The people of Piddington just voted to leave the United Kingdom. The school census has revealed shocking demographic trends that are sweeping through the country. Reform UK has sparked an intense debate over political donations. And a Labour peer is calling to designate peaceful public protests over illegal migration as “terrorism”. On the surface, these stories might seem disconnected. But as I explain on this week’s episode of The Silent Majority, they all share something in common.
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Silent Majority Podcast with me, Matt Goodwin — where I speak up every week unequivocally, unambiguously, unashamedly for the silent majority of people in the West, people who are working hard, paying taxes, playing by the rules, but feel like they’re being treated like second-class citizens in their own nations.
Now, thank you for joining us this week because I want to start with a rumour. I’m going to walk you through the theory. That gets us to a general election on November the 19th — at the end of this podcast.
But what I really want to talk about is what’s been going on in a remarkable week. And it really has been a remarkable week because we’ve seen four things that on the surface seem like they’re completely disconnected.
Firstly, a village in England, in Oxfordshire, a village named Piddington, has voted to leave the United Kingdom. That’s right. The people of Piddington have voted to create their own principality, the principality of Piddington, because they are so sick and tired of the government’s policy of illegal migration. And they have objected to that by voting to leave the UK. Now, of course, it’s not legally binding, but I think it tells us a lot about Britain and the frustrations that are rumbling through Britain.
Second, this week we got some bombshell figures on what’s going on in Britain’s schools and the sheer speed at which the population of Britain is being transformed. And I think that also tells us a lot about the concerns that are rumbling through the country. And I’m going to talk a little bit about that.
Third, we’ve had the intense debate in Westminster about Reform UK and donations totaling £72 million. That have gone to Reform UK, the principal anti-establishment party in British politics, the party that has become a refuge for many people who are sick and tired of watching what is happening to Britain.
And fourth, we’ve seen a prominent Labour peer, Shammi Chakrabarti, call for a protest group, a protest movement that we discussed in the podcast last week, an organisation that had been coordinating public protests against illegal migration in Dover and Portsmouth. To be designated as a terrorist organization. That’s right.
Now, what do these four things have in common? As I said, on the surface, it might seem that they’re disconnected, but actually what I’m going to suggest to you in the episode this week is that they are all reflective of something much deeper. A political system, a ruling class that is fundamentally struggling, failing, to respond to the concerns and the legitimate grievances of millions of ordinary people.
A political system that can no longer actually process and engage with legitimate dissent, with legitimate opposition. And I think what we are now living through is what I would call Project Fear Two.
Ten years ago, we saw Project Fear One, you will remember, with the Brexit referendum, where much of the establishment In essence, had a nervous breakdown about the fact that more than 17 million people had voted to leave the European Union and push their country onto a very different path.
Well, today, what I think we’re witnessing is Project Fear Two, a political system that is really reaching around for a draconian authoritarian response to ordinary people.
A system that’s no longer interested in actually engaging with their arguments, with addressing their concerns, but is instead constantly seeking to shut down any opposition to its project. And that’s what I want to talk about today.
But we’re going to start with the people of Piddington. This is a story that has captivated global media attention because the people of this village in Oxfordshire have voted to leave the UK. 350 people were living in this village and then they woke up to discover that 1,250 illegal migrants were about to be dumped right next to them.
And there were very emotional testimonies provided by the people of Piddington. They talked about their children’s lives being destroyed. Women talked about feeling scared and anxious about what might happen to them. Community leaders talked about the village, its way of life, its culture being completely destroyed. And many others talked about that village essentially being replaced.
And many people in Britain have looked at Piddington as a symbol, a symbol of something much bigger that is going on. A people essentially being dispossessed, being displaced by illegal migrants that have been promoted, pushed forward by a government that is no longer responding to those people.
So a lot of people in Britain have had a lot of sympathy for the residents of Piddington and will have celebrated when they voted overwhelmingly to leave the United Kingdom. Of course, it’s not legally binding. The Principality of Piddington is not about to have its own army, police force and economy, but it is significant nonetheless.
