own policy.

The reason people voted in 2016 to leave the European Union is because they were tired of being stuck in an illiberal, undemocratic regime that imposed policies on them that they never even voted for and they couldn’t influence.

But that is precisely what we have with the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR. We cannot control these decisions. Unelected judges, influenced by unelected lawyers, influenced by a political class in Westminster that is wholly focused on maintaining and upholding the broken status quo.

Now, millions of people in Britain might not know the detail in the asylum system that I’ve just talked about during this podcast. They might not know the exact numbers.

But what they do know, because the British people are not idiots, is that the system isn’t working and they are not being respected. They are not being treated fairly.

The old argument about British culture is that it was always based on fairness. It was based on the idea of fair play. And that is so important to the British people.

But what they can sense is that the very politicians on the left, Labour politicians and also Tory politicians too, Lib Dem Conservatives, that when they tell the British people, when they lecture the British people about fairness, about compassion, about empathy, what the British people can now see, like people across the West, is that those words do not mean what they used to mean.

Because what we have now is a political class in the West that is absolutely, absolutely dominated by the mindset of suicidal empathy, obsessed with suicidal empathy.

They want to show so much empathy to people who do not come from Western nations that they are destroying Western nations along the way.

That is what I see when I look at these numbers.

150,000 unresolved asylum claims. 210,000 people arriving illegally on the small boats. That’s more than twice what we have in our standing army.

It is completely and utterly insane.

Which brings me back to the protests that are now erupting very regularly across the country, which brings me back to Dover, brings me back to Portsmouth, brings me back to the anger, the tension.

And what we’re witnessing, the establishment response to those protests, has been utterly predictable.

Andy Burnham, Emma Reynolds, every woke celebrity, many mainstream journalists have condemned the protesters. Many mainstream newspapers have.

Ironically, many of the same newspapers that claim to represent public anger on immigration were some of the quickest to condemn people who were protesting peacefully.

They’ve been called thugs. They’ve been called far right. We’re back to the Keir Starmer playbook. They’ve been talking endlessly about people presenting a threat to British society.

Now look, as I said at the outset, if you’re committing violence, if you’re intimidating others, if you’re breaking the law, then of course the police should act, and I don’t support people engaging in violence.

But what I find absolutely remarkable is the complete lack of curiosity in Westminster and the media class about the bigger question, about why all of this is happening.

What I find remarkable is the hypocrisy.

I do not remember Shabana Mahmood, who has come out this week and said the police must get tough on the hard right, I do not remember Shabana Mahmood coming out and saying the police must get tough on those balaclava-wearing thugs from Muslim communities in East London who were marauding through the streets.

I do not remember the political class saying the police and the system must crack down on all of those hate marches through our capital city for the last three months—or four years.

I do not remember them adopting the same mindset when it comes to sympathizers of Hamas, the Islamist organization, by the way, that happens now to have praised the UK Labour government twice in as many years.

I mean, my question, as I wrote in the Substack this week: what on earth did Britain’s political class expect? What did they think was going to happen? What did they think the British people were going to do?

Because for years, for decades, pretty much ever since May 1997, where in my mind this hideous experiment begins, the British people have voted for immigration to come down. They’ve voted for demographic change to be slowed.

And for years, governments, whether Labour or Tory, have promised control. They’ve promised they would lower immigration. They’ve promised they would secure the borders.

Beginning with Tony Blair and Jack Straw and David Blunkett, running right through to Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer and now Andy Burnham.

But what have the British people been given instead?

One betrayal after another.

Small boats crossing the Channel. Asylum hotels opening. Five-star accommodation for people breaking our laws. Legal experts, lawyers, courts working overtime to prevent the British people from controlling their own borders, their own country.

An asylum system that is now riddled from top to bottom with fraud, with fraudulent claims. It’s become a Ponzi scheme. Rejected applications disappearing into an appeals process.

And now what we see is righteous public anger, legitimate public anger. People saying enough is enough.

And what I wrote about towards the end of this week, which actually has turned into one of our most-read pieces this year, what I wrote about is my concern, my fear, to be frank with you, about where this is heading.

A few years ago, I read the work of David Betts, a professor at King’s College London, an expert in conflict, military conflict and war. David’s very well respected. He’s very well cited in academia. He’s a serious man with a lot of studies, papers and books behind him.

David got some attention a few years ago, as some of you will know, for daring to suggest, having spent much of his career looking at civil conflict and civil war in developing states, that actually the conditions for civil conflict are now present in Western nations like Britain, and that actually we are already sliding into some kind of civil conflict.

The wheels, he argues, are already in motion.

Now, I explain his theory in the Substack. I talk through the different dynamics that he points to, the things that you would need to be present for that to happen.

But let me just read one of the quotes from his excellent report with a co-author, because I think it sums it up:

“The consequence,” he writes, “is a political culture that’s no longer defined by left and right, but by something starker. A belief that politics itself is theatre, with real decisions scripted elsewhere, beyond scrutiny or correction,” or we might add, the people. “In this sense, the central political belief of liberal democracy, the conviction that voting matters, has withered away.”

And I think that is what those people at the protests, those people in Dover, those people in Portsmouth, can sense.

It doesn’t matter, based on the last 30 years, how you vote. It doesn’t matter if you support Labour. It doesn’t matter if you support the Tories because nothing ever changes.

Immigration levels keep going up. The borders become weaker. The boats keep coming. And the bill, the billions of pounds that have to be paid, is forced onto the British people.

That is why I genuinely believe, even though I was skeptical of David Betts’s argument at first, that we are now entering a very dangerous period in British politics.

Because the social contract is being stretched beyond what is acceptable and what would support democracy and social cohesion and the legitimacy of the state going forward.

When millions of people start to conclude it’s not just that the state cannot do its job, it’s not just that the state is incompetent, but when millions of people start to conclude that the state itself is working against their own people, against its own citizens, well, then we’re entering a very dark place indeed.

And I suspect at the radical tip in Dover and Portsmouth, that is indeed what all of those men and women have already concluded.

There’s no point actually waiting three or four years for a general election. Nothing’s going to change. They need to protest and demonstrate peacefully because they’ve given up, clearly, on not just the establishment, but they are giving up on the social contract.

That is a very, very, very dangerous place for a country to be.

