ON LANGUAGE:
“Language is the armoury of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The ability to describe our reality, using communicable and unambiguous language is key to our success as a species. It is equally a prerequisite to the success of democracies. In Britain, we have a cultural tradition of reservedness, of not discussing matters directly—we are only recently doing so and discovering that many people do not even know what an Englishman is. Similar confusion arose over what a woman is in recent years. While mostly redundant, these confusions reveal that multiple generations of people have been exposed to highly deconstructionist attitudes toward everyday things and can no longer communicate properly. Imagined spectrums of meaning, standard distributions of substance and other make-believe models attach themselves to words like “woman” and “Englishman” seeking to deprive these words of certainty. It is in this valley of confusion and eggshell-treading that one realises, the Englishman has lost the ability to speak freely.

JD Vance put this neatly: “In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” “There is nothing more urgent than mass migration”, he added, which in Britain has reached numbers close to 1 million per year. People like Vance looking into these isles are puzzled as to how we have lost the ability to speak frankly on an existential issue like this. Our silence is on global display and is a function of the way our laws act upon institutions and people in Britain.

The Council of Europe & EU prefer the phrase “Irregular Migration” to describe the illegal immigration to European countries. It is used in various documents as a matter of house style. Lewis Goodall erroneously suggested there was a legal obligation for the UK Home Office to use this term on LBC. There is no such obligation, not in the 1951 Refugee Convention, nor elsewhere—it is merely a linguistic attempt to soften a grim reality.

Another example came in January this year, when Elon Musk discovered one of Britain’s worst-kept secrets: the industrial prostitution and multi-penetrative rape of young white British girls, perpetrated by racially-motivated men of Pakistani origin, across 50 towns and cities. This is a phenomena ongoing since at least the late 1990s, with trials for alleged historic abuses still taking place. In that time, the groups responsible have come to be known as “grooming gangs”—a term that conjures images of dog-care. Realistically, this is Britian’s Chernobyl.
These crimes, and the discussion of them, was described in a Home Office extremism report in 2024 “grievance narrative” by “Right Wing extremists”,  and the only coverage aired on a British news network was Channel 4’s “Liar: The Fake Grooming Scandal”, of 2024, which merely covered a false allegation which these crimes inspired. Britain has seen perpetrator-friendly terms like “minor-attracted persons” used to describe would-be child molesters and distributors of exploitative sexual material involving children—a term thankfully now denounced by Police Scotland after it saw official use in a 2022 Police Scotland report aimed at tackling child sexual abuse and exploitation.

All this language of obfuscation is not trivial. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell wrote that language is an “instrument which we shape for our own purposes”. Britain’s newspeak has a distinct purpose: to render various horrors as ordinary aspects of Modern, diverse Britain.
It is equally revealing which words are absent. “There is a forgotten, nay almost forbidden word” said Winston Churchill on St George’s Day 1913, “That word is England”. Many people and institutions, from Cambridge University Press to the Church of England, are hesitant to even say England (or, even the word ‘Church’ in the latter’s case), preferring instead the dropdown-menu legalese of “The UK”—a formulation of the 1990s with its usage on the rise since 2000. St George’s day itself is vanishing, a casualty of sharing the 23^rd of April with UNESCO’s “World Book Day”, a 1995 invention. The Honourable Society of Middle Temple, my Inn of court, has chosen its position on this conflict, despite St George’s cross featuring in their arms.

Britain itself appears to be having an identity crisis. The notion of “British Values” is a recent invention, it is one which seeks to remove difficult task of defining a distinct British people. Search trends suggest that in 2014 people abruptly began scrambling to find what these values were in large numbers, few seem to know what they are, some have formulated them as follows. I summarise:

• Being a democracy,
• Having laws; and crucially,
• Having an unquestioning openness to all things and people.

If this is the best our institutions can muster, perhaps they are suggesting something far grimmer—that we have no values left to speak of.

 

SPEECH RESTRICTION IN THE UK

Legally speaking, a myriad of laws and systems prevent us from describing reality truthfully, under threat of criminal, civil or economic reprisal from various professional regulators—all created in the 2000s. Any speech which is directed at a person, and causes distress, can become a crime in Britain. We operate on an eggshell skull doctrine, whereby sensitivity of the supposed victim can give rise to criminality. Where our American cousins are regarded as litigious, the British are far too poor to afford such civil law remedies. The aggrieved instead resort to criminal and regulatory complaints to settle their personal disputes. The result of this is that we now have a publicly funded complaints culture.