But there is an alternative take on this and one I’m just going to suggest to you because I think it tells us something about Britain from a different angle.
The people of Piddington, it seems to me, and I respect them, but it seems to me that they are becoming a symbol of something else, what we might call the luxury belief class in Western nations. Now, it was a Cambridge academic, Rob Henderson, who first coined this term. The luxury belief class is a class of people, financially affluent, professional, middle class, university educated, very socially liberal, if not radically progressive or woke, tending to live in areas like Oxfordshire.
And the luxury belief class call for policies that make them feel good and look good, that allow them to project their sense of moral righteousness over everybody else. And the luxury belief class do this because they never think they’re going to suffer the consequences of those policies.
A bit like all the Democrats in America who call to defund the police, perhaps never thinking they’ll live in a community with a very weak, or invisible police force.
But in Piddington, I think we have a good example of the luxury belief class because here we have lots of people who voted for the Liberal Democrats at local elections. They have Liberal Democrat councillors and they voted for the Liberal Democrats at the last general election in 2024. Now, the Liberal Democrats campaigned to remove restrictions on illegal migration. They campaigned to stop the Conservative Party’s Rwanda plan, which would have seen an offshore processing center for illegal migrants set up in Rwanda.
The Liberal Democrats campaign for safe and legal routes. They want more of those routes for illegal migrants and asylum seekers here in Britain. The Liberal Democrats have consistently been comfortable with mass migration while attacking anybody who opposes it as being far right, fascist or extremist.
So I would suggest to you and the people of Piddington that they got exactly what they voted for. They got the consequences that they thought they’d never have to live with. I think the people of Piddington should now do some reflection.
And I think a lot of other people in the luxury belief class, the middle class, university graduates, the social liberals that lecture us constantly about how wonderful mass migration and illegal migration really are. I think they should reflect about where their political choices and their political loyalties may well take them.
I want to welcome the people of Piddington back to common sense. They are British citizens at the end of the day. And they tell us a lot about the social contract in this country and how it’s breaking. Because the very basis of the social contract is that we all contribute, pay taxes and respect the laws of the land.
And in return, the state protects us and looks after us.
But what you see in Piddington is the opposite of that. You see an authoritarian state that is now dumping hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants on our communities. Not respecting the wishes of local people, not respecting their concerns and not respecting their grievances as being legitimate.
Andy Burnham and the Labor government, if you notice, they are now talking about how everybody should do their bit. Everybody should do their fair share when it comes to helping with the illegal migration crisis. Have you noticed that? What they are trying to do is normalise illegal migration.
The only debate we should be having in this country is how to have zero illegal migrants in this country. That is the only debate we should be having. We should not be debating should rich areas take them or poor areas take them. We should not be debating any of that.
The only debate we should be having is how to stop illegal migration and restore control over our borders. And that means doing everything the Liberal Democrats campaign to oppose. We need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR, which prevents us from deporting foreign criminals and illegal migrants.
We need to repeal Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act. We also need to detain and deport anybody who arrives in this country illegally alongside the estimated one and a half million people who are already in Britain illegally. We need to remove welfare benefits for people who are not British and we need to restore control over our borders and restore the social contract. If we do not, we are going to enter some very, very dangerous places in the years ahead. And I think the people of Piddington speak to that social contract and they speak to how rapidly it is coming undone.
And if you want to see another example of why people in Britain feel so profoundly anxious about the state of the country, then I just want to turn to something else we discovered this week. Which is some absolutely mind-boggling statistics relating to our schools and our education system. Now I wrote about this on Wednesday.
It first appeared in the Times newspaper, which pointed out that the share of grammar school pupils in Britain who are white British has collapsed from 66% to just 44% in the last 10 years. Let me say that again in just a decade. The share of pupils at grammar schools in Britain who are white British has fallen by 22 percentage points from 66% to just 44%. And I talk in the piece about some examples.
