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The people of Piddington just voted to leave the United Kingdom. The school census has revealed shocking demographic trends that are sweeping through the country. Reform UK has sparked an intense debate over political donations. And a Labour peer is calling to designate peaceful public protests over illegal migration as “terrorism”. On the surface, these stories might seem disconnected. But as I explain on this week’s episode of The Silent Majority, they all share something in common.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Silent Majority Podcast with me, Matt Goodwin — where I speak up every week unequivocally, unambiguously, unashamedly for the silent majority of people in the West, people who are working hard, paying taxes, playing by the rules, but feel like they’re being treated like second-class citizens in their own nations.

Now, thank you for joining us this week because I want to start with a rumour. I’m going to walk you through the theory. That gets us to a general election on November the 19th — at the end of this podcast.

But what I really want to talk about is what’s been going on in a remarkable week. And it really has been a remarkable week because we’ve seen four things that on the surface seem like they’re completely disconnected.

Firstly, a village in England, in Oxfordshire, a village named Piddington, has voted to leave the United Kingdom. That’s right. The people of Piddington have voted to create their own principality, the principality of Piddington, because they are so sick and tired of the government’s policy of illegal migration. And they have objected to that by voting to leave the UK. Now, of course, it’s not legally binding, but I think it tells us a lot about Britain and the frustrations that are rumbling through Britain.

Second, this week we got some bombshell figures on what’s going on in Britain’s schools and the sheer speed at which the population of Britain is being transformed. And I think that also tells us a lot about the concerns that are rumbling through the country. And I’m going to talk a little bit about that.

Third, we’ve had the intense debate in Westminster about Reform UK and donations totaling £72 million. That have gone to Reform UK, the principal anti-establishment party in British politics, the party that has become a refuge for many people who are sick and tired of watching what is happening to Britain.

And fourth, we’ve seen a prominent Labour peer, Shammi Chakrabarti, call for a protest group, a protest movement that we discussed in the podcast last week, an organisation that had been coordinating public protests against illegal migration in Dover and Portsmouth. To be designated as a terrorist organization. That’s right.

Now, what do these four things have in common? As I said, on the surface, it might seem that they’re disconnected, but actually what I’m going to suggest to you in the episode this week is that they are all reflective of something much deeper. A political system, a ruling class that is fundamentally struggling, failing, to respond to the concerns and the legitimate grievances of millions of ordinary people.

A political system that can no longer actually process and engage with legitimate dissent, with legitimate opposition. And I think what we are now living through is what I would call Project Fear Two.

Ten years ago, we saw Project Fear One, you will remember, with the Brexit referendum, where much of the establishment In essence, had a nervous breakdown about the fact that more than 17 million people had voted to leave the European Union and push their country onto a very different path.

Well, today, what I think we’re witnessing is Project Fear Two, a political system that is really reaching around for a draconian authoritarian response to ordinary people.

A system that’s no longer interested in actually engaging with their arguments, with addressing their concerns, but is instead constantly seeking to shut down any opposition to its project. And that’s what I want to talk about today.

But we’re going to start with the people of Piddington. This is a story that has captivated global media attention because the people of this village in Oxfordshire have voted to leave the UK. 350 people were living in this village and then they woke up to discover that 1,250 illegal migrants were about to be dumped right next to them.

And there were very emotional testimonies provided by the people of Piddington. They talked about their children’s lives being destroyed. Women talked about feeling scared and anxious about what might happen to them. Community leaders talked about the village, its way of life, its culture being completely destroyed. And many others talked about that village essentially being replaced.

And many people in Britain have looked at Piddington as a symbol, a symbol of something much bigger that is going on. A people essentially being dispossessed, being displaced by illegal migrants that have been promoted, pushed forward by a government that is no longer responding to those people.

So a lot of people in Britain have had a lot of sympathy for the residents of Piddington and will have celebrated when they voted overwhelmingly to leave the United Kingdom. Of course, it’s not legally binding. The Principality of Piddington is not about to have its own army, police force and economy, but it is significant nonetheless.

But there is an alternative take on this and one I’m just going to suggest to you because I think it tells us something about Britain from a different angle.

The people of Piddington, it seems to me, and I respect them, but it seems to me that they are becoming a symbol of something else, what we might call the luxury belief class in Western nations. Now, it was a Cambridge academic, Rob Henderson, who first coined this term. The luxury belief class is a class of people, financially affluent, professional, middle class, university educated, very socially liberal, if not radically progressive or woke, tending to live in areas like Oxfordshire.

