THE BIG READ: Why we need Reform to deliver an electoral thunderbolt on May 1

Our country is sliding towards an ungovernable future of ethnic enclaves and bitter rivalries. England is being unmade by our atrocious leftist establishment.

Photo by Marie M on Unsplash

IT IS very bold of Keir Starmer to make patriotism the key consideration as to who people should vote for in the local elections.

Speaking at the launch of the Labour campaign, Starmer claimed “there is nothing patriotic about Reform” and again accused Nigel Farage of “fawning over Putin”.

Regular readers will know I have long disagreed with Farage’s interpretation of the origins of the war in Ukraine. But were I living in an area with elections on May 1, there is not an earthly chance that this would influence which party gets my vote.

As it happens, I agree with Starmer that we are at a juncture in our island story where basic tests of patriotism should be decisive. The trouble is that he is leading one of the least patriotic governments in our history.

Let us set aside the disgrace of the Chagos surrender and the giveaway of billions of UK taxpayers’ money over coming decades – though that is a very telling indication of Labour’s ranking of “international law” above the national interest.

It is on the domestic agenda that Starmer and his administration are presiding over the active dismantling of the foundations of British and especially English society.

Nine months into his premiership, Starmer has already allowed into Britain some 30,000 illegal gatecrashers from abroad via the Channel dinghy racket. This is an astonishing number – the worst rate by far of any prime minister to date. He has abandoned a promise to stop using hotels to put up the law-breaking arrivals, mainly young men. He now says it may be impossible to stop the boats altogether but is still determined to “smash the gangs” he deems entirely responsible for the traffic.

In a speech this week at a security conference, Starmer insisted that the migrants were mainly victims of these gangs, declaring: “It is unfair on the illegal migrants themselves because these are vulnerable people being ruthlessly exploited by vile gangs.”

In the Commons, immigration minister Angela Eagle underlined this view by stating that people arriving illegally should still be able to lodge asylum claims and have them considered in the normal way.

This depiction of the illegal gatecrashers as victims is wilful naivety. The truth is that most of the criminals involved in this racket are the men in the boats. They are the biggest beneficiaries by far too – heading from what Donald Trump would term their “shit hole countries”, to lifetime access to the British welfare state and ultimately the right to apply to bring family members in for “reunification” purposes.

In the meantime they are put up in hotels, given meals, pocket money and special instant access to healthcare. And all this is turning various parts of our towns – and even villages – into no-go zones after dark as long-term residents seek to avoid large groups of foreign males.

Many of us pointed out from the start that Starmer’s policy of handing out more gold braid and epaulettes and talking-up “integrated crackdowns” was dressing-up box nonsense – doomed to failure. His actions in abandoning the Rwanda deterrent and scrapping the Illegal Migration Act’s rule that unlawful arrivals would be forbidden from lodging asylum claims has left “Treasure Island” wide open for plunder.

This is the very opposite of patriotism. It has torn up the social contract between government and the governed. And it has been accompanied by dozens of other policies which seek to relegate, disadvantage and marginalise the white indigenous majority on these islands.

On top of the Sentencing Council fiasco, we now have a police race action plan which explicitly abandons the idea of treating everyone the same or being “colour blind” in favour of seeking “equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs”.

But seeking equality of outcome in a country where, for example, black people commit homicide at eight times the rate of the general population is crackers. The