AS WE enter July, my thoughts have been straying back to the shadows of corrupt and cover-up government, evident well before covid and lockdown, and to an anniversary – the unresolved death of Dr David Kelly, the highly respected British weapons expert and former UN inspector whose body was found in an Oxfordshire wood 23 years ago.

Readers will recall that in May 2003, he had an off-the-record conversation with BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan during which Kelly expressed unease about the 2002 Iraq weapons of mass destruction dossier, alleging that the government had ‘sexed up’ the intelligence to make it more compelling for war. When Gilligan broadcast this on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, it triggered an explosive political war between the corporation and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration involving communications director Alastair Campbell. The government publicly outed Dr Kelly and forced him to appear before a hostile parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Two days later, on July 17, 2003, Dr Kelly was found dead in woodland near his home in Oxfordshire.

To say this was an electrifying moment of Tony Blair’s decade in Downing Street is an understatement. Its sinister detail still has the power to shock today. All the more so because Blair’s fixers saw to it that no coroner’s inquest was ever held so it remains unresolved.

In 2018, I interviewed Miles Goslett, author of An Inconvenient Death: How the Establishment Covered up the David Kelly Affair. You can read the interview here.

Goslett’s book sets out in brilliant detail why the official non-statutory inquiry into this appalling event, chaired by Lord Hutton, was flawed.

With the imminent arrival of Andy Burnham to the highest office in the land, I wondered whether he, then a young Labour MP, had ever said or done anything in relation to Dr Kelly’s death. What I discovered, and it is not to his credit, is that in January 2004 – a few months after Dr Kelly’s death, when the Hutton Report was published – Burnham tabled a toadying parliamentary motion defending Blair’s government from scrutiny and criticising journalist Rod Liddle, a former editor of the Today programme, for having the temerity to raise questions about Hutton’s probity during a Sky TV interview.

This is Burnham’s Early Day Motion: ‘That this House calls on Mr Rod Liddle to apologise to Lord Hutton for impugning his reputation on Sky television since if the report had criticised the Government, no doubt Mr Liddle would have accepted its conclusions; notes that, the report having entirely vindicated the Government, Mr Liddle described the report as “surreal” and that he further said that judicial enquiries always end up backing the Government; believes that this is a slur on Lord Hutton’s reputation, integrity and record; calls on Mr Liddle to withdraw those comments, admit the report was independent and have the good grace to recognise its findings were based on the evidence; hopes that this report will mark a watershed in relations between politicians and the media, moving to a debate based on respect for each other’s opinions and adherence to the facts; and further hopes that the rest of the media will not follow the example of Mr Liddle, who hired Mr Andrew Gilligan and was largely responsible for creating the culture of the Today programme which was so strongly criticised by Lord Hutton.’

Had Burnham known when he rushed to table this motion just how slipshod Hutton actually was – as Goslett shows so effectively in his book – would he have committed those thoughts to Hansard? Would he have cared? I rather doubt it. It speaks volumes about him that his mind was so closed to the possibility of anything other than the Establishment line on something that looked like a cover-up at best.

I have only just discovered that after Goslett’s book was published, he made a ten-part podcast on the Dr Kelly affair with producer Sam Eastall. In a media market saturated with podcasts it stands out. It is very listenable whether you just like mysteries or are deeply suspicious of government. It’s available free of charge on platforms including Spotify. It’s my top recommendation for a summer listen – and maybe, just maybe, it will spark a memory from someone in a position to fit another piece into the final-days jigsaw puzzle that Goslett painstakingly constructed.

You can find it here.

FROM multi-culture to mono-culture and back in four days. Four days of liberation from Britain and a break in beautiful Budapest. A city that more than lived up to all those glorious images of Buda and Pest facing each other across the Danube. A trip that proved an education – as all travel was meant to be from the Grand Tour onwards – not just an indulgence.

So what did I learn? First, that the British gentleman still exists. On both legs of the journey I heard a ‘let me carry that bag for you’ before I’d even put my first foot on the airline step. Second, confirmation of Labour driving our best businesses and businessmen out of Britain. One of my gallant bag-carriers was on his way to his new company headquarters in Budapest having just closed his offices in London, a year after relocating his UK factories to China. It was a no-brainer, he said.

With a flat corporation tax rate of 9 per cent, compared with UK rates which span from 19 per cent to 25 per cent depending on profit, it is indeed. A country where a young family with three children pay no tax at all, he told me, and where the working mother has three years off.