Chatham Grammar School for Girls. The share of white British pupils has fallen from 78% to 33%. At Dartford Grammar, it’s gone from 52% to 7%.
And this isn’t just about grammar schools.
As I say in the piece, if you look across all types of schools, you’ve seen a dramatic collapse in the share of children who are white British. And this is perhaps best symbolised by the fact that in the year 2023, just three years ago, the name Mohammed officially replaced the name Noah as the most popular boy’s name in England and Wales.
I won’t go through all of the stats because they’re in the piece. But what I do want to reiterate is why this is important. Majority groups really matter. Majority groups give a nation a sense of continuity. security and they become an anchor for that nation.
A nation’s culture, way of life, a nation’s values, its institutions, its sense of collective memory flow through the majority group. Many minorities feel attached to the majority group. That’s why about a third of black and minority ethnic people in Britain say they also worry about the pace of migration and how they feel like a stranger in their own country. In the same way that a lot of research found that Latino and Hispanic voters in America also feel concerned about the decline of the majority group in America because they associate that group as being a symbol, as being an important source of familiarity for the nation.
Majorities really matter because countries that don’t have clear majority groups also tend to be less stable countries, and they also tend to be low trust societies.
As I mentioned in the piece on Wednesday, there was recently a major academic study that summarised the findings of nearly 100 other studies, what’s called a ‘meta-analysis’ in academia, and it concluded that there is a negative relationship between trust and diversity. In other words, in nations that are much more diverse, where you have lots more immigration and you don’t have a big, clear majority group, levels of trust were much lower.
People were much less willing People were much less willing and more highly diverse societies to trust their neighbours and their friends because rapid diversity, rapid change undermines people’s willingness to support things like the welfare state.
Now, nobody in Westminster wants to talk about this. In fact, when I shared the data on schools, you guessed it, lots of left wing journalists probably said it was racist to even talk about demographic change in our institutions, which of course is nonsense.
You would not go into any other country in the world. Imagine going into Japan and saying you’re not allowed to talk about the decline of the majority group. They would laugh you out of the room.
They would find the whole thing profoundly anxious and they’d want to discuss it. But in Britain, we seem uniquely incapable of having serious conversations about what’s happening to the country. And that might be, of course, why so many people read our newsletter. But the school data, to me, it really matters because lots of people out there can sense something really big is happening to the country.
They can sense the demographic shifts and are much bigger than anything their ancestors ever saw. And I think they can sense that they’re losing their country and they’re losing what they imagine their country to be.
And there’s a temptation to think that the changes to the population are going to happen 50, 60, 70 years from now. But what the data that we talked about this week in the schools really shows is that that demographic revolution, if you like, is happening already. It’s happening today in our schools.
And it helps to explain why so many people feel so anxious because they can sense that actually slowly but steadily the majority group is sliding into minority status. Now, there are countries, of course, where that’s happened before, countries like Lebanon, countries like Sierra Leone, where there’s no clear majority group, and they are racked with tribal, ethnic, religious, cultural conflicts and grievances.
They’re not particularly stable countries. Yet nobody in Westminster, nobody in our media class seems willing to have a sensible conversation about, well, what does it mean for Britain if these trends that we’re seeing in schools continue.
That is also why I suspect many people in Britain have been turning to a different kind of politics. I think that’s why lots of people have been rallying around Reform UK, because I think they feel, whether they’re white British, black British, Asian, whatever they are, I think they feel that these trends are now so out of control.
The borders are so broken. The taxes are so high. The energy bills are so high. Two-tiered justice is so endemic. We seem to be losing that sense of who we are. Sir Roger Scruton, the English philosopher, famously said that a nation depends on that “we”. It depends on a collective sense of identity because without that, a nation crumbles.
And I think many people can sense that that is now becoming much weaker. And I think that’s integral to explaining why Reform UK have been doing so well. But it also explains why the establishment is so scared of this new political party.