The mainstreaming of two-tier politics, the mainstreaming of a sense that mass migration is completely out of control, the mainstreaming of a sense that the state now prioritizes minorities over the majority, and the mainstreaming of the belief that it is the people who are being forced to pick up the tab.

Tens of billions of pounds that should instead be going on building primary schools, secondary schools, building prisons, building hospitals, building roads, building infrastructure for the British people. Investing that money in our national defense, for goodness’ sake.

We’re now in the absurd position in Britain where the establishment says we don’t have enough money for the Royal Navy, for the Royal Air Force, for the British Army, while every year, every single year, we are sending £23 billion either overseas in foreign aid, funding things like contraception programs in Pakistan, eco farms in Nepal, or going on welfare payouts for people who are not even British.

Now, if that isn’t suicidal empathy, I don’t know what is.

And I think that is why so many people are so frustrated.

Now, I attract a lot of criticism. I’m going to be really honest with you. The reason I am Mr. Unpopular in certain circles in BBC SW1 land is because I’ve come to the conclusion that if we do not do those things, this country of ours, our home, will not only become unrecognizable, but it will enter something that will both look and feel very dark indeed.

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In the last few days, Britain has witnessed major and coordinated public protests that tell us a great deal about the dire state of the country — and where we might be heading if we do not urgently change course.

In Dover, last weekend, hundreds of working-class British men wearing balaclavas and black clothing blocked key access roads and brought the coastal town to a complete standstill. Then, a few days later, in Portsmouth, as news spread that the small boats carrying illegal migrant had changed their route and were approaching the area, hundreds of protestors again descended to block roads and try and prevent authorities from transporting small boat migrants to processing centres.

Many people in the ruling class were clearly shocked by the protests. Countless Labour politicians rushed to denounce them. Prime Minister Andy Burnham declared “we must stop the politics of poison seeping into our streets”. Labour’s Policing Minister Sarah Jones said there was “no excuse” for the disruption. And Labour Minister Emma Reynolds — channeling her inner Keir Starmer — toured media studios in London to denounce the protestors as “thuggish and intimidating”.

But as I also asked after the eruption of protests following the Southport atrocities, in 2024: what did the ruling class in Westminster expect? Seriously — what do they expect the British people to do? Because for eight years now, the Labour and Tory parties have continuously imposed a reckless and extreme policy of open borders on a people who neither voted for it, nor ever asked for it.

Their decision to allow 210,000 people from radically different cultures to enter Britain illegally, and then force the British people to pay, during one of the worst cost-of-living crises on record, billions of pounds for it, is making a mockery of the social contract. So too is the fact that they continue to welcome the small boats despite knowing they have already brought convicted terrorists, ISIS sympathisers, rapists, murderers, and other criminals into Britain.

What kind of ruling class, many people will ask themselves, does this to its own citizens? And what kind of ruling class imposes all this on a people but then expects them to remain silent and not react at all? Clearly, only a ruling class that has scant regard for its own people and is not thinking about where all this might lead.

But behind these questions and the protests in Dover and Portsmouth — which join a growing list of protests in places such as Bournemouth, Bristol, Dundee, Epping, Falkirk, Plymouth, and many more — lies something that I find even more profound and disturbing, and which very few people are even willing to discuss.

When politicians in Westminster look at the protests they clearly sees thugs and hooligans. And when the British people look at them, according to a survey by YouGov, they divide fairly evenly into the 31 per cent who see the protests as “a legitimate way of protesting”, and the 38 per cent who see them as illegitimate.

But what came to my mind as I watched those hundreds of men — dressed in black and balaclavas — marching along the streets of England and openly mobilising against the British state, was something else entirely. What I saw was something far more disturbing — a chilling prediction made by Professor David Betz, a leading scholar of war and conflict, that may now be starting to come true.

Let me explain what I mean.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Silent Majority Podcast with me, Matt Goodwin. My goal is simple, to tell you the truth, to bring you information you won’t get anywhere else, and to challenge an establishment that’s lost touch with millions of ordinary people. No groupthink, no political correctness, no forbidden questions.

Just the issues that really matter to you.

Come and join us at mattgoodwin.org.

Welcome everybody to the Silent Majority Podcast with me, Matt Goodwin. Now this is a podcast for people who are tired of being ignored, dismissed and shut out from our national conversation. Every Friday, I’m going to give you my unfiltered view of what is really happening in Britain and the West.

I’m going to bring you the evidence, the analysis, the statistics, the figures that you probably are not going to hear on the BBC. You’re probably not going to be able to get them anywhere else.

And I’m going to challenge the establishment. I’m going to challenge the establishment narratives that we are given from the BBC, from the institutions, from the dominant political class.

And I’m going to challenge The groupthink, the lazy groupthink that dominates our culture by asking questions that I think far too many people in politics and the media are too scared to ask or they don’t want to ask because of that lazy groupthink.

And today we’re starting with a big one, a really big question: Does the right in Britain need to unite? I’m going to show you some things you might not have seen before. I’m going to do this because I think it’s one of the most important questions of all going into the next general election in the United Kingdom, which I think millions of people can sense is going to be one of the most important general elections in our contemporary history.

But before we get to that, because this is our first episode, I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to to explain to you exactly why I decided to do this podcast and what I want it to become. Because I think today, if you look around the media landscape, if you look around the political debate, if you want to call it that, we already have countless podcasts.

And so many of those podcasts are made by the same kinds of people for the same kinds of people. They are podcasts that are created by people who have exactly the same underlying assumptions, who ask exactly the same questions, who reach exactly the same conclusions. Who often went to the very same schools and universities and who, to be frank, are completely disconnected from what millions of ordinary people out there in the country and indeed the West really think and believe.

So that’s why I wanted to try and do something a little bit different. I don’t want to have guests yelling at each other and talking over one another.

I don’t want to have any carefully We’re not going to rehearse talking points. We’re not going to cling to the establishment consensus. We’re not going to follow the lazy group think. I’m not going to tell you what you should think.

What I am going to do once a week, every Friday, is give you my unfiltered, honest view of of the biggest issues facing our country and Western nations. And I’m going to present to you and share to you evidence and information that you’re not going to get anywhere else and which I think will challenge the consensus.

So hopefully every week you learn something new.

