Too much immigration allied with growing Left-wing extremism has become a toxic mix
Daily Telegraph 25/02/26
Our democracy is dying in plain sight, and we don’t have the right to stay silent. The sectarian horror of the Gorton and Denton by-election cannot be the future of British politics.
We must not become a country where our race or religion determines how we vote, where segregated communities live parallel lives and despise each other, where our liberal elites, out of cowardice or suicidal empathy, pretend not to notice. We cannot sleepwalk into becoming a Lebanon-on-Thames. This is an emergency, a last warning, and we must act now.
We should start by calling out the Greens for what they have become: a hateful, despicable, extremist party that has identified an entrepreneurial opportunity in weaponising tribalism, division, stagnant living standards, misinformation and envy. Their behaviour in Gorton and Denton has been abominable.
Following a playbook pioneered by far-Left parties worldwide, the Greens, now led by Zack Polanski, are targeting a red-green coalition of white, woke “progressives” and the reactionary subset of the Muslim electorate. These two groups may appear culturally incompatible, but they can be united not just by their support for socialism but also their often virulent Israelophobia, an atavistic prejudice that the Greens unashamedly pander to.
Party members will vote on the absurd notion that Zionism – the natural right of the Jewish people to have their own country – is a form of racism. The Greens relentlessly spread the lie that the Jewish state has committed a genocide in Gaza and that Labour is complicit, a modern blood libel that is normalising anti-Semitism.
The Green candidate in Gorton and Denton was photographed wearing a keffiyeh, symbol of Palestinianism, has accused Reform of Islamophobia and racism, and has fronted a video in Urdu featuring Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi meeting Labour politicians, as if these were self-evident provocations and proof of a grand betrayal.
In a healthier society, our oh-so-anti-racist elites would be demanding to know why the Greens were fuelling anti-Jewish and anti-Hindu sentiment, and whether extremism and bigotry may be festering among sections of the local community, deserving urgent intervention. Yet the establishment finds it easier to treat swathes of our urban areas as if they were an 1920s imperial outpost where administrators are tasked with keeping a superficial peace between communities, rather than pursuing justice.
It’s a scandal. Extreme tribalism of the sort promoted by the Greens is incompatible with a democratic culture that requires a strong sense of commonality, a belief in a peoplehood that transcends differences of ideology, race, religion or class. It requires a neutral, single-tier rule of law, where citizens are treated as individuals, not as members of a group. Democracy isn’t just about tallying votes, and handing power to the winner. It is about debate, trying to change people’s minds, feedback mechanisms and punishing or rewarding politicians who fail or succeed.
None of this is possible in a world in which voters vote along religious or ethnic lines, and where the best that can be hoped for is peaceful coexistence and Northern Ireland-style or Lebanese confessionalist power-sharing. Under that scenario, democracy becomes a mere game of arithmetic, of demographic superiority. Outcomes are pre-determined, governed by community leaders.
This may not trouble the Greens: they have reinvented themselves as a vehicle for a new Left that combines Marxism-Leninism, Third Worldism, critical theory, and other radical anti-Western and anti-bourgeois philosophies. They detest private property and family values.
They support quasi-open borders and are soft on crime. They are infected by every Left-wing pathology of the past 200 years, every intellectual error. They have imbued the poison of “anti-colonial” Soviet propaganda, of woke writers such as Derrida, of fanatics such as Edward Said.
Britain used to be a beacon among nations, a country uniquely hostile to extremist parties. The British Union of Fascists never won a single council seat. The Communist Party of Great Britain only seized a couple of parliamentary seats in the 1930s and 1940s. The National Front never made it to Westminster. Militant grabbed Liverpool City Council but was kicked out of Labour by Neil Kinnock. The British National Party won councillors and MEPs, but just 1.9pc of the vote in 2010.
The dam finally broke when Jeremy Corbyn seized control of Labour. His election defeats and subsequent expulsion from the party didn’t remove the cancers of Left-wing extremism and sectarianism from the body politic. Instead, they metastasised into the “pro-Gaza” independents and now the revamped Green Party, our version of La France Insoumise, the first time in our history that a far-Left party has broken through.
How do we fight back? We have had too much immigration, and of the wrong kind. A lengthy moratorium on net immigration is a prerequisite to reducing sectarian voting, as is removing as many illegal migrants as realistically possible.
To borrow the title of William Blake’s 18th century pamphlet, Britain’s immigration policies are The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Our record mixes world-class success with catastrophic failure. Some groups have integrated extraordinarily well, and children of immigrants often do better at school and in the labour and housing market than the white British. There has been a surge in mixed-marriages.
At the same time, we have suffered the rise of Islamism, separatism and intra-minority tensions, fuelled by race-obsessed woke policies that denigrate Britishness. We use incorrect metrics: materialistic markers of achievement, rather than ideology. Numerous Islamists are well educated; doctors have been stuck off for anti-Semitism. Many British Jews, whose synagogues offer prayers to the Royal Family weekly, are having to reconsider their future in Britain.
The Panglossians, who believe that tensions will diminish spontaneously; that sectarian voting will wane as it did in England and Scotland by the 1970s; that secularism will dissolve all differences; that Islamism is overblown; that today’s minorities will rapidly become latter-day Huguenots or Irish immigrants, indistinguishable from the rest of the population in all but surname, are delusional.
In addition to slashing immigration, we will need to be more muscular. We will need to crack down pitilessly on extremism, including in some mosques or in local areas where prejudice is rife. We will need to learn from Singapore and other well-managed multicultural states. We cannot allow our country to fragment. Regardless of race or religion, we must all be British.
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