Even without an aggrieved party, the law in Britain threatens to make any comment in relation to race, sexual orientation or religion that is not wholly positive in nature a criminal offence under the Public Order Act of 1986 (“The POA”). This presents a serious problem for ordinary people reacting to the negative impacts of mass immigration.

For your speech to become an offence under The POA, it is required that an imagined person might be “stirred” to hatred by your statement. Whether that statement is intended for, seen by another person, or has any impact, is immaterial. The POA invites police to take part in the imaginative exercise in creating criminals, with overuse in the realm of digital communications, as I argued here. The Act ought be gutted and fully ringfenced from online applications. Low-income people, unable to afford adequate representation, are frequently coerced into pleading guilty to speech offences under this act and the Communications Act (2003). Usually, their crime is not saying things in a pleasant, middle-class way. When sentencing such guilty pleas, Judges appear delighted to lay-thick allegations of bigotry and racism, as though to suggest in-and-of-themselves these are criminal offences—they are not.

If you fall short of satisfying the criteria for criminality, or your financial situation renders you functionally defenceless, your speech may still be recorded on your police record as a non-crime hate incident, as Telegraph Journalist Allison Pearson discovered in 2024. Many are moved to silence out of fear. We do not enjoy legal certainty in the realm of speech in Britain.
We can see this risk aversion in our press’s choice of words too. A cursory look at the bodies which regulate the press explains why it painstakingly avoids frank discussions of reality. Britain’s broadcasting regulator (Ofcom) introduced its Broadcasting Code in 2005 and strengthened it further in 2016. This code bakes the POA, and avoidance of liability under it, directly into broadcast media in Section Three. The (voluntary) Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), created in 2014, takes the same approach in relation to print media, specifically in Clause 12. These publications have signed up to such constraint. Both regulators threaten criminal liability and urge that you do not mention race at all if you can possibly help it. We can see the effects of this when child-murderer, Axel Rudakubana, a second-generation British citizen of Rwandan heritage, was presented as a “Welsh choirboy” (as Kwasi Kwatang put it), a common occurrence when such stories are broken. The public sense this, and grow weary, with only at 35% trust in our media. That is the lowest trust across the 28 countries surveyed by the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer. Our police have followed the same approach. Since 2000, rapes have quintupled while violence-against-the-person offences have more than tripled. Police have gradually stopped recording ethnicity for these offences in the same period, supposedly in fear of being called racist. Mandatory non-discussion of mass immigration, and its dangers, exposes the public to its associated risks.

Individuals and institutions will find no solace from Sir Keir Starmer on the subject of speech. The former head of the Crown Prosecution Service—a man who has thus far governed as an eager prosecutor of the English people first, a career civil servant second, a pro-immigration Human Rights lawyer third—and Prime Minister as a distant fourth consideration. Public Prosecutors do not make compelling leaders; something Kamala Harris neatly demonstrated in 2024. I myself share JD Vance’s belief that once the Englishman’s freedom to speak is unleashed from legal uncertainty, the rest of his freedoms will naturally follow. That is why individuals such as Sir Keir are so eager that you speak as little as possible.

 

THE OLD ENGLISH CONSTITUTION

For much of the history of these isles, “free Englishman” was considered a tautology, with jurists like William Blackstone remarking that English common law was uniquely protective of liberty as the default position. Our slow-cooked constitution agreed.

Magna Carta and later the Petition of Right (1628), Habeas Corpus Act (1679), Bill of Rights (1689) and Act of Settlement (1701) established government by consent, taxation by consent, the ability to speak freely in parliament and due legal process and the independence of our courts. The Act of Supremacy (1534) demonstrated parliamentary supremacy over foreign powers in our lands, clarified parliament’s capabilities and asserted the monarch’s role over church and state.  The Laws in Wales Act (1535) annexed Wales into our legal and parliamentary system while The Act of Union (1707) formally brought in Scotland into our parliamentary system.

English common law supported this array of constitutional documents, clarifying the minutiae of everyday life, decision by decision, in the arena of our courts. This body of authoritative decisions grew gradually, like the branches of an old oak, deviating in exceptional circumstances (known as differentiating a case). America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Ireland, India, Pakistan and many more borrowed our common law system, because it works exceptionally well.

This combination of statutes and English common law formed the basis of the US’s Bill of Rights, and paper-constitution. The Englishmen in our 13 American colonies maintained these self-evident freedoms—we did not—and because we did not, they have escaped our grasp. England’s own Bill of Rights (1689) even furnished (Protestants) with the right to bear arms for the purposes of self-defence in Article VII. Today, self-defence as a valid reason to be permanently denied a shotgun license and carrying a sharp object on your person for this purpose carries a prison sentence of up to 4 years.