Maybe you come across a study or some findings or some evidence that you’ve not really seen or heard anywhere else. I’m hopefully going to contribute to the conversation and I’m going to speak up and represent the silent majority, the millions of people out there who really feel as though their voice is not included in the conversation.

And I simply don’t think that ordinary people are being told about it. And that’s what I want to try and do with this podcast. That’s what the silent majority is really going to be about.

And I also want this to become more than a podcast. We have a community. Many of you, hopefully, who are listening to this are part of our community at mattgoodwin.org, a Substack community that began a few years ago and has now morphed into a place for nearly 100,000 people who check in every week to read books.

What we what I write, what I share on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So if you want to support our work, if you want to help us speak up for the forgotten majority, if you want to get everything that we’re producing, all of the articles, all of the commentary, if you want to come and join our subscriber group chat, if you want to meet me in live discussions, then please head over to mattgoodwin.org and become a paid supporter. Those are the people who make our work happen.

And just to give you some context, we are now reaching tens of millions of people every month through our social media and through our outreach. We’re one of the biggest Substacks in Europe, and it’s absolutely amazing. And it’s thanks to the support of our readers and subscribers that that has been made possible. And we’re actually getting the evidence and the arguments and the information out there.

And I think genuinely, we’re making a difference.

You can also, of course, put your questions directly to me, and you can join all of our private discussions. So that’s that. That’s why I decided to set up a podcast. That’s why I wanted to do something different.

What I want to ask is our first question, which is, does the right in Britain need to unite? Because what I want to show you today is actually what is going on in the United Kingdom. And one of the problems for people on the right, one of the problems for people who perhaps feel so frustrated with things like mass migration, broken borders, record taxes, record energy bills, woke ideology, political correctness, one of the big problems that I see is that the left, left wing parties have figured out how to win under our election system.

And people on the right are currently not doing what they need to do in order to win the next general election. And let me just say this at the outset that I believe firmly that we really only have maybe one election left to save Britain, to save the country.

Because of all of the things that are profoundly transforming Britain like other Western nations, mass uncontrolled immigration, which nobody ever voted for, broken borders, which nobody ever asked for, rapid and relentless demographic change, which, let’s be honest, is making many of our cities, our towns, our villages is leaving them completely unrecognisable.

Not to mention the way in which many of our taxpayer funded public institutions have moved sharply to the left. Over the last 10 or 20 years, while ordinary people have stayed exactly where they are, or if anything, they’ve moved a little bit to the right on issues around culture and identity. All of this has really left an enormous chasm at the heart of our politics. And it’s left many people desperately searching for an alternative.

And I think the next general election is going to be one of the big ones. It’s going to be a historic turning point, I think, in the history of the United Kingdom, one that will either push the country into more of this radical, if not extreme political and cultural change and essentially making that permanent.

Or it will see millions of people join together to say, no, actually we want to push the country in a completely different direction. We want to end the policies of mass uncontrolled immigration. We want to fix the borders. We want to embed a principle of national preference into the country.

We want to put the British people and British young people first. And we want to establish a country that gives power genuinely back to the people who have built that country, who make that country work and who want to pass that country on to their children and their grandchildren.

And I think many people can sense just how profound, fundamental and important the next general election is going to be, which is why, which is why if you look at the current polling and you look at what is happening in British politics today and you look at what would happen if there was a general election tomorrow, you can begin to see the problem that many of those people are going to encounter.

If you take all of the polling and I’m talking to you here in early September, 2026, if you take all of the polling and you run what’s called a forecast model and look at what would happen at the next general election.

And as of today, the result would be another five years of left wing, liberal left wing government. The Labour Party would fall 60 seats short of a majority, but would be able to cobble together a working majority with the Liberal Democrats. There would be a sort of Labour led coalition.

And the reason for that, for those of you who are watching this podcast and can see the numbers on the screen, the reason for that is because of the division on the right, because of the division between the Conservative Party, the Reform Party, and to a much lesser extent, Restore Britain.

If there were an election tomorrow, the Conservative Party are predicted to win 119 seats. Reform would replace the Conservative Party as the dominant party on the right of politics with 132 seats, obviously a very historic shift. Restore most likely would pick up perhaps one or two seats, maybe one in Great Yarmouth, and that’s about it.

But the key point here is that even though you see that significant takeover of the right by Nigel Farage and Reform UK, Nobody on the right actually enters power because they are well short of the 326 seats that you would need in order to win a majority and take control of the country.

Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, with over 50 seats, potentially, of course, alongside the SNP, would be able to cobble together some kind of working coalition. Now, this is the reality that is facing the right.

This is the reality that is facing the right in British politics. And the reason we’re seeing some of this is because the left is consolidating and the right remains divided. So what we’ve seen since Prime Minister Andy Burnham has come into office is he’s doing a better job at winning back people who have switched to the Greens.

He’s doing a better job at winning back some Liberal Democrats, and he is doing a better job at winning back People that voted Labour in 2024, but were then alienated by Keir Starmer’s premiership. So slowly but surely, this explains the bounce that the Labour Party have had in the polls. Andy Burnham has consolidated part of that left wing vote. But the right remains more divided than ever.

Now, I have a funny feeling. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is probably going to go for a general election earlier than many people think. And there are a few reasons why I think that’s going to happen.

One is he feels locked in by the 2024 mandate. He feels locked in by the manifesto that Labour campaigned on in 2024. He feels that he cannot get sufficient radicalism when it comes to economic and social policy. He won’t be able to move too far away from that manifesto. I think he’s also going to be looking at the debt markets, at the bond markets, and how they’re moving.

And what we can see currently is a great deal of concern in the financial markets about the direction of travel, rising costs, The cost of servicing Britain’s enormous pile of debt, we now have nearly three trillion pounds worth of debt.

The cost of servicing that debt is going up and up and a debt crisis, a big debt crisis of some kind looks likely. And it may be that some within the Labour Party want to potentially go to the country before that really does implode.

But the main reason Andy Burnham, I suspect, will go much earlier than people think will be because of this division on the right. And a strange place to start, but I think an important one is what happened at an obscure local election in Kent, Dover, Last week, where I just want to show you exactly what took place in the Guston Kingsdown and St Margaret’s at Cliff local by-election.