And the luxury belief class call for policies that make them feel good and look good, that allow them to project their sense of moral righteousness over everybody else. And the luxury belief class do this because they never think they’re going to suffer the consequences of those policies.

A bit like all the Democrats in America who call to defund the police, perhaps never thinking they’ll live in a community with a very weak, or invisible police force.

But in Piddington, I think we have a good example of the luxury belief class because here we have lots of people who voted for the Liberal Democrats at local elections. They have Liberal Democrat councillors and they voted for the Liberal Democrats at the last general election in 2024. Now, the Liberal Democrats campaigned to remove restrictions on illegal migration. They campaigned to stop the Conservative Party’s Rwanda plan, which would have seen an offshore processing center for illegal migrants set up in Rwanda.

The Liberal Democrats campaign for safe and legal routes. They want more of those routes for illegal migrants and asylum seekers here in Britain. The Liberal Democrats have consistently been comfortable with mass migration while attacking anybody who opposes it as being far right, fascist or extremist.

So I would suggest to you and the people of Piddington that they got exactly what they voted for. They got the consequences that they thought they’d never have to live with. I think the people of Piddington should now do some reflection.

And I think a lot of other people in the luxury belief class, the middle class, university graduates, the social liberals that lecture us constantly about how wonderful mass migration and illegal migration really are. I think they should reflect about where their political choices and their political loyalties may well take them.

I want to welcome the people of Piddington back to common sense. They are British citizens at the end of the day. And they tell us a lot about the social contract in this country and how it’s breaking. Because the very basis of the social contract is that we all contribute, pay taxes and respect the laws of the land.

And in return, the state protects us and looks after us.

But what you see in Piddington is the opposite of that. You see an authoritarian state that is now dumping hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants on our communities. Not respecting the wishes of local people, not respecting their concerns and not respecting their grievances as being legitimate.

Andy Burnham and the Labor government, if you notice, they are now talking about how everybody should do their bit. Everybody should do their fair share when it comes to helping with the illegal migration crisis. Have you noticed that? What they are trying to do is normalise illegal migration.

The only debate we should be having in this country is how to have zero illegal migrants in this country. That is the only debate we should be having. We should not be debating should rich areas take them or poor areas take them. We should not be debating any of that.

The only debate we should be having is how to stop illegal migration and restore control over our borders. And that means doing everything the Liberal Democrats campaign to oppose. We need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR, which prevents us from deporting foreign criminals and illegal migrants.

We need to repeal Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act. We also need to detain and deport anybody who arrives in this country illegally alongside the estimated one and a half million people who are already in Britain illegally. We need to remove welfare benefits for people who are not British and we need to restore control over our borders and restore the social contract. If we do not, we are going to enter some very, very dangerous places in the years ahead. And I think the people of Piddington speak to that social contract and they speak to how rapidly it is coming undone.

And if you want to see another example of why people in Britain feel so profoundly anxious about the state of the country, then I just want to turn to something else we discovered this week. Which is some absolutely mind-boggling statistics relating to our schools and our education system. Now I wrote about this on Wednesday.

It first appeared in the Times newspaper, which pointed out that the share of grammar school pupils in Britain who are white British has collapsed from 66% to just 44% in the last 10 years. Let me say that again in just a decade. The share of pupils at grammar schools in Britain who are white British has fallen by 22 percentage points from 66% to just 44%. And I talk in the piece about some examples.

Chatham Grammar School for Girls. The share of white British pupils has fallen from 78% to 33%. At Dartford Grammar, it’s gone from 52% to 7%.

And this isn’t just about grammar schools.

As I say in the piece, if you look across all types of schools, you’ve seen a dramatic collapse in the share of children who are white British. And this is perhaps best symbolised by the fact that in the year 2023, just three years ago, the name Mohammed officially replaced the name Noah as the most popular boy’s name in England and Wales.

I won’t go through all of the stats because they’re in the piece. But what I do want to reiterate is why this is important. Majority groups really matter. Majority groups give a nation a sense of continuity. security and they become an anchor for that nation.

A nation’s culture, way of life, a nation’s values, its institutions, its sense of collective memory flow through the majority group. Many minorities feel attached to the majority group. That’s why about a third of black and minority ethnic people in Britain say they also worry about the pace of migration and how they feel like a stranger in their own country. In the same way that a lot of research found that Latino and Hispanic voters in America also feel concerned about the decline of the majority group in America because they associate that group as being a symbol, as being an important source of familiarity for the nation.