POST-WAR CONSTITUTIONAL CORROSION AND NEVER AGAINISM

The Second World War had a particularly corrosive effect on English liberty. Post-war Europe was so haunted by mechanized slaughter and fascist horrors that it embraced what I will call ‘Never Againism’ as its guiding ideology. In running from the dangers of populism and fascism we created The European Coal and Steel Community (1951) (now EU) and the European Court of Human Rights (1953). By sharing resources and litigating wars, we hoped to prevent the creation future Hitlers: Never Again, we said. Both the ECHR and EU have far outgrown this initial purpose. The ECHR has bloated from an alternative dispute resolution centre for 12 states to a court which takes individual petitions from approximately 820 million people and operates a de-facto borderless experiment whereby any human arriving in Europe is obliged to remain. As of 2011, it was discovered its backlog would “take 46 years” to clear. Never Againism justifies these expansions of purpose and asks for permanent commitment to these institutions. The ECHR coasts onward, believing that its charter of rights alone stands between the European public and endless Hitlerian atrocities. I am unconvinced.

Never Againism shaped the way Britain treated the post-war immigration, stemming from the fall of our empire. The British Nationality Act (1948), an incredibly naïvely constructed act by the Atlee administration, granted those born within the British Empire Commonwealth Citizen status, and with it, settlement rights in mainland Britain. It opened the floodgates to six-figure annual migration—quaint by today’s standards, but an unprecedented crisis for the time. Various Acts successfully stemmed these numbers, but the question of citizenship remained unsettled. It was The British Nationality Act (1981) that attempted to settle it by putting an end to birthright citizenship. In short, “if you’re here now, you’re British”. The 1980s also saw the introduction of the POA, which sought to criminalise the speech of anyone who had a problem with that. These acts attempted to say Never Again in relation to Britain’s racial tensions.

 

TONY BLAIR’S NU-CONSTITUTION

Puzzlingly, Britain’s next move was to increase racial tensions by importing people in higher numbers than at any point in the history of these isles, outpacing the Windrush annual numbers by an order of magnitude. It effectively reintroduced birthright citizenship via the Human Rights Act (1998) (“the HRA”) and hoped that the POA would continue to quieten any dissatisfaction with this situation. Why did this occur? One need look no further than New Labour.

On the election of Tony Blair in 1997, what remained of our constitution was pasted over by a nu-constitution; a series of key acts and treaties ranging from the The HRA, Constitutional Reform Act (2005) to the signing of the Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon Treaties with the EU. The Blairite constitution accepted all aspects of the post-war consensus, from its Never Again-isms to the necessity of closer union with Europe. It attempted to give legal permanence to every millennial assumption about a globalised world, at the zenith of the globalist moment. To do so, it implicitly repealed many of our key constitutional documents and weakened Parliament’s influence, shifting responsibility away from it, in three directions. The nu-constitution essentially castrated our sole lawmaking body—balls, shaft and head—a procedure which nobody has dared to reverse.

First, in the downward direction: the balls. Blair devolved the UK’s internal kingdoms of Wales & Scotland into micro-states with accompanying micro-parliaments in 1999. London essentially became a city-state following the Greater London Authority Act (1999) with the creation of the Mayor of London and London Assembly. This was all ostensibly to better identify local problems. In practice, the devolved parliaments and assemblies lacked the capabilities to fix such problems, they were just no longer Parliament’s problems.

Second, in the upward direction: the head. Blair’s reforms federally integrated the UK into the political and legal jurisdictions of continental Europe, essentially made the ECHR a regulator of parliamentary legislation via the full domestic implementation of its convention in the 1998 HRA. Blair’s gleeful acceptance of the newly-politicised EU signalled that we were a vassal state, with an authority higher than that of the English parliament. Both were a deference to the macro-realm of international law. Things previously taken for granted by the Englishman such as the right to private thought, or to be alive, were explained as gifts given to him by the international legal order. All law passed by Parliament must henceforth be interpreted “as far as is possible” so as to be compatible with the ECHR, even if that means bending a domestic statute. If a statute flatly flew in its face, Section 10 and Schedule 2 of The HRA provided a route to amend that Parliamentary act. Although the ECHR’s protections were to be absent when Britain experienced a 2-year suspension of basic liberties (the lockdown of 2020-21) there is still a mythological belief that the rights contained in the HRA/ECHR did not exist in Britain prior to the HRA’s introduction 1998. This is of course, ludicrous, but it is the Blairite constitution in action.

