This article was originally published in The Spectator.
There are dark whispers on the internet about Britain’s coming “race war.” The protests outside migrant hotels prove the “native English” have had a gutful of these “invaders,” say nefarious actors on X. Others foresee a civil war: a showdown between a haughty left and a resurgent right over the very soul of the kingdom. I see something different: a class war.
Okay, maybe not a “war.” It’s not the Russian Revolution, or even a rerun of the Battle of Orgreave. But the class tensions in these clashes outside migrant hotels seem undeniable to me. On one side we have the keffiyeh-adorned, often quite plummy defenders of “open borders.” And on the other, working men and women, many of them mothers, all wrapped in the English flag as they state their case for the restoration of our nation’s sovereignty. Tell me this isn’t the “left behind” finally standing up to the turbo-smug posh left that loves to lord it over them.