Majorities really matter because countries that don’t have clear majority groups also tend to be less stable countries, and they also tend to be low trust societies.

As I mentioned in the piece on Wednesday, there was recently a major academic study that summarised the findings of nearly 100 other studies, what’s called a ‘meta-analysis’ in academia, and it concluded that there is a negative relationship between trust and diversity. In other words, in nations that are much more diverse, where you have lots more immigration and you don’t have a big, clear majority group, levels of trust were much lower.

People were much less willing People were much less willing and more highly diverse societies to trust their neighbours and their friends because rapid diversity, rapid change undermines people’s willingness to support things like the welfare state.

Now, nobody in Westminster wants to talk about this. In fact, when I shared the data on schools, you guessed it, lots of left wing journalists probably said it was racist to even talk about demographic change in our institutions, which of course is nonsense.

You would not go into any other country in the world. Imagine going into Japan and saying you’re not allowed to talk about the decline of the majority group. They would laugh you out of the room.

They would find the whole thing profoundly anxious and they’d want to discuss it. But in Britain, we seem uniquely incapable of having serious conversations about what’s happening to the country. And that might be, of course, why so many people read our newsletter. But the school data, to me, it really matters because lots of people out there can sense something really big is happening to the country.

They can sense the demographic shifts and are much bigger than anything their ancestors ever saw. And I think they can sense that they’re losing their country and they’re losing what they imagine their country to be.

And there’s a temptation to think that the changes to the population are going to happen 50, 60, 70 years from now. But what the data that we talked about this week in the schools really shows is that that demographic revolution, if you like, is happening already. It’s happening today in our schools.

And it helps to explain why so many people feel so anxious because they can sense that actually slowly but steadily the majority group is sliding into minority status. Now, there are countries, of course, where that’s happened before, countries like Lebanon, countries like Sierra Leone, where there’s no clear majority group, and they are racked with tribal, ethnic, religious, cultural conflicts and grievances.

They’re not particularly stable countries. Yet nobody in Westminster, nobody in our media class seems willing to have a sensible conversation about, well, what does it mean for Britain if these trends that we’re seeing in schools continue.

That is also why I suspect many people in Britain have been turning to a different kind of politics. I think that’s why lots of people have been rallying around Reform UK, because I think they feel, whether they’re white British, black British, Asian, whatever they are, I think they feel that these trends are now so out of control.

The borders are so broken. The taxes are so high. The energy bills are so high. Two-tiered justice is so endemic. We seem to be losing that sense of who we are. Sir Roger Scruton, the English philosopher, famously said that a nation depends on that “we”. It depends on a collective sense of identity because without that, a nation crumbles.

And I think many people can sense that that is now becoming much weaker. And I think that’s integral to explaining why Reform UK have been doing so well. But it also explains why the establishment is so scared of this new political party.

Now, this week, Reform UK attracted £36 million from two donors, so £72 million in total, one of the biggest donations in contemporary British history. And it has sparked an intense debate about financing and political support in British politics. And much of the establishment has had a complete meltdown in response to this.

So much so that we were treated to the sight of Angela Rayner giving the country a lecture on integrity and decency, hitting the media airwaves to say, well, I’m not so sure that this donation sits right with me.

This is from the very Labour minister, Angela Rayner, who had to resign in disgrace because she didn’t pay the right amount of tax on her own property. This from the Labour minister who’s sitting in a Labour party, that includes an anti-corruption minister who is being investigated for corruption, a homelessness minister who evicted her own housing tenants, presumably because she wanted to increase the rent on her property and potentially made them homeless, who knows.

And a Labour Party that has been riddled with one scandal after another. Remember Lord Ali? Remember Labour MPs helping themselves to suits, glasses, box office tickets? I think Keir Starmer even took some clothing for his wife.

But what about a Labour Party that’s now lecturing this country about overseas donations, but which literally just took £4 million from a hedge fund that is registered in the Cayman Islands? The general hypocrisy has been off the charts.

A reminder that if you look at the actual data in the Electoral Commission, which collects data, has been doing so since 2001, the two big parties, Labour and the Tories between them, have collected, have received more than £1 billion in donations. Since 2021, they’ve each received somewhere between £500 and £600 million in donations. And the Labour Party, of course, has received enormous sums from the trade unions, with many members of those unions not actually wanting to support the Labour Party.