Thirdly, in the outward direction: the shaft. Limitations were placed upon our key institutions. Everyone from medical doctors to the Bar of England & Wales, from a Member of Parliament to the Government itself was entrusted to a third-party regulatory steering entity which regulated what professionals and their professional bodies may do and say. There is the Climate Change Committee (2008) with its net zero policy; and SAGE (2009), which recommended placing Britain under house arrest for two years; and the Office for Budget Responsibility (2010), capable of ousting prime ministers if their budget is not approved, by way of the Bar Standards Board (2006). Every professional you can imagine was given a legislatively enshrined body to limit his agency on political grounds, and, create statutory responsibilities to monitor and promote equality and diversity in their industry, or at least, never to be seen to oppose it. The election of Kemi Badenoch as the leader of the Conservative Party is the natural conclusion to this.

Blair’s constitution placed England, and the Englishman under perpetual attack, not just from outside, but from within. After 2016’s Brexit vote signalled the Englishman’s dissatisfaction with this new constitutional arrangement, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak signalled that they were quite content with it. In rejecting Robert Jenrick’s confrontation with the ECHR (and associated demographic shifts it obliges) the Conservatives have shown they are uninterested in deviating from Blair’s constitutional arrangement. They have been its direct beneficiaries—and only nominally the opposition.

The new arrangement, characterised by a weak parliament, constrained institutions and continental oversight allows for permanent governance from the centre provided the Overton window of political discourse remains closed—ideally under threat of your imprisonment.

 

 

THE NEW SUBJECTS—IMMIGRATION:

The Blairite constitution is also different from any constitution these isles have seen in an unusual way: Its subjects are different. They are now no longer English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish.

On November 28^th 2024, even Keir Starmer could not help but agree. Taking to a podium, he decided to address Britain’s uncontrollable levels of  LEDC, Global South immigration—or as Donald Trump more tersely put it, immigration from “shithole countries”. Starmer’s diagnosis was that “this happened by design, not accident”. He is correct; it was a choice to allow an estimated 10-15 million people to enter the UK from 1997 onwards, just as it was a choice not to stop it. The ONS predicts that another 13.7 million people are set to immigrate in the period from mid-2021 to mid-2036.

Stopping this would require unmaking much of the nu-constitution. New Labour embarked on these immigration policies by way of the Immigration & Asylum Act (1999) and Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (2002) which streamlined naturalisation and asylum processes and saw net legal immigration rise from five-digit numbers to six-digit numbers, never to return. The HRA expanded protections for illegal entrants and foreign nationals in our lands. The grounds for asylum claims were expanded, family reunification migration rose and deportations—which ought to have been simple—became nigh-impossible. Your presence in Britain, however illegal undesirable to the public, could now be secured by the magic 8-ball of international human rights. The requirements to become a British citizen had reached new lows: be present, be human. As Andrew Neather, former advisor to Tony Blair, once said of mass immigration, this was all an attempt to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”.

That rubbing has become permanent, and the activism of specialist immigration tribunals has played no little part in this situation. Deportation appeals were streamlined by the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act in 2007, which also gave immigration judges the power to create binding cases for lower tribunals. Recently, in one such Upper tribunal, Judge Norton-Taylor declared that a 23 year old man with a receding hairline and beard would be treated as a child. In another Upper tribunal, Norton-Taylor decided that a Palestinian family of six had the right to come to Britain under Article 8 of the ECHR after they applied through a refugee scheme designed for Ukrainians, stating their “specific situation outweighed the public interest in keeping to British immigration rules”. Britain’s most senior judge, Baroness Sue Carr, defended these decisions, a move which suggests that our judiciary has forgotten that the “independence of the judiciary” does not mean its independence to pursue flagrant open-border activism, at cost to the taxpayer.
Every initiative to the stem the flow of people into Britain has been stymied by our twin commitments to the ECHR and HRA—commitments Sir Keir has stated he will “never” deviate from. From the Rwanda Plan to Labour’s “Border Security Force,” the will of the elected House of Commons is routinely overruled. Even with his background knowledge of the human rights framework, Sir Keir has been unable to make political gains using it. In November, he congratulated himself for arresting (not charging) a single Turkish man selling inflatable dinghies. This exercise took three nations, cooperating internationally, over at least five months. This is the Blairite constitution operating at full tilt.

Thanks to our continued commitment to human rights, one in four people in Britain today is an ethnic minority. In London, white British people have become the ethnic minority, making up only 36.8%  of the capital of England in 2021 (likely lower at the time of writing). This demographic shift will see the white British population become an overall minority before 2070, something which has already occurred in many places, including Manchester and Birmingham. In the opening days of 2025, the world has been exposed to the historic, organised rape of children by those who directly benefitted from those relaxations in immigration, and the acquisition of citizenship. The public appetite to turn back the clock, reversing 20+ years of corrosion to Britain’s demography via deportations, revocation of citizenship and innovative policies like the Swedish position of incentivised “remigration” has never been higher. It is an appealing proposition, and it is the same proposition which drove the Make America Great Again movement to victory in the US.

