Image Credit: CARLOS JASSO / Contributor / Getty Images 
It doesn’t matter.
That was the message—those precise words, blunt, unequivocal, brooking no dissent—that Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered to the British people last summer in the aftermath of the brutal murder of three little girls at a dance class, in Southport. Six more were left in critical condition with stab wounds, as well as two teachers.
Decades of anger at the effects of the multicultural experiment, an experiment conducted without the approval of the British public and which tens of millions have voted to bring to an end at multiple elections, suddenly boiled over. Britain was convulsed by protests.
The country was on a knife-edge.
Although initial rumours that the perpetrator of this heinous crime was a Muslim immigrant were quickly shown to be wrong—and it was hardly an unjustified assumption—they were nevertheless directionally true. The killer was not an Englishman or, indeed, as the media tried to suggest, a swarthy Welshman like me. The killer was Axel Rudakubana, the anthracite-black son of a Rwandan immigrant.
It was later revealed that Rudakubana had bragged at school about bringing a new Rwandan Genocide to the UK and had downloaded ISIS atrocity manuals; though these facts were conveniently made to disappear. Other pertinent facts, like why Rudakubana’s family left Rwanda during the Genocide and the role of Keir Starmer himself in granting them asylum, may never see the light of day.
As unrest spread across the nation, Starmer took to the podium and addressed the British people, telling them in no uncertain terms, though his voice wavered, that the protestors were “far right,” participants in “violent thuggery;” their protests were not protests at all; their grievances, no grievances; and that they would face the “full force of the law,” whether they had participated “directly” or by “whipping up this action online and then running away themselves.”
Among those caught in the dragnet was Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor. She sent an angry Tweet about burning down migrant accommodation and swiftly deleted it a few hours later. Days after Starmer’s speech, she was arrested, railroaded through the “justice system” and sentenced to 31 months in prison, despite being told that if she pleaded “not guilty” she would not be made an example of. A Labour councillor who told a baying mob that the “far right” protestors should have their “throats cut” walked away from court a free man.
The protests, and the British government’s extraordinary heavy-handed response drew outrage at home and abroad. When the State Department issued its annual global human-rights report this month, Britain was singled out as a nation where individual liberty is in full, headlong retreat. The President and Vice President have both voiced their concerns about Britain on multiple occasions, including during official visits. Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy were both made to squirm exquisitely as they were forced to deny that active censorship and persecution is taking place, but their determination to continue that censorship and persecution has remained undiminished.
This week, the British people were told again, “It doesn’t matter.”
It still doesn’t matter.
On Friday, three judges at the Court of Appeals voted in favour of the government and overturned a High Court injunction against the owners of the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex that prevented them from continuing to house asylum seekers. The Bell Hotel has been at the epicenter of renewed nationwide protests against the government’s insane immigration policies, following the sexual assault of a 14-year-old British girl by an Ethiopian man being housed there. The injunction would almost certainly have led to further local injunctions against the policy of housing asylum seekers in hotels and other private accommodation.
For a moment, it seemed as if the rights of the British people to be safe in their own communities would triumph—or if not triumph, at least secure a rare, temporary, win.
Those hopes have now been dashed.
The three Appeal Court judges ruled the initial injunction had been “seriously flawed” and contained “several errors in principle.”
They said that upholding the High Court order could lead to further disorder by showing that protests—legal protests that were, for the most part, free from violence and lawbreaking, despite the strength of feeling—could actually achieve something. And that couldn’t possibly be allowed.
Lord Justice Bean: “If an outbreak of protests enhances the case for a planning injunction, this runs the risk of acting as an impetus or incentive for further protests—some of which may be disorderly—around asylum accommodation. At its worst, if even unlawful protests are to be treated as relevant, there is a risk of encouraging further lawlessness.”
Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, had this to say in response to the decision: “Keir Starmer has shown that he puts the rights of illegal immigrants above the rights of British people who just want to feel safe in their towns and communities.”
Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, agreed: “Illegal migrants have more rights than the British people under Starmer.”
The protests have continued. The police, emboldened by the decision, have adopted a more aggressive approach. At least three men were arrested outside the Bell Hotel on Friday.
Protestors are now predicting serious civil unrest.
One group conspicuously involved in the protests has been the “Pink Ladies,” ordinary British women who’ve donned pink t-shirts and taken to the frontlines to raise their voices for the rights of British girls and women not to be assaulted and raped by foreign men who shouldn’t even be in their communities in the first place.
Carmen, a member of the Pink Ladies, spoke to The Guardian. “We come every week—march, protest,” she said, “and today’s ruling is just devastating, absolutely devastating. It will probably cause civil unrest.”
This is a conclusion that’s hard to resist. The level of popular anger is simply unprecedented. I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime. The tension is palpable, even in small towns and villages far from the unrest. Ordinary people are freely giving voice to opinions that would have seemed outlandish and extreme, beyond the pale, just years or even months ago—about immigration and the legitimacy of a government that ignores the will of the people as a matter of policy, about what it actually means to be British.
Despite its pretensions to total control, the British government is not in control. Nowhere is this more in evidence than on social media, and especially X, whose owner Elon Musk declared nothing short of a holy war against Keir Starmer and his cronies on Friday.
Musk accused the British government of “treason against its own people.”
“A nation with a government against its own people shall perish from the earth!” he Tweeted, before warning that, “The nightmare happening to Epping and hundreds of other towns in Britain and Ireland will come to your town too, unless it is stopped by the people.”
The Trump administration has made the promotion of free speech abroad one of its flagship policies. European attempts to bully and bring Elon Musk to heel have not gone over well.
During the election campaign, the EU’s intimidation caused JD Vance to threaten that the US might even leave NATO if the EU didn’t back off. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires proactive censorship by social-media companies at the algorithmic level if they are to avoid punitive fines, is actively infringing the First Amendment rights of Americans, and the Trump administration knows this.
Some have asked how soon until Starmer bans X in Britain. The British government’s loathsome new Online Safety Act, which was intended to protect children from exposure to harmful content, has already been used to censor footage of the protests in the UK. 4Chan and Kiwifarms have now filed a US lawsuit against Ofcom, the British media regulator, claiming the Act is limiting the fundamental rights of Americans, just like the DSA, and of course they’re right. 4Chan has already been threatened with fines for refusing to cooperate with Ofcom.
Starmer’s government may indeed go further in its quest to silence the British people and their cries for freedom, but if it does, it will surely face harder pushback from the Trump administration.
I won’t make any predictions at this point. Predictions make fools of us all. But one thing is clear: The fight is not over.
It’s just beginning.