And the Tories are just as bad. The vast majority of Tory party treasurers Who’ve given upwards of a million pounds in donations to the party, have received honours, knighthoods, have been put in the House of Lords.

The whole thing has been completely and utterly ridiculous. The system has become a kind of cartel. And I wrote about this earlier this week in the piece on Monday on the reform donations. And I said, look, there is a line of thought in academia. There’s a very famous paper here. By Richard Katz and Peter Mayer, and they talk about the rise of cartel parties in Western nations.

And these are establishment parties that live off the state, that use the instruments of the state to try and control and neutralize their opposition, to try and silence any dissent to their dominance over the political regime. And Reform UK represents a direct threat to that dominance.

So they’ve been rushing now, even talking about retrospectively changing the law through legislation. Now, this only ever happens in a banana republic when you change the law retrospectively to try and undermine your own opponents. We’re even in the position where columnists at the Times newspaper, which has been launching a war against Reform UK for much of this year, it’s not exactly a right-wing newspaper, we’re even in a position where Times columnists like Danny Finkelstein are saying Labour would be outrageous to change the law retrospectively to try and deliver a blow against Reform UK. And what Danny Finkelstein says in that column, and I actually agree with him, I’ve made the same argument myself for a number of years now … Look at President Trump. Look at Marine Le Pen. Look at the alternative for Germany. Look at populists across the West. Whenever the state has, instead of addressing the grievances that are pushing people towards those parties, has tried to shut down those parties through lawfare, through improper means, those movements have only got stronger.

That is the central lesson. In Western politics from the last 25 years, look at President Trump and the way in which he navigated constant prosecution and persecution. Look at Marine Le Pen. They tried to stop her from running for the presidency of France. And within two minutes, Jordan Bardella, her number two, was completely dominating the presidential polls. Now she’s managing to run again. There was a recent court case which has allowed her to do so. But her movement, the national rally has never been stronger. Or look at Germany. The alternative for Germany, the AFD, has constantly faced attempts by the state to have it shut down. And it just absolutely dominated state elections. And I suspect we’ll have a number of other very impressive results at some state elections forthcoming.

So if I was Nigel Farage, Reform UK, I would be personally very happy with this turn of events. What would I spend the 72 million quid on? Well, Firstly, Reform UK have said publicly they want to double their policy team. They want a campaign manager in every constituency in the country. I would add to that and say this is a unique opportunity to deal with some of the strategic weaknesses within the Reform electorate. I think there should be a strategy for targeting women because I think Reform UK’s electorate is still heavily dependent upon men. I think there should be a strategy for appealing to working class Labour voters.

In the Red Wall in Wales and elsewhere, it’s a critical part of the Reform UK electorate. I think there needs to be a separate strategy for targeting Conservative Party voters in the shires. Reform UK really need to whittle that Conservative Party vote back down to 16%, 17%, if not lower.

And they also need a strategy for attracting non-voters, and in particular for registering non-voters, getting them on the electoral register.

The reason Brexit crossed the line, In 2016 is because one or two million non-voters came back into the political system to vote. Reform UK, if they are going to win the next general election, if they’re going to emerge as the largest party at the next general election, they have to mobilize hundreds of thousands, if not millions of non-voters, people who have given up on politics, people who feel absolutely frustrated with the state of politics and who want to come back in to the political system to try and bring about some change. That is how I’d be spending some of that money. I think all of that is absolutely critical. But the establishment’s attacks on reform, reflect a system that doesn’t really know what to say to the millions of voters who quite like what reform is saying, right?

Fix the borders, leave the ECHR, send in the Navy, strip welfare benefits from foreign nationals, slash overseas aid by 90%. And by the way, did you see this week, we just sent £665 million pounds to Angola to build a new airport while we’re treating British people in hospital car parks and corridors.

It’s this kind of thing that is riling people up and playing to Reform UK strength, but the establishment, instead of dealing with that, wants to instead try and deprive Reform UK of support, and I think that will play into Reform’s hands.

What we also saw this week was a similar response to anti-establishment movements, if you want to call them that, with this call by a Labour peer to ban the group Patriot Platform and designated a terrorist organization.

I’ve talked a little bit about this group in the past. They were integral to the protests in Dover, essentially shutting down the port of Dover.

