Whoever Comes After Starmer, Britain's Populist Revolt Will Only Grow

None of Starmer's Successors Appear to Understand Why Labour's Collapsing

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Here are three shocking things we discovered about Britain in the last two weeks.

First, despite grappling with the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War, the hardworking British people are now having to fund welfare benefits for 1.5 million people who are not even British citizens.

One in six people claiming Universal Credit, according to freedom of information requests submitted to the Department for Work and Pensions, are not even British.

Even more astonishingly, the British state just increased welfare payouts for ‘additional spouses’ who are in polygamous marriages that were registered overseas, despite bigamy being illegal here in Britain. Yes - that really happened.

Second, nearly 600 Muslim sectarian candidates – who prioritise foreign conflicts and tribal allegiances over British issues and national loyalty – were elected to England’s councils last week, with the vast majority elected under a Green Party banner.

While politicians now routinely deride British people who oppose the spread of Islamism and mass immigration as ‘far-right’, they say nothing at all about the fact, revealed by the Henry Jackson Society, that more than one in ten candidates elected to public office in England last week are Muslim sectarians.

And third, the British state just banned several conservative commentators from America and Europe, including a Member of the European Parliament, from entering Britain on the grounds their presence is “not conducive to the public good”.

The conservative activists have been prevented from joining a protest against mass immigration in London this weekend at the very same time as the British state allows more than 200,000 unvetted migrants to stream across our border illegally, including terrorists and murderers, and has allowed an assortment of Islamist sympathisers and anti-Semites to march through the streets of our capital city for the last three years.

What do these three things have in common?

They are all symptoms of a profound, deep-rooted and widespread sense of unfairness among the British people. A feeling that not only explains why the country’s Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is about to be turfed out of office but why, no matter who replaces him, a growing populist revolt against the political class that has presided over the decline of Britain will now only intensify in the post-Starmer era.

Britain, under Keir Starmer, has morphed into a sick, febrile, and deeply unstable country. A place where people on welfare are prioritised over people who work. A place where those who break the rule of law are prioritised over those who respect it.

And a place where those who openly say they want to overthrow our national identity, culture, freedoms, and democracy, are allowed to flourish, while those who want to protect and preserve these things are shut down or denounced, as we heard yet again from Keir Starmer this week, as “divisive” and “dangerous”.

Britain has now become a dark and dystopian place in which the decent majority of hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens feel they are treated like second-class citizens in their own country, and where more than half of all British people now say they ‘feel like a stranger’ in their own nation.

This is why 3.8 million people across Britain just rejected the political establishment by voting for Reform at the elections. This is why tens of millions of people feel so exasperated with the dire state and direction of Britain. And this is why Keir Starmer is the most unpopular prime minister in the entire history of polling.

But if anybody thinks all this will be resolved by simply replacing Keir Starmer with somebody else then they’d be mistaken.

Because the blunt reality is that none of Starmer’s likely successors – Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham – will do anything to address the profound sense of unfairness that now rumbles beneath the surface of British society.

Angela Rayner, for instance, just managed to write a detailed statement this week on her vision for Britain in which she did not mention – not even once – the number one reason why millions of people just voted Reform: immigration.

Remarkably, Rayner has even publicly criticised politicians who do want to restrict immigration, such as her colleague Shabana Mahmood, as ‘un-British’.

Rayner also praises Spain as the answer to Britain’s problems, where some 90 per cent of new jobs have gone not to natives but immigrants, and where Spain’s ruling class just gave an amnesty to 500,000 illegal migrants.

Is this what Angela Rayner wants to do to Britain? Does she have any idea why every local council seat except one in her own backyard of Tameside just elected Reform councillors?

Having personally knocked on 7,000 doors in the area, I can say with some confidence it’s not because these voters were looking for a cocktail of extreme social liberalism mixed with even harder left-wing economics.

Wes Streeting, meanwhile, has spent years deriding Nigel Farage and his voters as ‘far-right’, ‘toxic’, ‘hateful’, and proclaiming that Reform UK pose ‘an existential threat’ to Britain. He deploys the same authoritarian narrative that is used by every globalist progressive in the West, from Keir Starmer and Tony Blair to Mark Carney.

‘The world is dangerous’, the narrative goes. ‘The only option is left progressivism. If you do not agree with us, then you are dangerous’. What they share, as research shows, is the deeply-held belief that people who hold different views are not legitimate.

It is the same authoritarian impulse that millions of Brits saw in Keir Starmer early on, especially in the aftermath of the Southport atrocity. An instinctive tendency to shut down legitimate political opposition or reframe it as beyond the pale. They simply have no interest in addressing the understandable concerns of ordinary people.

And then there’s Andy Burnham, who is apparently so ‘in touch with working people’ he’s managed to say nothing of substance about why so many of them are abandoning the old parties in droves and turning instead to Reform.

For Burnham, like the Labour left more generally, the answer to winning these people back is not to address their actual, legitimate concerns about mass immigration, broken borders, two-tier justice, excessive welfare, and the spread of Islamism, but to speak instead to the fringe concerns of an increasingly radicalised Labour Party.

A Labour Party that is retreating into itself. A Labour Party that from top to bottom has very clearly decided that it’s more interested in winning the approval of its own radical activists than that of the decent majority of hardworking, patriotic Brits.

A Labour Party that would clearly much rather chase after other left-wingers who have moved to the Greens, who are forecast to win 22 seats at the next general election, than chase after the much larger number of people who have switched to Reform, who are forecast to win some 324 seats.

Labour, put simply, is no longer a serious movement that is interested in representing the national majority. It has now been fully hijacked by what the economist Thomas Piketty once called the ‘Brahmin Class’, or what others call the ‘Lanyard Class’: urban, left-wing, socially cocooned, liberal if not radically progressive, morally righteous yet deeply inexperienced activists who have completely lost touch with the country.

An obsession with nationalisation. Imposing the highest tax burden for 80 years. Continuously calling to raise the minimum wage, despite businesses saying they cannot afford it. Talking about growth while clobbering the high street with soaring taxes, business rates, energy bills, employment costs, and regulation. Getting ‘closer to the European Union’ when a majority of people voted for the very opposite. Committing to ever more borrowing and spending when the financial markets have made it clear this is unaffordable. Refusing to slash welfare, despite spending more on welfare payouts than they are generating in tax revenue. Endlessly prioritising minority interests over the national majority. Staying silent about the disastrous effects of mass immigration, or viewing any opposition to it as ‘racism’. Pandering to Islamists. Downplaying anti-Semitism. Refusing to fix the borders.

All this might please an amateurish, self-absorbed Labour Party that like a student society has now fully turned in on itself. But none of it represents a serious offer to the tens of millions of people from the decent majority who just want to be treated with fairness, respect, and decency in the country their ancestors built, which they are now keeping going through their hard work and contribution, and which they love.

This is why a rapidly growing number of these people have not only rejected Keir Starmer but, as we just saw at the elections from Gateshead to Wigan, Barnsley to Wales, are now also lining up to reject something else: the entire Labour Party.

This is why, with a Labour leadership contest now coming down the line, it does not matter who ends up replacing Keir Starmer. It does not matter who becomes leader of the Labour Party, and our next prime minister. And it does not matter who ends up leading us into the post-Starmer era.

Because so long as the Labour Party continues to show that it is more interested in itself than the decent majority of hardworking, tax-paying British people then the populist revolt that has already been unleashed against Keir Starmer will only intensify and take down not just Keir Starmer but the entire Labour Party and, perhaps, the entire political class in Westminster.

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