Not many people would have been watching it. But what was so fascinating about this contest is that parties on the right, between them, reform, the Tories, restore, polled 55% of the vote in this ward. More than half of all voters voted for the right.

And actually, you see this in many national polls. The right is polling upwards of 50%. So you can see the appetite is there for a change of direction in Britain and the country. But the Green Party ended up winning this local election on just 28% of the vote. In fact, it won the election by just 34 votes.

How is that possible, you might ask?

It’s possible because of how that right-wing vote was split three ways between reform, which emerged as a dominant party on the right with 27.5%, the Tories, 10 points behind on 17%, and Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe’s party, even further behind on 10%.

The reason I’m showing you this is because if the right do not get organised then this is exactly what is going to happen at the next general election in Britain. It might not be the Green Party winning, it will be Andy Burnham and the Labour Party.

Because under first-past-the-post, all you need to win a seat is not 50% and above. But in Britain’s election system, you just need one more vote than the second place party.

And so what you might see at the next general election is the result that we saw in Dover playing out from one seat to the next from one part of the country to the next as a divided right is outflanked by a more consolidated left.

Now, one of the reasons why people on the left really have an advantage at the moment over people on the right is because of what is actually going on underneath the surface, and that is tactical voting.

And I think this is going to be one of the big stories at the next general election in Britain, if I’m honest with you, because tactical voting is not impacting the left and the right equally. This is the big challenge that everybody on the right needs to think about and really needs to reflect on.

If you look at people on the left of British politics, Labour voters, Liberal Democrat voters, Green voters, they are much more likely to say they will vote tactically to stop the right than people on the right are in saying they would vote tactically to stop the left. Labour voters, for example, roughly 69-77% of Labour voters say they would switch to the Liberal Democrats to stop the Reform Party, or say they would switch to the Greens to stop the Tories and say they would switch to the Greens to stop Reform.

The overwhelming majority of Labour Party voters, in other words, would happily lend their vote to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens in order to stop the Right.

And if you’re watching this podcast, rather than listening, you’ll be able to see the numbers from a YouGov study just a few months ago that makes this crystal clear.

You have a much greater degree of discipline on the left when it comes to tactical voting than you have on the right.

Now let’s look at the right. Let’s look at how reform UK voters would vote under similar tactical voting scenarios. Well, imagine you were in a seat where it was Tory versus Lib Dem or Tory versus Labour or Tory versus Green.

In these scenarios, only between 37 and 41% of reform UK voters would switch to the Conservatives to help them get over the line. A much larger number would stay loyal to Reform UK. They are much less likely, Reform voters than their counterparts in the Labour Party or the Greens, to switch over and support another party tactically.

And you see exactly the same thing with Conservative voters. Conservative Party voters are much less likely than Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters to vote tactically.

This is what YouGov said when they were concluding that study. “Tactical voting among supporters of right-wing parties is both less common and less mutual, though it is still less present. The key line there being less common, less mutual.”

Now, how does Restore Britain fit into all of this? Well, it wasn’t included in that particular study, but there was another fascinating poll which asked Restore Britain voters whether they would be open to voting for Reform UK.

And only 36% of Restore Britain voters said they would be open to voting for Reform UK. 36%. And only 23% would be open to supporting the Conservatives. So again, what you see among Restore Britain voters, much lower numbers compared to those big 60-70% figures for Labour, Lib Dem and Green.

Restore voters are less willing to switch over to support reform UK at the next general election and to do so tactically. You might say to me, well, actually, Matt, maybe one tiny local council by-election in a corner of Kent is not going to predict what happens at the next general election.

But what I am saying to you is, it is a warning.

It is a warning of what is going to happen in this country, what is going to happen in If the right of politics does not actually get its act together.

If the right of British politics does not start to vote tactically, then it will lose the next general election. And then you need to think about what that means.

If the right in Britain loses the next election, it will be more mass uncontrolled immigration. It will be more broken borders. It will be more Woke ideology.

It will be more putting people ahead of the British people who are not even from Britain. It will be more of the sectarianism and the illegal family voting that we’re seeing across large parts of the country.

The kind of illegal family voting I warned about when I stood for Reform UK at the Gorton and Denton by-election and people said that I was a bad loser.

And yet two weeks ago, Birmingham City Council reveals that there had been election interference in 50 polling stations across our second city. And that comes after that study in Greater Manchester in the seat of Gorton and Denton, which found illegal family voting in more than two thirds of all polling stations.

This is what’s going to happen if the left win the next general election. More and more of our political system We’ll come under the influence of things like sectarianism, illegal family voting, and more and more of our cities, our towns and villages will become unrecognisable because of relentless demographic change.

The kind of change that Labor, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are entirely comfortable with. So what I am saying, and let me be clear, what I’m saying to everybody on the right is this:

If you do not start to vote tactically, if you do not start to consolidate around one alternative to the establishment, then you will lose the next general election and the left will dominate Britain well into the 2030s.

I also would urge everybody to remember what happened in 2019. In 2019, When Boris Johnson promised to get Brexit done, Nigel Farage realised how close the country was to having that democratic vote for Brexit undermined and blocked by the establishment in Westminster.

And Nigel Farage decided on that basis to put the people and the country before his own interests by standing down candidates in hundreds of seats. Now, people at the time were unhappy with Nigel Farage for making that decision, but he put the country first. That allowed Boris Johnson to put together the realignment of British politics to outflank left-wing parties in large parts of the country.

Because Conservative voters, they are distributed more efficiently than left-wing voters. And it allowed Boris Johnson to win over Middle England. And what you saw was Labour, the Greens, Lib Dems and others piling up lots of boats in the cities, piling up lots of boats in the university towns, but they weren’t able to match the power of that people led realignment of the system.

Now, we know what happened next.

Boris Johnson and the Tories completely betrayed the people who had voted for them by presiding over the Boris wave, importing millions of people and basically nearly destroying our country. Only one in five of the people who came over under the Boris wave came on a worker visa, one in five.

Many of them brought 10, 11, 12 of their relatives. It was a complete betrayal of what the people asked for. But the realignment that made that election possible in 2019 remains very visible today. And that is why Reform UK have been able to power to the top of the opinion polls because they’ve started to lean into that realignment.