And I believe I’m right in saying they were involved in the Portsmouth protests as well. And my line on this has always been clear. If people are not committing violence, if they are protesting peacefully, they are respecting the rule of law, then I support protests 100%.

Because you cannot do what Labour and Tory governments have done to the British people Over the last 20 years, but in particular since 2018, by ripping open the borders and letting anybody in, you cannot do that to our people and not expect them to react.

You cannot allow small boats to bring in, as we now know, Iranian terrorists, ISIS sympathisers, murderers, pedophiles and criminals, put them in the heart of your local communities and not expect those people, the British people, to react. You cannot do that.

The protests are an inevitable response to what is a very extreme policy being imposed on the British people by the very people, the very politicians who are supposed to protect them, look after them and care for them.

And it is absolutely outrageous. So the scenes in Dover and Portsmouth, for me, were entirely predictable. I don’t personally like balaclavas.

My view is if you’re fighting for your country, you’re speaking up for your country, you should show your face. That’s what many of us have been doing for many years. And I agree with those who say face coverings are not very British. And what we should be doing is banning all face coverings.

Balaclavas for Antifa people on the radical extreme left, burqas, any religious clothing covering the face in public spaces, balaclavas in this case. Of course, there is a hypocrisy in calling to designate an organization like this, a terrorist organization, from Labour peers who said absolutely nothing at all about some of those groups that we’ve seen marching and campaigning through the streets of our capital city for many, many years now.

Labour members of the House of Lords who actually opposed the way in which organizations like Palestine Action were clamped down upon by the state. Saying no, it’s wrong to clamp down on that organization, but yet when it happens to involve conservative right-wing themes like it does this time, they’re more than happy to use the power of the state to try and crush and shut down dissent.

Let me say it again, so long as people are non-violent, so long as they are peaceful, I support those protests 100%. But that is what we’re seeing. That is what is reflected in the case of Piddington, In the reaction to Reform UK donations, and in the reaction to protest groups like Patriot Platform, a system that is incapable of addressing the underlying reasons why so many people are drawn to these movements, are drawn to this politics, are so utterly fed up with the system.

And unless the system, the establishment, the blob, starts dealing with the reasons why people are so sick and tired of watching what is happening to their country, these movements only get stronger and stronger. They will only get stronger and stronger unless the system starts to address their legitimate concerns.

I gave a talk this week in Brighton, and there were some protests that were there, and I thanked the organizers and the security team and the venue for not backing down in the face of that. But as I saw this sort of group of protesters outside trying to make some noise for about 10 minutes before they got bored and walked off, I did think to myself, everything I say in the newsletter, in this podcast…

We need to fix the borders. We need to lower migration. We need to get rid of soft on crime policies. We need to lower the tax burden. We need to root out two tier policies in policing and our education system. We need to reduce foreign aid.

Everything I say is a 50, 60, 70%. The 10-15% extreme minority The liberal progressives, the radical woke progressives who dominate the institutions and dominate much of the political establishment, including a large chunk of the Tory parliamentary party. They want you to think that they represent the majority, but consistently on lots of issues, they are completely out of touch with the rest of Britain.

Which brings me to what I promised to end on. Which is that none of that has stopped this rumor from doing the rounds in Westminster this week. Which is that despite being hideously out of touch with the country,

Andy Burnham and the Labour government are planning an early general election. And the theory being that that election could come as early as November 19th. And the theory is this. Andy Burnham has said nothing really of any substance for a reason. He’s not really pushed any big wedge issues.

He started to turn the volume up on issues around Gaza and the Middle East to try and pull back Green Party voters that have been leaving the Labour Party and to try and pull back voters who have been leaving the Labour Party since 2024. And he appears to be doing that.

And the theory is that if the Labour Party win the St Pancras and Holborn by-election, if they defeat Zach Polanski and the Greens, and if they have a good conference, That in the aftermath of that, Andy Burnham will also look at the divided right, which of course we’ve talked about in the Silent Majority podcast two weeks ago and I’ve written about in the newsletter.

They’ll look at Reform UK on 25%. They’ll look at the Conservatives on 20%. And to a lesser extent, they’ll look at Restore on 3% or 4%. And they’ll say, you know what? The right is divided. We’re consolidating the left. The geopolitical situation in Iran and elsewhere is deteriorating again, as is the global economy.