Now, this week, Reform UK attracted £36 million from two donors, so £72 million in total, one of the biggest donations in contemporary British history. And it has sparked an intense debate about financing and political support in British politics. And much of the establishment has had a complete meltdown in response to this.
So much so that we were treated to the sight of Angela Rayner giving the country a lecture on integrity and decency, hitting the media airwaves to say, well, I’m not so sure that this donation sits right with me.
This is from the very Labour minister, Angela Rayner, who had to resign in disgrace because she didn’t pay the right amount of tax on her own property. This from the Labour minister who’s sitting in a Labour party, that includes an anti-corruption minister who is being investigated for corruption, a homelessness minister who evicted her own housing tenants, presumably because she wanted to increase the rent on her property and potentially made them homeless, who knows.
And a Labour Party that has been riddled with one scandal after another. Remember Lord Ali? Remember Labour MPs helping themselves to suits, glasses, box office tickets? I think Keir Starmer even took some clothing for his wife.
But what about a Labour Party that’s now lecturing this country about overseas donations, but which literally just took £4 million from a hedge fund that is registered in the Cayman Islands? The general hypocrisy has been off the charts.
A reminder that if you look at the actual data in the Electoral Commission, which collects data, has been doing so since 2001, the two big parties, Labour and the Tories between them, have collected, have received more than £1 billion in donations. Since 2021, they’ve each received somewhere between £500 and £600 million in donations. And the Labour Party, of course, has received enormous sums from the trade unions, with many members of those unions not actually wanting to support the Labour Party.
And the Tories are just as bad. The vast majority of Tory party treasurers Who’ve given upwards of a million pounds in donations to the party, have received honours, knighthoods, have been put in the House of Lords.
The whole thing has been completely and utterly ridiculous. The system has become a kind of cartel. And I wrote about this earlier this week in the piece on Monday on the reform donations. And I said, look, there is a line of thought in academia. There’s a very famous paper here. By Richard Katz and Peter Mayer, and they talk about the rise of cartel parties in Western nations.
And these are establishment parties that live off the state, that use the instruments of the state to try and control and neutralize their opposition, to try and silence any dissent to their dominance over the political regime. And Reform UK represents a direct threat to that dominance.
So they’ve been rushing now, even talking about retrospectively changing the law through legislation. Now, this only ever happens in a banana republic when you change the law retrospectively to try and undermine your own opponents. We’re even in the position where columnists at the Times newspaper, which has been launching a war against Reform UK for much of this year, it’s not exactly a right-wing newspaper, we’re even in a position where Times columnists like Danny Finkelstein are saying Labour would be outrageous to change the law retrospectively to try and deliver a blow against Reform UK. And what Danny Finkelstein says in that column, and I actually agree with him, I’ve made the same argument myself for a number of years now … Look at President Trump. Look at Marine Le Pen. Look at the alternative for Germany. Look at populists across the West. Whenever the state has, instead of addressing the grievances that are pushing people towards those parties, has tried to shut down those parties through lawfare, through improper means, those movements have only got stronger.
That is the central lesson. In Western politics from the last 25 years, look at President Trump and the way in which he navigated constant prosecution and persecution. Look at Marine Le Pen. They tried to stop her from running for the presidency of France. And within two minutes, Jordan Bardella, her number two, was completely dominating the presidential polls. Now she’s managing to run again. There was a recent court case which has allowed her to do so. But her movement, the national rally has never been stronger. Or look at Germany. The alternative for Germany, the AFD, has constantly faced attempts by the state to have it shut down. And it just absolutely dominated state elections. And I suspect we’ll have a number of other very impressive results at some state elections forthcoming.
So if I was Nigel Farage, Reform UK, I would be personally very happy with this turn of events. What would I spend the 72 million quid on? Well, Firstly, Reform UK have said publicly they want to double their policy team. They want a campaign manager in every constituency in the country. I would add to that and say this is a unique opportunity to deal with some of the strategic weaknesses within the Reform electorate. I think there should be a strategy for targeting women because I think Reform UK’s electorate is still heavily dependent upon men. I think there should be a strategy for appealing to working class Labour voters.