The young people replying to his company recruitment drive were presenting with no fewer than four languages, Mandarin as well as impeccable English, he also told me. If they were anything like the various Hungarian young people I went on to meet, the contrast with the UK was totally in their favour. All well-presented, alert and courteous. And Hungarian. Which brings me to my third lesson: that Hungary values its citizens and its culture. You can see and feel it everywhere. All thanks to Viktor Orbán, the massively and unfairly maligned former Prime Minister of Hungary. Not least for his determined and principled refusal to accept immigrants or implement the European Union’s compulsory relocation quotas. The punitive EU financial penalties he thought were worth paying to preserve Hungarian cultural identity, national security and a level of safety on the streets unknown elsewhere.

Certainly not to be found in any other European capital, as getting lost after a wonderful classical evening concert at St Matthew’s Basilica, and long dark walk alone back to the hotel, proved to me. Not for one moment did I feel unsafe. Hungary does rely on some migrant labour in manufacture and service sectors under a highly restrictive policy of temporary guest worker permits. But you don’t see them on the building sites nor in the hospitality sector anywhere. Front or back of house. Polite, alert Hungarians everywhere, from chambermaids to front desk staff. In every restaurant and café, Orbán has preserved his country’s demographic make-up and his people’s dignity. Unlike his EU counterparts, he has never wavered on his country’s right to decide who enters its territory. He has never kidded himself about the illusion of multiculturalism or that mixing Christian and Muslim societies (without assimilation) creates other than parallel, fractured communities. This is not a country that turns its back on genuine asylum seekers, evidenced by the ticket collector on one of our tours who turned out to be an educated Iranian dissident. A man who marched against the Iranian regime every weekend, always feeling safe. Neither anti-Trump (far from it) nor negative about Iran’s ultimate liberation. A man flabbergasted by the Western media’s gullibility about the failing Iranian regime’s propaganda.

I learnt more on my first evening spent with Gavin Duncan, TCW’s man in Budapest and long-term resident there, and his wife Eva, who was Orbán’s speech translator until a few weeks ago. Their worry is that young people naively voted for change for change’s sake, not knowing how lucky they are. They are worried about new PM Peter Magyar’s immediate (un) constitutional amendment that permanently bars Orbán from returning to power, and the downhill slide that will follow as Magyar pays his dues to his EU masters. The two young people on the two tours I took – one around the Jewish Quarter and the other in the breathtakingly magnificent opera house – were testament to Hungary’s first-class education system. Articulate, fluent in English, confident and courteous. Both passionately attached to their history. Not denying the worst of it. Yet oikophobia free.

The young Jewish guide did not spare us as we heard of the horror of a ghetto that crammed roughly 70,000 to 80,000 Jews into a 0.1-square-mile zone; the starvation, disease and mass slaughter; the 20,000 taken by the fascist Arrow Cross squads to the banks of the Danube, to be shot and dumped in the icy waters after being ordered to remove their shoes. Sixty pairs are replicated in rusty iron as a memorial.

Standing by them nearly brought me to tears.

So too did the memorial to the courageous souls who risked all to save their fellow men. Not cancelled, or explained away as a conspiracy theory or psy-op by modern Hungarians, but respected.

Standing at the foot of a plaque in memory of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, I remembered Gustavo Jalife’s account of this ‘hero without a grave’ for TCW:

‘Working under the auspices of the Swedish legation, he distributed protective passes, rented buildings and declared them Swedish territory, bluffed SS officers and bribed Hungarian officials. His tools were audacity, paperwork and nerve. He did not seek to interpret or defeat Nazism; he sought to obstruct it. There was no doctrine behind his actions, no universal claim, only the practical conviction that lives could still be saved if someone acted quickly and shamelessly enough.’ This was a man whose own ending was stolen, whose arrest by the Red Army left him to a fate that ‘dissolved into the grey anonymity of the Soviet incarceration system – the Gulag. No explanation, no closure – only silence’. No grave, but an enduring memory in this plaque.

Standing there I realised how memory is as much a key to our Western culture heritage as the magnificently beautiful architecture dominating both banks of the Danube. Buildings designed and built by Hungarian architects and craftsmen through the centuries, and today restored by them and spoken about with pride. I couldn’t help but compare their beautiful golden palace (at night-time from the river) of a Parliament with its inspiration, our own Palace of Westminster which no politician or philanthropist in Britain has cared enough about to stop from slipping into gross disrepair – a rat-infested shambles – risking its very future.

A disregard and de-civilisation that perfectly symbolises Britain today, so diametrically opposed to the civility that shapes Hungary. Yes, in the taxi to London from the airport, checking my emails and social media confirmed it. In four days I had gone from stabbings to safety and back, from cultural prejudice to cultural pride and back, from barbarity to civility and back. Back to a people who are being as brutally severed from their cultural past and identity as the ‘intercision’ process Philip Pullman described in his Dark Materials trilogy that cut people from their souls. Back to the traumatic, lingering death of a nation.

THERE is no question. The scale of Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield has come as a severe shock.