They’re now the most popular party among the working class, and the most popular party among Brexit voters. They’re also very, very popular among men. In some polls, they’re most popular party among men. And they’ve been putting back together that post-Brexit realignment.

My view, given some of the disagreements among individual politicians and leaders of political parties who are clearly struggling to find some kind of alliance, my view is that it would make much more sense to explain to voters, to have a conversation with voters, about the critical need to vote tactically at the next general election.

The people we might call the patriotic majority. That broad coalition is out there. Reform voters, Conservative voters, Restore Britain voters, and also millions of non-voters who don’t usually participate in general elections.

About two million non-voters came back into the political system to vote for Brexit, of course. That’s what made Brexit possible.

To say to all of those people, you have to now come together, consolidate, and support one clear alternative to the establishment. To the establishment that wants to continue with mass immigration, that wants to continue with open borders, that wants to continue putting people who are not from Britain ahead of the British people.

And that is the biggest task facing the right ahead of the next general election, because I do not believe that we can afford to lose that general election.

So the evidence is clear. The reason I suspect Andy Burnham will go for an early election is because of these divisions on the right.

And unless we’re able to get some unity among voters, to get that tactical voting among the supporters of reform, the Conservative Party and to a much lesser extent, restore Britain, which is really not very competitive outside of Great Yarmouth, then I fear the result will be the continued dominance of the left.

There are times in the history of a nation When you have to put the interests of that nation ahead of individual egos and individual political parties. And I genuinely believe the next general election is one of those times.

I want to thank you for listening to this week’s Silent Majority.

We’re putting out the early one or two episodes completely free on all platforms but soon free subscribers will only be able to access the first few minutes. If you’d like to join us in the future, come over to mattgoodwin.org. Join us as a subscriber. You’ll get not only all of the podcast episodes, but you’ll get all of our articles and no paywalls.

You’ll also be able to join our live discussions and you’ll be able to join our group chat. But for this week, that’s it for now. Have a think about what I said. Come and join us in the debates, in the chats, and I’ll see you there. Bye-bye.

Thank you for watching or listening to the Silent Majority podcast with me, Matt Goodwin, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

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Join more than 90,000 readers and receive evidence and analysis that challenges the establishment each week. Become a paid supporter to unlock every article, the full Silent Majority podcast every Friday, and our group chat — while supporting voices that are speaking up for ordinary people.

A country that abandons its own young people is abandoning its own future. But that is precisely what Britain is doing, as shocking new figures reveal.

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, released in the last few days, reveal something that is nothing short of a national scandal.

There are now nearly one million young people in Britain – 981,000 to be exact – who are not in employment, education, or training. That’s one in every eight young people.

Nearly one million 16-24-year-olds who have nothing to do, who are not contributing to their community or country. And while some of them might be looking for work or opportunities, roughly six in ten of them are completely inactive. They are not just out of work — they are not even looking for work.

I don’t know about you, but I think this should be a national emergency. Because what’s happening seems crystal clear to me, even if nobody in Westminster will admit it. An entire generation of young British people have been abandoned by a political class that’s become addicted to two things — mass welfare and mass immigration.

Let’s start with mass welfare.

Over the last twenty years or so, the number of young people in Britain who claim to be disabled or suffering from mental health issues has exploded.

Nearly half of all young people who are not working, in education, or training now say they have a disability — which is more than twice what it was twelve years ago.

Close to 45 per cent of these young people who are out of work and education say they have a ‘work limiting health condition’ — up from 26 per cent a decade ago.

And the share of disabled young people who say they are out of work and education because of ‘mental health’ has likewise nearly doubled — to 43 per cent.

Are young people today really more disabled than in the past? Are they genuinely suffering from much higher rates of mental illness? Or have politicians built a mass welfare system that now medicalises the ordinary struggles of young adulthood, dramatically broadens the range of conditions that are treated as ‘barriers to work’, and pushes ever-growing numbers of young people into welfare instead of work?

Labour and Tory politicians should have been answering these questions for much of the last twenty years. But they took the easy option. They pushed countless young British people into a wasted life of welfare dependency and looked the other way. For every £1 the political class now spends on providing young people with job support, it spends £25 providing them with welfare benefits. This is, in a word, insane.

Again, look at the numbers.

Over the last 14 years, the number of young people claiming incapacity welfare benefits or Universal Credit welfare payouts on health grounds has more than doubled. So too has the number receiving disability benefits. Unless something changes, and changes fast, then within ten years British workers, who are already having to fork out £8 billion a year on welfare for young people, will be having to subsidise a much larger welfare bill for roughly 820,000 young people.

In fact, things are now so absurd that even a government review just conceded that one reason why so many young people refuse work, education, or training is because they do not want to risk a secure monthly income of £2,000 or more in benefits.

Nobody should trivialise mental illness or disability. Young people who genuinely cannot work deserve our support. But what is happening in Britain today does not look like compassion to me. It looks like a colossal failure of the social contract, where the entire system is now fully geared towards pushing hundreds of thousands of young British people into welfare dependency.

And as if that’s not bad enough, then comes the second half of the story.

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Here’s something you might have missed.

With rumours of an early general election in the UK once again swirling around Westminster, most people have probably not even noticed what happened in a small corner of England this week.

It’s something that I think tells us a great deal about what might happen at the next general election and why people on the Right of politics should be deeply concerned.

I’m referring to the result of a local by-election for the council seat of Guston, Kingsdown and St Margaret’s-at-Cliffe, located in the parliamentary constituency of Dover and Deal, in Kent, which is on the frontline of the small boat invasion.

Between them, three separate right-wing parties — Reform, the Tories, and Restore — polled 55 per cent of the vote, reflecting how this part of England remains incredibly receptive to ‘small c’ conservative politics.

But when all votes had been counted it was the Green party, on 28.7 per cent, which ended up winning by just 34 votes, allowing Zack Polanski and his increasingly extreme Green party to claim a small victory in the heartland of Brexit Country.

How were the Greens able to win?

Because while support for Left consolidated around the Greens — with support for Labour collapsing, the Liberal Democrats not fielding a candidate, and left-leaning people voting tactically — the Right was deeply divided.

Reform entrenched its status as the dominant right-wing party, taking 27.5 per cent. But the Tories also captured 17.1 per cent and Restore took another 10.7 per cent. While the Left benefitted from tactical voting, the Right split the vote three ways.