In the Red Wall in Wales and elsewhere, it’s a critical part of the Reform UK electorate. I think there needs to be a separate strategy for targeting Conservative Party voters in the shires. Reform UK really need to whittle that Conservative Party vote back down to 16%, 17%, if not lower.
And they also need a strategy for attracting non-voters, and in particular for registering non-voters, getting them on the electoral register.
The reason Brexit crossed the line, In 2016 is because one or two million non-voters came back into the political system to vote. Reform UK, if they are going to win the next general election, if they’re going to emerge as the largest party at the next general election, they have to mobilize hundreds of thousands, if not millions of non-voters, people who have given up on politics, people who feel absolutely frustrated with the state of politics and who want to come back in to the political system to try and bring about some change. That is how I’d be spending some of that money. I think all of that is absolutely critical. But the establishment’s attacks on reform, reflect a system that doesn’t really know what to say to the millions of voters who quite like what reform is saying, right?
Fix the borders, leave the ECHR, send in the Navy, strip welfare benefits from foreign nationals, slash overseas aid by 90%. And by the way, did you see this week, we just sent £665 million pounds to Angola to build a new airport while we’re treating British people in hospital car parks and corridors.
It’s this kind of thing that is riling people up and playing to Reform UK strength, but the establishment, instead of dealing with that, wants to instead try and deprive Reform UK of support, and I think that will play into Reform’s hands.
What we also saw this week was a similar response to anti-establishment movements, if you want to call them that, with this call by a Labour peer to ban the group Patriot Platform and designated a terrorist organization.
I’ve talked a little bit about this group in the past. They were integral to the protests in Dover, essentially shutting down the port of Dover.
And I believe I’m right in saying they were involved in the Portsmouth protests as well. And my line on this has always been clear. If people are not committing violence, if they are protesting peacefully, they are respecting the rule of law, then I support protests 100%.
Because you cannot do what Labour and Tory governments have done to the British people Over the last 20 years, but in particular since 2018, by ripping open the borders and letting anybody in, you cannot do that to our people and not expect them to react.
You cannot allow small boats to bring in, as we now know, Iranian terrorists, ISIS sympathisers, murderers, pedophiles and criminals, put them in the heart of your local communities and not expect those people, the British people, to react. You cannot do that.
The protests are an inevitable response to what is a very extreme policy being imposed on the British people by the very people, the very politicians who are supposed to protect them, look after them and care for them.
And it is absolutely outrageous. So the scenes in Dover and Portsmouth, for me, were entirely predictable. I don’t personally like balaclavas.
My view is if you’re fighting for your country, you’re speaking up for your country, you should show your face. That’s what many of us have been doing for many years. And I agree with those who say face coverings are not very British. And what we should be doing is banning all face coverings.
Balaclavas for Antifa people on the radical extreme left, burqas, any religious clothing covering the face in public spaces, balaclavas in this case. Of course, there is a hypocrisy in calling to designate an organization like this, a terrorist organization, from Labour peers who said absolutely nothing at all about some of those groups that we’ve seen marching and campaigning through the streets of our capital city for many, many years now.
Labour members of the House of Lords who actually opposed the way in which organizations like Palestine Action were clamped down upon by the state. Saying no, it’s wrong to clamp down on that organization, but yet when it happens to involve conservative right-wing themes like it does this time, they’re more than happy to use the power of the state to try and crush and shut down dissent.
Let me say it again, so long as people are non-violent, so long as they are peaceful, I support those protests 100%. But that is what we’re seeing. That is what is reflected in the case of Piddington, In the reaction to Reform UK donations, and in the reaction to protest groups like Patriot Platform, a system that is incapable of addressing the underlying reasons why so many people are drawn to these movements, are drawn to this politics, are so utterly fed up with the system.