Pointing to Reform’s local election victories in Makerfield just a few weeks ago, pollster Luke Tryl said: ‘Even running it close would have been defying electoral gravity, if it’s a clear Burnham victory that’s something quite extraordinary.’

In the event Burnham increased Labour’s vote share in the constituency by 10 per cent, a feat that the BBC’s John Curtice says defied national and historic trends.

A suitably chastened Nigel Farage admitted that it was a vote share that nobody predicted – ironically, I thought, as he had presented his party as the ‘centre right’ replacement. That was his first mistake. If the centre right sell never worked for the Tories, why would it for Reform?

In case you haven’t caught up yet, these are the results:

Labour 54.8 per cent (24,927 votes, maj 9,321)

Reforem 34.5 per cent (15,696)

Restore 6.8 per cent (3,111)

Conservatives 2.2 per cent (997)

The only good news was the Green Party’s 300-odd votes.

If the right was ever delivered the message that they need to come together and act together, this was it.

Burnham spoke one word of truth among his many lies during his ‘I’m one of lads’, black T-shirted, post-victory speeches. ‘Labour came together,’ he said repeatedly, ‘as it always does.’ By stressing this enduring feature of Labour’s ‘political culture’ he underlined exactly what ‘the right’ did not do in this campaign, nor ever does, because it is congenitally incapable of burying differences even if temporarily for the greater purpose.

It is true, however, that Restore’s vote share was not the only reason for Reform’s failure. The numbers show that. Reform, as with the Tories in previous years, failed to seize the moment. Instead of really going for Burnham’s and the left’s jugular over what they have brought this country to they were reduced to deflecting interest from the off-putting and distracting spectacle of Restore snapping at their heels, from Rupert Lowe’s relentless attacks upon them in which Labour must have revelled.

The turnout of 58.75 per cent, described as exceptionally high for a by-election, suggests both Reform and Restore still have a lot of room for engaging the interests of the non and never voters and getting them out.

Reform’s lacklustre candidate did not help with this. This wasn’t a local election. It was of national importance because it very likely will decide who is to become the next Prime Minister. Robert Kenyon proved incapable of skewering the man behind Burnham’s Mr Nice Guy, I’m one of the lads, image, exposed here by Harry Cole:

It is not as though Burnham’s shallowness and hypocrisy wasn’t all delivered on a plate for Reform UK by TCW. ‘How was a man neck-deep in Labour Together, the same shadow cabal who engineered Sir Keir Starmer’s victory, going to change anything for the better?’ Kenyon could have asked.

However much of a genuinely good bloke he is by comparison with Burnham, Kenyon just didn’t have what it takes. Instead of weakly denying his own ‘sexism’, he could so easily have doubled down on Burnham’s. Why didn’t he vociferously attack the far more egregious form of sexism evident in failing to protect Greater Manchester’s girls from Muslim grooming and rape gangs, and delivering justice for them? This was a line of attack promised at the start of the campaign but not followed through.

Burnham, the man who came to power in Manchester just a couple of weeks before the terrorist bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in May 2017, did little to tackle the pervasive rape gangs infesting swathes of his fiefdom. He should never be allowed to forget it. This is also a man who was never going to touch the governance of Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi’s resident Didsbury mosque. He is a man ‘who rode other people’s waves as private equity and smart investment raised much of the city from its Coronation Street-style knees’, as Danny Lockwood starkly set out here.

Instead ‘likeable’ Burnham appeared a strong candidate and Kenyon seemed weak. Banking everything on fielding a local candidate as one who would connect with the electorate failed abysmally; next to Burnham Kenyon looked like a boy. That he couldn’t shake off the taint of misogyny from liking some laddish tweets many years earlier (even when the day before the vote the kerb-crawling Hugh Grant came to the constituency to support Burnham) says it all. Also, of course, working in Burnham’s favour was the ubiquitous loathing of Keir Starmer and the belief he will be gone in weeks if Burnham is elected.

If the Makerfield vote is a microcosm of the larger picture, our next choice is Labour or Labour.

No one should assume, given sticky Starmer’s tenacity, that Burnham is going to ride the wave right into Downing Street, especially if Burnham promises an immediate general election, risking the loss of Labour’s majority and the livelihoods of Labour’s political career-only MPs who might struggle to make a living in the real world. Starmer has been busy amassing his war chest for the battle with Burnham while attention was focused on Makerfield. He has backers, reports the Times, the organ most friendly towards him. My money is on Starmer winning.

For the right, the question remains whether Farage’s Reform can prove powerful enough to defeat either man on the national stage. Remember a strong (albeit far from charismatic in the flesh) candidate, Matt Goodwin, lost Gorton and Denton to the Greens. What yesterday’s vote should tell everyone on the right is that we are in massive trouble. There are tough battles ahead if we are to prevent the emerging Labour dictatorship.