What this shows, I’ve warned before, is the real and growing danger that now faces a divided Right in British politics. And it’s precisely why I suspect Labour’s Andy Burnham is going to call a general election earlier than many people think.

Because while the Labour government is certainly pursuing disastrous policies, when it comes to electioneering they are not idiots. They can see the writing on the wall.

Britain has a first-post-the-post election system in which you do not win elections by assembling the largest ideological blocs but by finishing first in individual seats.

So, if Reform, the Tories, and Restore continue fighting for the same pool of voters, then the risk is obvious: what just happened in Dover will happen again and again, up and down the country, at the next general election.

Am I reading too much into one local by-election? Maybe.

But then again, maybe not.

Because a much bigger study of voters across Britain suggests the very same thing: there is likely to be widespread tactical voting at the next general election and it will not impact the Left and Right equally.

According to the study, by pollsters YouGov, people on the liberal left and the left-wing of British politics — Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green party voters — are much more likely to say they will vote tactically across party lines than their Reform or Tory counterparts (the study did not include Restore).

And this tactical voting appears to be especially strong when the clear objective among left-wing voters is to try and stop Reform from winning seats.

Just look at some of the numbers because they really are important.

Close to 60 per cent of Liberal Democrat and Green party voters say they would vote tactically for Labour at the next general election to stop Reform winning a seat.

And between 63 and 77 per cent of Labour voters say they would likewise vote tactically for the Liberal Democrats or the Greens to prevent the Right from winning.

Confronted with a right-wing candidate in a seat where Labour is not competitive, large majorities of Labour voters say they would switch to the Lib Dems or the Greens to block the Right, while, astonishingly, close to one-third of Labour voters even say they would switch to the Tories in a two-way race between the Tories and Reform in order to stop Nigel Farage and his Reform party winning a seat.

What you see, in short, is a widespread willingness among voters on the Left to lend their vote to other socially liberal parties to try and stop the Right.

Large majorities of voters on the Left are clearly willing to cross party lines and switch their political loyalties if it means stopping Reform in its tracks.

But now look at the Right.

While large majorities of left-wing voters are prepared to vote tactically, only 43-45 per cent of Reform voters say they would similarly vote tactically for the Tories to fend off Labour, the Lib Dems, or the Greens. And even lower numbers of Tory voters, only 37-41 per cent of them, say they would vote tactically to stop the Left.

There is, put simply, more of a reluctance among voters on the Right than voters on the Left to vote tactically to achieve some kind of bigger objective at the next election.

Imagine a two-horse race between Reform and Labour, for example. Only 41 per cent of Tory voters say they would switch to Reform to beat Labour.

Or imagine a two-horse race between Reform and the Greens — only 32 per cent of Tories say they would switch to Reform to stop Zack Polanski’s party while, astonishingly, close to one in five Tories would switch to the Greens to stop Reform.

Time and time again, when it comes to Tory and Reform voters, significant numbers say they would be unwilling to vote tactically for the other right-wing party.

“Tactical voting among supporters of right-wing parties”, note YouGov, in what is the key line in the study, “is both less common and less mutual, though it is still less present”. Less common. And less mutual. That’s the key point.

How does Restore fit into all this?

Read more

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SOMETHING NEW IS STARTING

After thinking carefully about where I want to take this community of ours next, I’m delighted to announce that next Friday we’re launching a brand new weekly podcast.

THE SILENT MAJORITY with Matt Goodwin

The idea behind it is simple.

Look across the mainstream media today and you’ll find countless podcasts that are all made for exactly the same group of people.

A minority of liberal progressives and centrists who represent no more than 10-15 per cent of the population but who completely dominate our political and media debate.

They all look the same.

They all sound the same.

They all think the same.

And they all believe the same things.

Immigration is good. Nationalism is bad. Globalism is to be applauded. Patriotism is to be opposed. Elites know best. And the people should not be trusted.

But what about everybody else?

What about the millions of people who are looking at what is happening to Britain and the West with a growing sense of alarm and dread?

What about the millions of people who are profoundly worried about mass migration, broken borders, two-tier justice, the erosion of our identity and culture, and a political establishment that seems to prioritise everybody except their own people?

And what about the countless numbers of people who rightly feel they are being shut out of the national conversation and written out of our national story?

EVERY FRIDAY on all platforms

That is who this podcast is for. The Silent Majority.

The Silent Majority of hardworking, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who want their voice and their values to be represented in the wider debate.

Every Friday, I’ll be releasing a new episode of The Silent Majority right here on Substack — as well as on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.

And every week I’ll cut through the noise and talk directly and openly about issues that actually matter to millions of ordinary people.

Immigration. Borders. Two-tier justice. An out-of-touch establishment. The populist revolt sweeping the West. And what comes next for Britain and other Western nations.

My promise is simple.

In roughly 30 minutes or less, I’ll give you evidence, information, and data you’re unlikely to hear on the BBC — and a perspective that openly challenges the lazy Groupthink that’s taken hold of our political and media class.

No groupthink.

No political correctness.

No avoiding the difficult questions.

Just somebody speaking up for the Silent Majority of hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens who are sick to the back teeth of being treated like second-class citizens in their own country.

I want this to become something you look forward to at the end of each week.

Something you can listen to while walking the dog, going on a walk, doing housework, driving to work, or commuting home on the train.

And the timing could hardly be better.

Parliament returns next week. We have huge elections coming in Europe. And we might even be heading toward an early election here in Britain.

There is an enormous amount coming. And we’re going to cover all of it.

Every Monday and Wednesday, you’ll continue to receive my written posts. And then every Friday the Silent Majority podcast brings the week together.

Free Subscribers will be able to hear the opening few minutes. Paid supporters will receive the full episode every Friday, along with all other content.

So, if you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid supporter and unlocking everything we do, then now is the time to join us.

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The audiobook is read by me and tells the story of how Britain reached this point — and what I believe needs to change. And once the 30 are gone, they’re gone.

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This community has grown because tens of thousands of people believe there should still be somewhere you can discuss the big questions facing our country openly and honestly. We’ve built that community together and through Substack and our social media it is now reaching tens of millions of people every single month.

