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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.