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IF YOU were Prime Minister and were alerted to a barbaric near-fatal stabbing of a vulnerable man by an immigrant in a town where the foreign population has risen at almost twice the rate of that of mainland Britain, what would your first instinct be? A man with learning difficulties, who’d fled to Belfast from Scotland to get over an indescribably horrendous attack earlier in his life, only now to become the victim of another in which, inter alia, he was stabbed in both eyes. What life has he left? Who will care for him? might be your first thoughts.

Then mine would be to visit that man – in an induced coma or not – even if only to stand outside the hospital to express my sorrow and remorse, to offer my personal apologies to his family and community for the out-of-control immigration policy inflicted on Belfast that caused it. After that it would be to resign.

That more than anything would have quelled the unrest that Starmer found plenty of time to condemn (as ‘racist’, of course) over which he expressed far more outrage than he did over the heinous crime that triggered it, as Daniel Jupp pointed out in TCW on Friday.

I have found it really difficult this week to think about anything else, seeing the conscienceless Starmer dodging the bullet again, pontificating this time over ‘acts of violence and arson’ that he said ‘were totally unjustified’. Totally?! Really? This was Starmer gaslighting the beleaguered Belfast residents – like a stepfather who beats his wife’s child then locks the child in a room as a punishment for being so unloving and disrespectful as to cry out at the pain.

What exactly is Herr Starmer trying to lock away and cover up? Well, it’s the bruises he’s inflicted on Northern Ireland – turning a deaf ear to three successive summers of ‘we feel extreme fear’ migration-related protests.. Dismissed as racist. What exactly is it that he doesn’t get about the insult added to the injury they have suffered? I am not talking about sectarianism or the legacy of the Troubles, on top of which this new scourge has come. What I am referring to is the UK’s population replacement policy for this British outpost, namely the unprecedented migrant surge inflicted on the city.

Between 2021 and 2024, 52,570 migrants entered Northern Ireland. Over the same period a decade ago, the figure was just 3,801.

The growth rate of the foreign-born population is 45 per cent, compared with 11.9 per cent in England and Wales over the same period.

The foreign populations are highly localised: half of the foreign-born population live in 74 of the country’s 462 wards.

In the Central Belfast ward, 30.6 per cent of the population are migrants and predominantly of Middle Eastern descent.

These are 2021 figures. God knows what they are now, five years on.

Belfast, the PM must know, is one of the Government’s prime locations for housing asylum seekers (10th in the local authority league table, to be precise).

Does he really think any community should be expected to tolerate this level of demographic change? What’s more, the arrivals are coming largely from hostile, violent, war-torn and yes, alien cultures. The only reasonable answer is no. Something every newspaper editor who reports and condemns these protests as ‘racist’ should dwell on.

The only thing that made last week barely tolerable were the few columns that called out the government’s cruelty, hypocrisy and double standards. Starting with TCW and Laura Perrins’s magisterial take-down of Governments happily importing people from the ultra-dangerous country of Sudan they give the highest level of warning against travel to.

Then there was Brendan O’Neill’s brilliant truth bomb article about how alien such cultures are, that one of my regular TCW correspondents alerted me to. It made a mockery of Hilary Benn’s ‘rebuke’ to MP Jim Allister for his altogether reasonable suggestion ‘that the bloodletting maniac in Belfast hailed from an “alien culture”.’

How, O’Neill asks, would you describe a culture where women are flogged in public for ‘inappropriate dress’? A culture ‘where one woman suffered 40 lashes from a leather whip for the crime of wearing trousers and a T-shirt? A culture where a man who lies with a man risks being whipped a hundred times before being put in a dank cell for five years? A culture where apostasy is considered such an abominable sin that even a heavily pregnant woman could be sentenced to death for supposedly committing it?’

Yes, you would describe it with the word ‘alien’, he continues, and the words ‘backward, regressive, inhuman and morally inferior to the freer, more forgiving culture we Brits are lucky to live in’.

He goes on to condemn the distorted thinking that interprets moral judgment as bigotry – a world view shaped by ‘the social experiment of moral non-judgmentalism [that] has been a catastrophe’. He ends by asking: ‘For how much longer will working-class communities have to suffer the consequences of state failure and bourgeois virtue?’

The answer is not until the MSM wake up to and reject this moral inversion, and turn their back entirely on the woke, non-judgemental framing of the establishment. Not, in fact, until they start being more like us at TCW, like Brendan O’Neill and like the wonderful Jim Chimirie on X who pointed to another ‘Government’ truth that the newspaper editors ignored – that the border stayed open while the State closed the conversation:

‘Before the fires in Belfast had been extinguished, the government had identified the threat. Not the border. Not the system that granted Hadi Alodid legal residency in seven months without a verifiable European asylum history. Not the Albanian gangs advertising guaranteed passage to England on TikTok this morning. The threat, as defined by this government, was the conversation.’