 

THE ECONOMIC DRAIN OF MASS MIGRATION:

Manufacturing consent for high legal immigration relied on the promise of its economic benefits. That argument has completely crumbled. 71% of the public believe legal immigration has been too high in the passing decade, rather than providing rocket fuel for economic growth there is an increasing awareness that 48% of Arabs, 42.1% of Bangladeshi’s and 40.8% of Pakistanis in Britain are economically inactive. To put this into perspective, the Centre for Policy Studies calculated that just 5 percent of all visas issued between 2022—2023 were given to immigrants likely to be net tax contributors. Even the OBR admits the average low-skilled migrant labourer will cost the taxpayer £465,000 by the time they reach the age of 81. Even when it comes to high-earning immigrants, for every £1 paid to the Treasury in tax, their more numerous net-dependents take out £1.60. In the period since 2019, approximately 3.3 million foreign nationals have passed the test for receiving state benefits including Universal Credit (UC). This means 50,000 foreign nationals in the UK gain eligibility for UC every month. Those individuals will be eligible for other forms of state benefit by way of the same test.

At time of writing, the UK’s “Skilled Worker” visa salary threshold is set at less than the UK average wage and Health and Care visas expanded to include unskilled care workers and dependants. It can hardly be said that we are getting the world’s best and brightest. Anyone entering on these visas may apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) after five years. Between 742,000 and 1,224,000 migrants from the post 2020 wave will gain access to Indefinite Leave To Remain (ILR) in the coming years; that means access to benefits, social housing, and the NHS tantamount to citizenship. The cost of this is estimated at £234 billion, or the equivalent of six years of defence spending.

Put simply, it has simply become too easy to enter Britain and gain full access to its services. The public agrees, with 55% of people, as polled here in 2025, in favour of increasing the period of residence to attain British citizenship. The Home Office continues to grant refugee status (and failing that) humanitarian protection under Article 3 of the ECHR all too liberally and the cost of those who arrive on work visas is still marked.

 

DOMESTIC WAGES:

As for the British worker, the UK suffers from such severe wage compression (see figure 9) that professional graduates have comparable disposable income to those on state benefits. For perspective on this compression, before tax, nurses earn an average of £37,000, Astronauts start on £40,000, Full-time lawyers (solicitors) have a mean average of around £51,000. Train drivers of around £55,000.

When it comes to where you live, a 2021 housing report by James Gleeson of the Greater London Authority found that the square footage of property per person was higher for those in social (council) housing than for those in private rentals. Almost half of all people living in social housing in Greater London were born abroad, at 47.6%. Our incentive structures have been annihilated.

 

THE INACTION /SOLUTIONS:

The new-Labour constitution which got us here could have been unmade in mere pen strokes. A highly generous timeframe would have been five years. The Conservative party failed in 14. Donald Trump has suggested such feats are possible within 48 hours. Culturally, we have continued to live in Blair’s world since 1997 and failing some Great Restoration Act or, England Act whose preamble repeals and amends around 20 statutes, we will continue to.

 

CONCLUSION

I am an Englishman, though my passport (and all British passports) is silent on this matter. I am quite secure in this. Unlike Rishi Sunak, who was recently alleged to be as much an Englishman as any other, I have never been the Head Boy at Winchester School, nor have I sat as Prime Minister (so far). The Englishman isn’t defined by his whiteness, this would be reductive (though it is a given to ordinary people). It is his gentlemanly mischief which defines him.

The British Values discussion, ongoing in various circles, reveals that many view Britishness as a checklist of beliefs, explainable and communicable to anyone as though they were an Ikea assembly manual. Reasonable people know this to be an oversimplification, yet, the law presently supports this strange notion. In the eyes of the British Nationality Act of 1981, British Citizenship is simply a set of requirements and examinations alone. It is a status that can be achieved at any time by anyone, even fraudulently (as one woman did 12 times wearing various wigs).

For many, Englishness can only be witnessed from afar, but, those watching our nation from abroad can see Englishness is disappearing at a rate directly proportionate to our ongoing issues surrounding mass immigration. England is under attack, from all sides, and within. Without a confrontation of key acts, chief among them the HRA, POA and a stark revaluation of who is and isn’t a citizen we stand to lose something which cannot merely be legislated into being.