The Silent Majority podcast is the next stage of that journey, which I hope will further widen our reach, influence, and impact. Because changing the culture is absolutely central to changing politics and then changing the country.

And I really want you to be part of it.

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Every now and then, something comes along that completely blows apart the establishment narrative. And that’s exactly what just happened in Britain.

After years of lecturing people not to worry about immigration or ask difficult questions, the political class has just completely undermined its own narrative.

How so? By publishing a pamphlet for asylum-seekers and illegal migrants that’s not only gone viral online, dominating the media debate, but now also being discussed in millions of ordinary households up and down the country.

The government-produced pamphlet, titled ‘Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK’, which was made for asylum-seekers and illegal migrants arriving on the small boats, makes a series of stunning admissions.

When you are in Britain, it reads …

You should not rape women. You should not try to have sex with someone who is asleep, drunk, or unable to consent clearly.

You should not have sex with children. You should not sexually harass strangers. You should not beat your wife, tell her what to wear, or control where she goes.

You should not physically or verbally abuse your partner. You should not prevent women from working, studying, or leaving the house.

And when you are in public spaces, you should not make sexual comments, whistle or make kissing noises. You should not follow someone, or block their path.

I’m going to go out on a limb here but if politicians are having to tell migrants not to rape or sexually assault women, abuse children, and harass strangers then they might want to ask themselves who they are letting into the country. As even columnist Matthew Syed noted in The Sunday Times this weekend:

“Don’t rape women. Don’t mutilate their genitals. Don’t copulate with children. I’m paraphrasing but only a bit. Are politicians like [Shabana] Mahmood so blind that they can’t see that if illegal migrants need such instructions, it is rank betrayal of the British people not to instantly deport them?”

He has a point.

But there’s also something deeper going on here that not only makes this a profoundly important moment in Britain’s debate about immigration but also helps to explain why so many people are losing faith in the wider system.

Because for years now, whenever people have asked entirely legitimate questions about the link between immigration and crime, and the ability of Britain to integrate people from radically different cultures, they have been told to stay quiet.

“Everything is fine”, politicians assure them. All cultures are equal. Diversity is our strength. Don’t ask whether importing people from cultures with profoundly different attitudes towards women, sexuality, and consent might have negative consequences. And definitely don’t ask what the British state actually knows about the relationship between immigration and crime and is still refusing to share with its own people.

The same politicians who routinely lecture the British people about the dangers of ‘misinformation’ are still going out of their way to hide, conceal, and refuse to release what information they have about the impact of immigration on crime. In fact, they are even going to court to prevent the release of this information!

Which is why, today, we now find ourselves in a truly absurd position. We have a political class that insists immigration is not driving crime but which simultaneously refuses to release what information it has about immigration and crime and which is now distributing a booklet that warns new migrants not to … commit crime!

I don’t know about you but here’s what I think.

What we now have in Britain is a political class that knows exactly what is going on in the country and knows exactly what the data show. They are just refusing to show the rest of us. Because why else would they be rushing to hand out this guidance to the people who are stepping off the small boats, having travelled from Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere?

The very people who are elected to represent us are refusing to tell us the truth – the taxpaying public who are not only forced to subsidise policies that we never voted for but are also forced to live with the dire consequences of these policies.

Such as the 13-year-old girl whose life has been ruined after being raped by an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan, the vulnerable 18-year-old raped by an asylum-seeker from Pakistan, or the elderly man raped by a man from Eritrea. As everybody in Britain who reads the newspapers will know, there are now dozens if not hundreds of these cases.

And yet, over the last 48-hours, Labour ministers, who have been forced to respond to the furore over the pamphlet, have only made the situation worse by conceding the very point they have spent years trying to push out of the national debate.

Such as Labour’s new Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, who sought to defend the booklet by pointing out that migrants arrive from “different cultures”. What they are now conceding is what the left has denied for much of the last thirty years. Culture really does matter and not all cultures are equal.

Clearly, not everybody who is migrating into Britain is a criminal or needs to be told they should not harass women and children. But migration, as I’ve pointed out before, is not just about the movement of people. It is about the movement of cultures.

As the academic Garrett Jones points out in his brilliant book, The Culture Transplant, when you import people, you import the average cultural traits of those people. And when you import large numbers of people from radically different cultures outside Europe, as Britain is now doing, you import radically different attitudes toward women, homosexuality, children, religious freedom, sex, and consent. Attitudes that don’t just collide with our established way of life but are incompatible with it.

We should have the confidence to say this openly and publicly. It should not be considered controversial or ‘far right’ to do so. Because as that pamphlet reflects, even the government and the British state now implicitly accept this. Not all cultures are the same. If they didn’t think this, they wouldn’t be handing out the booklet.

So, enough of the gaslighting. Enough of the lies. Enough of the constant spreading of misinformation by Labour and Tory politicians who have all refused in recent years to tell people the truth. They clearly know what is going on in Britain. They clearly have information we are not being given. And they have clearly concluded that things are now so bad they have to hand out the warnings contained in that booklet.

What politicians should be doing is what I said they should do more than two years ago. Give us the data. Give us the information. Give us the evidence. Be open and transparent with the people. And let the people make up their own minds.

Because you cannot simultaneously tell us there is nothing to worry about while hiding what information you have and quietly telling asylum-seekers and illegal migrants not to rape, sexually assault, or abuse the British people and their children.

The British people are not stupid. They are not idiots. They can see the blatant contradiction. And they are utterly sick and tired of being treated in this appalling way by the very people who they elected to protect them and look after their interests.

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Something truly extraordinary is about to take place in Germany. And if you want to make sense of the sheer scale and strength of the populist rebellion that’s unfolding against the established political class in the West then you cannot ignore it.

In just a few weeks, the people of Saxony-Anhalt, in the eastern half of the country, go to the polls in a crunch state election. Then, two weeks later, the people of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in the north-east, do the same. And if the polls are right Germany is about to experience the biggest political earthquake in recent history.

Why? Because in Saxony-Anhalt the national-populist Alternative for Germany, the AfD, a party that openly rejects mass immigration, open borders, and political correctness, is polling at an astonishing 42% of the vote.