His post, which you can read in full here, observes: ‘A government that cannot close a border it knows is being exploited, cannot answer its own terror watchdog, and cannot explain how a man with no verifiable asylum history acquired British residency in seven months, has chosen a fourth option. Control the account. Leave the causes intact.’

Just as it did last week with Liz Kendall’s new free speech clampdown announcement that ‘social media firms would face new legal curbs during times of crisis’.

It was a week of feeling helpless and frustrated, tempered only by Christian Concern, an organisation that never gives in to moral weakness.

Andrea Williams and her small team stay on course come what may – on the front line of defence and advocacy for individuals at the receiving end of the reverse judgmentalism of the woke authorities. Remember the nurse dismissed for declining to use the preferred pronouns of a convicted paedophile identifying as a transgender woman? After two years they won her case, one of many they have eventually won justice for. As they did for the Darlington nurses. Now they have taken up the case of the former North Yorkshire Police Community Support Officer Luke Salmons, forced out after asking respectful questions about Islam during mandatory diversity training sessions (presented as ‘safe spaces’ for open discussion!)

This week, in direct association with this (and the Nowak case), they ask us to support a new petition, directed at Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, to say no to two-tier ideological police training. Please click here to sign it. It is the very least we can do.

I MEANT to avoid any more political commentary this week. The country is drowning in comment. Is there anything left to be said? Shouldn’t we all just shut up? Me included?

It turned out to be easier said than done with idealists on the New Right downplaying the prospect of another five years of self-inflicted (and increasingly irreversible) decline that an Andy Burnham premiership would inevitably mean. Add a million more Neets, as Bruce Newsome put it in TCW yesterday, ‘raised to think they are the turkeys that would be voting for Christmas if they voted for Reform’, to his payroll, plus a million more immigrants every year, and we may never get the opportunity to vote Labour and their Animal Farm ‘utopia’ out again.

Don’t be taken in by Kemi Badenoch’s performative reaction to Phoney Tony’s warning about Burnham’s promised trajectory. It was Tory fascination with and veneration of Blairism – which she seems to share – that entrenched his disastrous legacy and is why we are where we are today. Something she does not get. Labour won’t change, she told Sir Tony via the Times, as though his so-called New Labour recipe for Britain was ever honest or right.

Ok, she criticised Blair’s constitutional changes and his Human Rights Act in her open letter to him. But it fell far short of doing a full David Starkey on him. Or of demanding an apology for his constitutional sabotage, erosion of freedom, his attack on national identity and his creation of a House of Cronies. Or giving an apology of her own!

Did her own party attempt to reverse any of this? No, bar one or two Cameron pledges, they doubled down on it. Will she admit from her party conference platform Tory responsibility for the state we are in? Will she be shouting her commitment to ‘demographics, demographics, demographics’? I am not holding my breath.

Last week saw good reason why she or any aspiring political leader should be making this his or her mantra. Take the staggering million immigrants the ONS revealed to have arrived in Britain last year. Over the same period nearly 700,000 UK nationals left – a high proportion of them young. A straight swap, you might say. Except it’s not. Law-abiding skilled workers, people with initiative and enterprise, are being replaced by those who have no qualms about breaking the law, speak little English, and are a social drain. This latest million follows the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of arrivals under the last Conservative government, a net 2,950,000 people – the equivalent of two and a half Birminghams – arriving in just five years from 2019 to 2024.

It made me wonder what England’s population density is now. Was it eight years ago that we reported England was already fit to bust? A short, sharp article setting out the fact that England then was fifth on the world’s list of the most densely populated countries.

Overcrowding of course will be yet another excuse for the indoctrinated childcare generation to decide not to reproduce – on overpopulation/climate grounds – further exacerbating the demographics crisis. Last week brought further evidence of our culture’s suicide wish. It was reported that births plunged to their lowest level in half a century last year. Meanwhile foreign-born parents accounted for a record four in ten births. I love (I am being ironic) the Daily Mail’s politically correct reporting of this: ‘Meanwhile, in a sign of how diverse Britain’s population has become, the data showed 40 per cent of births (235,273) in 2025 were to parents where one or both were foreign-born, the highest since 2008.’

Of all the changes Blair made, the one most responsible for our declining home-grown birth rate was his attack on the married family, the nationalisation of childcare, and the benefits preferencing of single mothers – to be married to the state. This is the one thing David Starkey didn’t mention in his analysis of the Blair revolution. Engineered family fragmentation and round-the-clock childcare create a fertile field for unhappiness, indoctrination and censorship, all factors in today’s reproduction crisis.

