Matt Goodwin

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Matt Goodwin
Epping is a warning of what’s to come

Epping is a warning of what’s to come

This is what happens when the state pushes its own people to the edge

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Matt Goodwin
Jul 19, 2025
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Matt Goodwin
Epping is a warning of what’s to come
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If you want a sense of the rapidly deteriorating and darkening mood in Britain right now, a sense of just how quickly the social contract is breaking down, then look at what erupted this week in the small market town of Epping.

After news that yet another girl has been sexually assaulted by an asylum-seeker, the people of Epping —mothers, fathers, children—joined a peaceful protest to register their frustration and opposition to what is happening in their own community.

When so-called ‘anti-fascists’ turned up, the protest escalated and there were clashes with police. And then, in the aftermath, much like after Southport, the protestors were quickly dismissed as “far right extremists” and the state held its breath, hoping the disturbances would not spread.

But here’s the question I would like to ask the state, the establishment and what we might call the dominant political regime in this country —the people who oversee the institutions and the direction of our nation.

What on earth do you expect? What do you expect ordinary people to do when you are cruelly imposing radical and irresponsible policies on them from above, top down, with absolutely no democratic mandate and no consideration for what these policies are doing to the social fabric of this country?

Just look at what really lies behind the latest protests in Epping, which could very easily mark the beginning of another long, hot, turbulent summer of protest.

While the initial trigger was the assault of a schoolgirl, who alongside others was allegedly assaulted by an Ethiopian asylum-seeker, named Hadush Kebatu, who had only arrived in Britain a few days earlier on one of the small boats, the real reason the British people’s anger and frustration is now boiling over can be found elsewhere.

It can be found in the very deliberate, the very extreme, and the very irresponsible policies that are pushing our country into managed decline, if not managed collapse.

Just look, for example, at what the British people learned about their communities and country in the last seven days alone.

Just look at the truly astonishing things that have unfolded on these islands in just one week, thanks to this utterly incompetent, insular, and corrupt regime.

Without doubt, the most shocking discovery was that the UK state and the two big parties, the Tories and Labour, have been complicit in secretly importing thousands of Afghan migrants into Britain and then working overtime to cover it up by using lawfare to gag the media and conceal the truth from their own people.

While also forcing the British people to pay billions in costs for a decision they knew nothing about, and had no influence over, the regime did all this with no oversight, no democratic vote, no accountability, and no scrutiny whatsoever.

In an operation that would have impressed authoritarian regimes around the world, the UK state managed to keep the entire country completely and utterly in the dark.

In other words, the very same politicians who ever since the Southport atrocity last summer have berated the British people for suffering from “misinformation” were, at the very same time, actively misinforming their own people.

They were flooding the country with yet more migrants from distant lands while refusing to tell anybody about it and pretending nothing strange was happening.

And that’s not the only shocking thing that happened this week. Far from it.

While learning British military veterans have been removed from housing to make room for the Afghan migrants, some of whom, shockingly, have brought 22 relatives with them, the British people also discovered the state can do some truly miraculous things when it wants to.

Despite there being thousands of homeless British military veterans in this country, and hundreds of thousands of British families at risk of homelessness, this week we learned the state can suddenly move heaven and earth to make 2,200 homes available for Afghan migrants, including, at one point, 20 per cent of the defence estate.

If our politicians can suddenly find a solution to this problem, many hardworking British people will have wondered this week, then why on earth can they not solve many other problems that happen to involve the British people?

At the same time, in the last seven days, the British people also learned they are being forced, by the very same regime, to pay £12 billion a year in Universal Credit welfare payments for up to 1.3 million foreigners who are not even British, and more than half of whom are not even working.

During the worst cost-of-living crisis since World War Two, the state and political class clearly think it is somehow acceptable and responsible to force their own people to subsidise an enormous welfare regime for foreigners and, on top of that, to pay billions more to subsidise social housing for people who were not even born in the country, despite the British people also having to grapple with one of the worst housing crises on record.