And unless the system, the establishment, the blob, starts dealing with the reasons why people are so sick and tired of watching what is happening to their country, these movements only get stronger and stronger. They will only get stronger and stronger unless the system starts to address their legitimate concerns.
I gave a talk this week in Brighton, and there were some protests that were there, and I thanked the organizers and the security team and the venue for not backing down in the face of that. But as I saw this sort of group of protesters outside trying to make some noise for about 10 minutes before they got bored and walked off, I did think to myself, everything I say in the newsletter, in this podcast…
We need to fix the borders. We need to lower migration. We need to get rid of soft on crime policies. We need to lower the tax burden. We need to root out two tier policies in policing and our education system. We need to reduce foreign aid.
Everything I say is a 50, 60, 70%. The 10-15% extreme minority The liberal progressives, the radical woke progressives who dominate the institutions and dominate much of the political establishment, including a large chunk of the Tory parliamentary party. They want you to think that they represent the majority, but consistently on lots of issues, they are completely out of touch with the rest of Britain.
Which brings me to what I promised to end on. Which is that none of that has stopped this rumor from doing the rounds in Westminster this week. Which is that despite being hideously out of touch with the country,
Andy Burnham and the Labour government are planning an early general election. And the theory being that that election could come as early as November 19th. And the theory is this. Andy Burnham has said nothing really of any substance for a reason. He’s not really pushed any big wedge issues.
He started to turn the volume up on issues around Gaza and the Middle East to try and pull back Green Party voters that have been leaving the Labour Party and to try and pull back voters who have been leaving the Labour Party since 2024. And he appears to be doing that.
And the theory is that if the Labour Party win the St Pancras and Holborn by-election, if they defeat Zach Polanski and the Greens, and if they have a good conference, That in the aftermath of that, Andy Burnham will also look at the divided right, which of course we’ve talked about in the Silent Majority podcast two weeks ago and I’ve written about in the newsletter.
They’ll look at Reform UK on 25%. They’ll look at the Conservatives on 20%. And to a lesser extent, they’ll look at Restore on 3% or 4%. And they’ll say, you know what? The right is divided. We’re consolidating the left. The geopolitical situation in Iran and elsewhere is deteriorating again, as is the global economy.
And Andy Burnham is going to think to himself, what I’m going to do is go out there to the country and say, I need a fresh mandate to fix these problems. And he will take a punt on the fact that he’ll be able to outflank a divided right, and he’ll be able to hoover up the left, continue to consolidate the left and try and pull them along through promises on Gaza, maybe even proportional representation.
That is how we get to a general election on November 19th. Michael Ellis made this argument, among many others, he made this argument in The Telegraph saying that you essentially cancel the budget, you come out the back of conference in that by-election and you say, right, we’re going to the country. And remember, Andy Burnham was around Gordon Brown when he didn’t do that, when Gordon Brown bottled it.
And then, of course, the financial crash happened. Came crashing down, and Gordon Brown was promptly kicked out of office in 2010, and that opened the door to 14 years of Conservative rule. I suspect Team Burnham are remembering that, and I suspect that that has become very influential in their mindset. I’m not saying it’s going to happen for sure, but I’m saying it’s a rumour, it’s a theory that’s doing the rounds, and is also encouraging some people within the more Tory-aligned press to suggest that Kemi Badenoch needs a big, bold retail offer at the Conservative Party conference because they are now also expecting an earlier than expected general election.
So quite a lot going on in British politics, but at the root of it is a system, is an establishment, is a blob that is completely and utterly out of touch with the silent majority. That’s what you see in Piddington. That’s what you see reflected in the reaction to that school data. That’s what you see reflected in the establishment’s reaction to Reform UK and the donations this week. And I think that’s what you see out there in the country when you talk to your friends, family, and neighbours. As always, we thank you for your support. If you’re not yet a paid supporter and you want access to everything, we encourage you to go over to mattgoodwin.org, get access to every single post, every episode of the Silent Majority Podcast.
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