THE Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) published some startling figures on Thursday. The latest HMRC payroll data, their analysis reveals, shows that the number of young foreigners entering the workforce massively outstrips UK nationals.

Specifically the number of non-EU migrants on the payrolls rose from 82,000 in January 2020 to 370,000 in December 2025 – an increase of 290,000 and up 355 per cent over five years compared to just 11,000 extra young UK nationals.

This CSJ’s figures were published the same day as the publication of the Labour Party commissioned investigation into a record number of Neets (people Not in Employment, Education or Training) in the 16 to 24-year-old category; a number that topped a million rising by almost 200,000 between December 2024 and December 2025, Starmer’s first year in power.

‘A lost generation of idle youth’ was how this record of failure was described by Alan Milburn, the report’s author. Bruce Newsome put it down to a culture of useless degrees, entitlement and benefits for which Mr Milburn himself and his former boss Tony Blair must take much blame. However the CSJ has identified a further reason for these dreadful figures, pointing to the ignored role of almost half a million more non-EU migrants employed in sectors like retail and hospitality since 2020. This has fuelled the Neets crisis. Mass immigration cannot be ignored. Young men (typically those aged 16 to 35) make up roughly a quarter to 30 per cent of the total, while over half of all immigrants are male and the vast majority are young working-age adults.

Since January 2020, the CSJ reports, 27 young non-EU migrant workers have been hired for every additional young British employee. And the latest figures show the divergence in the employment between young non-EU and UK-national workers is getting worse. Between December 2024 and December 2025, the number of non-EU under-25s on payrolls increased by 33,200, while the number of UK-national under-25s fell by 32,200, an almost equivalent number. In the retail and hospitality sectors, non-EU workers of all ages rose by almost half a million (473,000) – nearly doubling – between January 2020 and December 2025, while UK nationals employed in the same sectors fell by over a quarter of a million (252,000).

The CSJ’s ‘digging’ also shows that the surge in non-EU employment is particularly concentrated in entry-level sectors that have historically been the first rung on the ladder for young British workers.

However what their analysis does not go into is what makes employers choose migrants over UK nationals, if indeed this is what they are doing. This omission begs the question of whether young UK nationals are applying and being rejected or not applying at all? More information is needed about numbers of applications and refusals across the migrant versus the UK national demographic.

Nor does the CSJ analysis mention any effect that DEI requirements might have on employers’ candidate selection. Are migrants preferenced by virtue of their ethnicity? This does not seem implausible. With starter roles simply vanishing across the jobs market, unsurprising given high National Insurance costs and their upward levelling for 16 year olds, the type of labour market that young UK nationals are trying to enter does indeed matter. The CSJ say protecting Britain from under-cut labour is an essential step to improving the pay, conditions and training opportunities for British young people. True. But even more important is it to stop migration, repeal DEI, put merit first and time limit welfare to young nationals, and not offer it to migrants at all.

Limiting welfare is an essential reality check on attitudes, another elephant in the room of the CSJ analysis. The all-party-favoured lockdowns of 2020 to 2022 resulted in an even more work shy culture than before. One less able to compete with a much tougher, survival-driven new migrants. But here’s the rub, while research proves the ‘migrant work ethic’ exists it shows it only does for the short term, reflecting a temporary survival strategy rather than an inherent cultural trait. Newly arrived migrants’ extra effort and lower absence rates (compared to native-born workers) normalise after about two years, after, my guess is, acclimatising to Britain’s ‘benefits street’ culture. However with no end in sight to high inward migration we can expect as the last group acclimatises it will be replaced with a new one, until they too find they don’t have to try so hard once they know how work the system. A grim prospect all round.

IT IS impossible to argue with one fact: what will deliver victory to Andy Burnham in Makerfield is the splintering of the ‘right’ wing vote.

A couple of months ago Donna Rachel Edmunds wrote an article in TCW called ‘A roadmap for the resurgent right to retake Britain‘, on why the left wing, although it is intellectually and morally bankrupt, still manages to hang on in there. Her analysis was simple and correct. While the left organises, the right infight.

How true this is for the Makerfield by-election. The first thing that hit me a week or so ago was the sheer craziness of Kemi Badenoch’s refusal, in defiance of senior Conservatives’ advice, to offer a deal to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Jacob Rees-Mogg thinks his Conservative Party and Reform should work together in the national interest: ‘The voters may recognise the advantages of tactical voting. But wouldn’t it be more sensible for the two leaders, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, to see there is an opportunity to work together, to show that politicians can come together and can do things that are overwhelmingly to the benefit of the country at large?’

Tory veteran Edward Leigh weighed in, saying that the Tories should stand down in Makerfield in return for Reform standing down in Aberdeen South, where Stephen Flynn’s seat is up for grabs and the Tories are 1,000 votes off the SNP: ‘If doing some kind of deal means we can win Aberdeenshire and save the Union, it’s worth doing. My view is that if at the next general election there are two right-wing parties slugging it off in every single constituency, as night follows day there will be a left-wing government.’