How is this fair, many ordinary Brits will have asked one another this week? And how is this right? While there are choices in politics, there are also decisions that appear deliberately designed to put outsiders ahead of insiders, irrespective of what this means for the social contract.

Even worse, we only learned much of this information because of how independent campaigners forcibly extracted it from the state, which has consistently refused to be open and honest with its own people about what on earth is going on in their country.

It was only by submitting freedom of information requests that campaigners were able to find out what is really going on, while Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and other politicians prattle on about being “open”, “transparent” and “responsible”.

As I say, it is the same politicians and state officials who routinely accuse the British people of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, while deriding them as “far-right”, who have been actively colluding to keep this information secret.

And then, again this week, the British people learned that the establishment somehow thought it appropriate to give a major award, an MBE, to a Muslim man who called on fellow Muslims to boycott authorities over the rape gang scandal.

The man, Muhbeen Hussain, was given the prestigious honour for “services to cohesion”, despite visibly calling for local Muslims to boycott state institutions they perceive to be targeting their communities.

Is this really the kind of message the UK state wants to be sending out to millions of other people, in the wake of the rape gang scandal? That if you organise a mass boycott of our public institutions, in the name of religion, you will be rewarded?

Or is this a state and a ruling class that is now so utterly obsessed with prioritising minorities over the majority that it has completely lost sight of what’s needed to uphold the social contract in this rapidly fragmenting and declining country?

And then, as if all that wasn’t enough, we had the hideous sight of Labour MP Jess Phillips once again going on national media, after the rape gang revelations and the Casey Review, which make it clear we have a specific problem with Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, to try and downplay, obfuscate and ignore this very big and now unavoidable elephant in the room.

Asked about this specific problem, Jess Phillips, who likes to present herself as a tough campaigner for women’s rights, was so tough and truthful this week that she displayed the very same mentality that enabled the rape gang scandal to begin with –total denial.

While she dodged the question and blabbered on about “all men”, reflecting the same bias that led middle-class #MeToo liberal feminists to say nothing at all about the rape gangs, the British people were given yet another reason to withdraw their trust in the regime.

Then, also this week, the British people learned that a British schoolgirl was sent home by her school after being told she could not celebrate her British identity at a “culture day”. After choosing to wear a Union Jack dress to her school’s culture day, Courtney Wright was pulled to one side and sent home.

This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a perfect symbol of what the courageous academic Eric Kaufmann calls “asymmetrical multiculturalism”, or what the rest of us might call “two-tier multiculturalism”.

What the case of Courtney Wright powerfully symbolises is that we are now living in a state, in a regime, which actively encourages every minority group to protect and promote their identities while telling the majority they cannot have an identity of their own.

Britishness and Englishness, through this deeply warped worldview, must be eroded and hollowed out so they become nothing more than the bland, universal celebration of other people’s identities and cultures through the new religion of “diversity”.

But as everybody in Epping and England know, if the only thing that defines your identity is that you celebrate others then it is the same thing as saying you have no identity of your own, which flies in the face of what millions people in this country believe and feel, namely that there is something very special and unique about coming from these islands.

This two-tier multiculturalism, by the way, is also why the political class struggle with the entirely accurate view that not everybody can be English, because Englishness is not just a nationality but an ethnicity with deep roots and ancestry.

While these elites would find the idea of a white Briton suddenly declaring themselves to be ethnically Pakistani absurd, this doesn’t stop them from trying to have us believe that anybody and everybody can suddenly become English, reflecting how the English are the only group who are ever denied the right to an identity of their own.

And then, also this week, the British people were bombarded by an array of other deeply troubling findings, all of which reflect just how quickly their country is being radically transformed, despite this deliberate policy having no democratic mandate at all.

If anything symbolises not just the total incompetence of the state but its general disregard for the safety of its own people then it’s the fact …

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