An anti-establishment, anti-immigration party that is widely loathed by the political class is polling roughly 20-points ahead of its nearest competitor, the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), which has controlled this state for nearly 25 years. The left, as you can see in the chart below, is simply nowhere to be seen:

These shifts are seismic. At the last election in this state, only five years ago, the Alternative for Germany finished in a very distant second, on 21%. But now, on September 6th, a party that is calling for the ‘remigration’ of migrants back to their countries of origin, is on course to potentially double its vote in just five years.

And that’s not all. A few weeks later, on September 20th, another election will be held in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern where, again, the AfD is leading in the polls.

In this state, which has been held by the centre-left Social Democrats for nearly thirty years, the polls put the AfD on roughly 36%, some 7-points clear of the left.

Again, what we are witnessing — if it comes to pass on polling day — is truly historic.

The last time an election was held in this state the Alternative for Germany finished a distant second on just 16% of the vote. Now, unless the polls have got something badly wrong, the party looks set to more than double its support.

Germany has never seen anything like this.

Since the Alternative for Germany was created, in 2013, the party has never governed a state. But if the AfD takes power next month then we would see the first ever AfD-led state government in the history of the Federal Republic. This would not only send major shockwaves through Germany but much of Europe.

It would instantly smash the so-called ‘firewall’ that Germany’s establishment has tried to maintain against allowing the AfD into government.

A firewall is only possible when insurgent parties are on around 5 or 10% of the vote. But when they are polling between 35 and 46% of the vote, when they are attracting millions of ordinary Germans who are fed-up with mass immigration, demographic change, broken borders, and economic decline, then firewalls become impossible.

A breakthrough of this magnitude for the AfD would also do something else.

It would make it crystal clear to the established political class in not just Germany but across Europe that the national-populist rebellion, which has been brewing for thirty years, is not only here to stay but — as we predicted — soaring to new heights.

If you had suggested even decade ago, nevermind twenty or thirty years ago, that a radical right party in Germany would be polling these kinds of numbers, and would be on the cusp of becoming the largest party in key German states, then most political analysts and commentators would have laughed you out of the room.

But here we are.

And while many analysts will try to convince you the AfD’s rise is really just a story about the more economically deprived and left behind eastern half of Germany, this is deeply misleading.

While the AfD is certainly stronger in the east, earlier this year the party won close to 20% in the wealthier, southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, more than doubling its vote and moving from fifth to third. In another southwestern state, Rhineland-Palatinate, the AfD likewise more than doubled its support.

Even in more liberal Berlin, where there is also a state election next month, the polls suggest the AfD is on course to double its support, while in Germany’s national polls the party that was once dismissed as one for cranks, racists, and right-wing extremists is now pulling away from the established centre-right in first place, pointing to an even bigger political earthquake on the horizon.

What lies behind all this seems pretty clear to me.

In Germany, as in many other European states, the very deliberate policies of mass immigration, rapid demographic change, and porous borders, combined with what this has enabled, including Islamist terror, have now left millions of ordinary people desperately searching for a political alternative.

Last year, YouGov conducted a major survey and found that people who are planning to vote for the AfD are overwhelmingly concerned with immigration. While more than half of all Germans put migration in their top three concerns, for AfD voters their anxieties about this issue crowded out everything else:

Another major study likewise found that concerns about immigration dominate the minds of AfD voters, alongside their opposition to mass welfare, feelings they are being ‘systematically neglected’, and a belief that the underlying social contract in Germany no longer works for ordinary people.

And it’s not hard to see why so many Germans feel this way. Their anxieties are entirely legitimate, shaped by what is actually happening to their country. In the last ten years or so …

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For more than a decade, the political and media establishment in Britain has told itself a comforting story.

The shock vote for Brexit, more than a decade ago, was just the ‘last gasp’ of an older, more conservative Britain that struggles to accept the modern world.

Yes, some 17 million people might have voted to leave the European Union and given the establishment a bloody nose. But this was only a temporary revolt - a brief interruption on Britain’s inevitable journey towards a far more liberal future.

And in the years since — they continually tell us — new generations of younger, more diverse, and ‘better educated’ British people have arisen to continue pushing Britain towards this far more socially liberal, cosmopolitan, or ‘progressive’ horizon.

Ever more supportive of immigration. Ever more supportive of demographic change and rising diversity. Ever more relaxed about ‘modern Britain’. And ever more embarrassed about the vote for Brexit and the desire to ‘take back control’.

This is the narrative that countless politicians, academics, and columnists push.

Alastair Campbell. Rory Stewart. Emily Maitlis. Polly Toynbee. Owen Jones. Former Times columnist David Aaronovitch. Liberal pollster Peter Kellner. Academic activists like Jon Portes and Rob Ford. They have all made variations of this argument.

You know the type.

Smug illiberal progressives who think the future belongs to them, who preach about the wonders of diversity but refuse to tolerate genuine diversity of thought, who portray anybody who holds a different view as some kind of fascist, and who probably look at a newsletter like ours as representing a fringe minority.

Well, take a look at what is happening now.

A few days ago, a remarkable new study by the polling company YouGov completely dismantled this argument by comparing what the British people think today with what they thought at the time of the Brexit referendum, a decade ago.

And what did they find?

Contrary to all the talk and all the predictions about the British people embracing things like immigration and diversity, the pollsters found a very different story and one that reveals just how badly the establishment continues to misread Britain.

For a start, they found that over the last decade the British people have not become more supportive of immigration over the last decade. Far from it.

They are just as likely today as they were a decade ago to think immigration into Britain has been “too high” — a view which, consistently, seven in ten people hold.

While you won’t hear this on the BBC or one of the countless podcasts produced for the liberal minority, large majorities of British people think migration has been too high, with roughly half the country — 47% — saying it’s “much too high”.

There’s been no move leftwards. No ‘liberalisation’. The British people remain just as convinced that there’s too much migration as they were a decade ago.

The fringe minority, in other words, is not people who want migration lowered; the fringe minority is the one in five people in Britain who think the level is “about right”.

Contrary to what all those columnists and academics tell us, furthermore, these views are also held widely among the young, too. Britain’s 18-24-year-olds are more likely to say immigration has been “too high” than say it’s been “too low” or “about right”. Again, this is not something that ever seems to feature in media vox-pops.

And that’s not even the most interesting part.

Because the pollsters also found something else that really does destroy the establishment narrative and which, I think, helps to explain why politics is so volatile at the moment.

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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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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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