Disregarding for the moment whether the Tories deserve the moniker ‘right-wing’, both Rees-Mogg and Leigh are right. To no avail with ‘out of touch with political reality‘ Kemi, oblivious apparently to the fact that once Burnham gets into Westminster he will go straight to the top.

Survation’s first polling shows Andy Burnham leading Reform’s Robert Kenyon by three points, 43 per cent to 40. Rebecca Shepherd, standing for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain in the party’s first parliamentary contest, is on 7 per cent. The Liberal Democrats are on 4, the Green candidate on 3 and the Conservatives on 2.

Restore’s 7 per cent ‘take’, if voters do indeed make this choice, is a killer not just for Reform but for the rest of us; for the country in fact, left burdened with a leader whose far-left policies will condemn us to a soup kitchen, bread queue inflationary hell. Everyone said it couldn’t get worse last time around. It did and it still can.

On Monday Matt Goodwin set out a plausible chain of events that could follow a Burnham win. The key point is that the 3-point gap between Labour and Reform is dwarfed by the 9 points going to two other right-wing parties, namely the Tories and Restore UK led by ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe.

Under this scenario Goodwin sets out what could happen. He will, I am sure, forgive me for quoting him at length:

***

Andy Burnham narrowly wins the Makerfield by-election and in the aftermath proclaims that he is the only person who can unify the Labour Party and defeat Reform in a pro-Brexit, heavily white British seat in northern England.

He is the only person, he will say, who can save the Labour Party.

In the aftermath of victory, Labour MPs from different factions of the party rally around Andy Burnham and pile enormous pressure on an already deeply unpopular Keir Starmer to immediately resign.

Burnham’s leadership rivals and perhaps Starmer himself are offered top jobs in a Burnham-led administration to ease the rapid transition.

Within weeks, Andy Burnham is appointed leader of the Labour Party and prime minister, much like Gordon Brown was in 2007.

Given there is no democratic support for Prime Minister Andy Burnham, widespread calls for a general election emerge across the country.

But here’s the twist: Andy Burnham also wants an early, snap general election.

Why?

Because he looks at the political landscape.

In his eyes, he’s just defeated Reform in northern England, while Reform has a new problem with Restore which is not a big party but significant enough to cost Reform seats like Makerfield.

The Tories, having lost their deposit at both the Gorton and Denton and now Makerfield by-elections are clearly dying but also remain a problem for Reform in a few pockets of the country.

The Right, in short, is divided. It is visibly, clearly divided.

On the left, Burnham sits down with senior Greens and essentially buys them off with some kind of offer on electoral reform, perhaps proportional representation – an offer sweetened by Labour offering the Greens a clear run in a dozen or so seats.

Then Burnham looks at the economy.

While rising, the Iran-linked surge of inflation is yet to arrive. So too is mass unemployment and recession, which are on the way but still lie over the horizon.

The latest growth figures were not a complete catastrophe and compared with other nations Burnham says ‘we are doing better than others’.

More importantly, he wants his own mandate. He does not want to be locked into the fiscal rules and policies imposed by Starmer and Reeves. He wants to be his own man.

And he certainly doesn’t want to wait for the major economic downturn that is coming – better to deal with that when he’s actually got his own majority and is safely ensconced in Number 10 for years.

Burnham is also influenced by his experience of watching Gordon Brown bottle an early general election when he was appointed prime minister in 2007, just before a major global financial crisis erupted – a mistake that Burnham does not want to replicate in 2026, with a major debt crisis on the horizon.

All this pushes Burnham to do the unthinkable and roll the dice: calling an early, snap general election. He calls one within days of entering Downing Street, setting the stage for a general election roughly 5-7 weeks after taking office.

Labour does not like winter elections so he moves quickly to avoid one.

He hopes to secure his own mandate. Crush any opposition to his rule within the Labour Party. Capitalise on media excitement around a ‘new direction’. And, more than anything, exploit a divided Right.

He enters the general election with a united Labour Party, willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Greens and the Scottish National Party on side, and exploit a divided right, winning enough votes to cobble together a coalition.

For yet another five years, until at least the year 2031, Britain is now in the grip of a hard-left coalition that’s committed to ongoing mass immigration, record taxation, spending and borrowing, that refuses to fix the borders, and continues to reform the electoral and political system so that the right finds it much harder to win power.

***

Now, you can say that Goodwin, as a member of the Reform Party and desperate for everyone to come onside, ‘would say that, wouldn’t he’.

But the unpalatable truth is that there is no other plausible scenario unless Restore gracefully back down. Which they won’t for two reasons: their leader and supporters hate Farage more than they hate Labour; and second, for them this isn’t about the cost of living or even government incompetence or overreach, they exist because the Conservatives betrayed patriotism, Brexit, nationalism and ordinary people. They worry that Reform will betray them too.

Understandable after years of uni-party globalist policies, but indubitably this will hand power to an even worse far left ‘Islamo-globalism’.

Together Restore, Reform and Advance are showing, Daniel Jupp wrote this week, that they are just as ready to hand power over to the left as the Conservatives were. What an irony. Jupp’s analysis agrees with Goodwin’s: The Restore vote will hand victory to Labour. Furthermore, as Jupp points out:

‘Burnham is a lot more popular than Keir Starmer. While this may be a bit like saying that Lucy Letby is more popular than Harold Shipman, Burnham’s measly 4 per cent positive approval rating actually has an impact on projected Labour votes that could be significant in a national election. Pollsters are putting Labour at around 18 per cent with Starmer as leader. Some of them suggest Labour under Burnham polls at 30 per cent. That’s a huge bump that would make a snap election attractive and winnable for Labour (before the gloss wore off as it inevitably would since Burnham is actually even more crazed and uncharismatic than Starmer). Labour or a left coalition would then smash Reform in a general election, securing a reset mid-term with five years more of the left ruling Britain rather than three years.’

Jim Chimirie, an exceptionally acute political observer on X, also sees the Makerfield by-election as the vehicle through which Andy Burnham will return to Westminster and win the Labour leadership. Although Reform took every council seat in the area at the May local elections with 46.2 percent of the vote he says the stakes could not be higher. However strong the antipathy of (modern) ‘Wigan man’ is to Labour, however much he feels that Labour does not represent him any more, ‘that they have taken them for granted and that Labour does not put them first’, Burnham may have less of a struggle than the author of this article suggests. Why? Because Labour plays dirty as Chimirie highlights and the establishment lets them get away with it. Take how the Hope Not Hate charitable trust, whose trustees are overwhelmingly current or former Labour politicians, is funding Hope Not Hate, a private company, to distribute leaflets in a by-election constituency explicitly targeting Reform and backing the Labour candidate. A ‘charity whose trustees read like a Labour Party honours list is spending charitable funds to help deliver the result’. Against all the rules charitable money is being spent to influence a by-election that could determine who leads the country. The regulator that failed to stop this in January has so far not acted. The playing field is not level.

And lest we forget, each year of the five possible years of leftist rule (that a Burnham win will mean) is another million migrants added. And another year to push through crippling taxes, insane legislation, and closer alignment with the EU.

Restore UK cannot win. Splitting the vote is worse than pointless. That’s why Restore and Conservative voters alike in Makerfield really must hold their noses and vote R

eform UK.

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I RARELY listen to podcasts and when I do they seldom hold my attention to the end. But one did this weekend, an edition of The Jeremy Boreing Show, and I recommend all sceptics or would-be sceptics to watch it all the way through. Boreing is an American right-wing political activist, film director, a founder of and contributor to the conservative news and opinion website the Daily Wire.

He opens with the assertion that ‘A lot of people believe they independently woke up to the truth about Israel, the Jews, and who really runs the world over the last two years.’ Boreing proceeds to make the case that they didn’t ‘wake up’, rather that they were sold a worldview using the same rhetorical machinery that’s fuelled every social contagion from eugenics to the population bomb to covid-era hysteria.

It’s timely. It’s been impossible to ignore the rise and spread of anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, and Israel-hating social media postings over this last year. I have seen one person after another, people I previously thought were decent, independent ‘free thinkers’, falling victim to this. One after another, they joined the clamour of hateful pro-Hamas, pro-Iran, anti-Israel, anti-US propaganda, denying or ignoring the facts about Iran’s decades-long promotion of terrorism, and denying its nuclear threat. Even accusing me of being in the pay of Zionist interests!

These are people who uncritically see ‘Zionists’ controlling every political and international decision, who accept stories with obvious red flags as proof of their theory, without any hard evidence. People who consider themselves scientists who should therefore understand the components of critical reasoning, but have been swept along on this wave.

How has this happened? How have people become so gullible and un-questioning? Boreing explains. First he identifies two primary influencers behind this spread of ideas: Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. He analyses their methods. Using dozens of examples, he breaks down the specific techniques deployed by them and the wider ‘black-pilled’ online right. These are pre-suasion, presupposition, assertion stacking, asymmetric scepticism, authority transfer, and the manufactured feeling of ‘waking up’ that hijacks real scepticism and turns it into religious conviction.

His video is not a defence of Israeli policy. Nor does he claim that conspiracies don’t exist. Rather he takes a clinical look at how conviction is engineered, alerting the viewer/listener to notice it when it’s being engineered on you.

You can watch it here.

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