And Andy Burnham is going to think to himself, what I’m going to do is go out there to the country and say, I need a fresh mandate to fix these problems. And he will take a punt on the fact that he’ll be able to outflank a divided right, and he’ll be able to hoover up the left, continue to consolidate the left and try and pull them along through promises on Gaza, maybe even proportional representation.

That is how we get to a general election on November 19th. Michael Ellis made this argument, among many others, he made this argument in The Telegraph saying that you essentially cancel the budget, you come out the back of conference in that by-election and you say, right, we’re going to the country. And remember, Andy Burnham was around Gordon Brown when he didn’t do that, when Gordon Brown bottled it.

And then, of course, the financial crash happened. Came crashing down, and Gordon Brown was promptly kicked out of office in 2010, and that opened the door to 14 years of Conservative rule. I suspect Team Burnham are remembering that, and I suspect that that has become very influential in their mindset. I’m not saying it’s going to happen for sure, but I’m saying it’s a rumour, it’s a theory that’s doing the rounds, and is also encouraging some people within the more Tory-aligned press to suggest that Kemi Badenoch needs a big, bold retail offer at the Conservative Party conference because they are now also expecting an earlier than expected general election.

So quite a lot going on in British politics, but at the root of it is a system, is an establishment, is a blob that is completely and utterly out of touch with the silent majority. That’s what you see in Piddington. That’s what you see reflected in the reaction to that school data. That’s what you see reflected in the establishment’s reaction to Reform UK and the donations this week. And I think that’s what you see out there in the country when you talk to your friends, family, and neighbours. As always, we thank you for your support. If you’re not yet a paid supporter and you want access to everything, we encourage you to go over to mattgoodwin.org, get access to every single post, every episode of the Silent Majority Podcast.

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Why are protests erupting in Dover, Portsmouth, and elsewhere? It’s a question that’s on the mind of many British people right now. And it’s a question I explore on this week’s episode of The Silent Majority Podcast, in which I walk you through a series of bombshell revelations about what is really going on in Britain’s broken asylum system and explain why people are being gaslit and misled by the system.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the second episode of the Silent Majority podcast, the place where we like to push back against establishment narratives. We like to ask questions that very few people are willing to ask.

And more importantly, we like to give you information and evidence you’re probably not going to hear today anywhere else.

Now, this week, we’re going to be looking at the disturbances, the eruption of protests and demonstrations in the United Kingdom, in Dover and Portsmouth. Of course, those are related to migration.

But I’m going to be asking what actually lies behind the simmering public anger in the country, because I do think we are approaching a very dangerous place.

But before we get going and discuss all of that, before we start, I just wanted to say, if you’re listening as one of our free subscribers, if you’re listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts, our early episodes are going to be completely free and open to everybody.

But after a little while, we’re going to limit the podcast to a short preview for our free subscribers, and the full episodes are going to be available to our paid supporters over at mattgoodwin.org.

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We are reaching tens of millions of people now every month across social media, through things like our Substack newsletter and now this podcast.

We are immensely grateful to our paid supporters for making that possible. So if you want access to every post, every episode, the group chat, live discussions with me, head over to mattgoodwin.org and become a paid supporter.

Now, enough of that because it’s time to get going with what we really want to talk about today. And that is the eruption of significant protests and demonstrations in Dover and Portsmouth.

Many of you will have seen the scenes.

These were highly coordinated events, public protests in two major places in the UK. We saw hundreds of people, in some cases dressed in black, wearing balaclavas, taking to the streets, blocking off essentially the port of Dover.

And then just a few hours later, the next day even, we saw those extraordinary scenes in Portsmouth where a small boat, a mega dinghy, carrying around 140 illegal migrants arrived off the south coast of England.

And when it became clear that that mega dinghy—and of course, this is significant because most of the dinghies and boats do not land at Portsmouth, they go around to Dover—hundreds of protesters started to gather, not just locals, but people from organized networks.

And they proceeded to block roads. They tried to block the boat from arriving, and they tried to prevent the police from taking those illegal migrants and asylum seekers to be processed.

And Britain was once again this week confronted with, I think, a level of anger, frustration and tension around the immigration issue that is now becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Many Labour politicians quickly proceeded to criticise the protests, demonise the protesters. Prime Minister Andy Burnham described “poison” being brought onto Britain’s streets. The Labour Policing Minister described the protests as being unacceptable. Labour Minister Emma Reynolds described them as being “thuggish”, as dealing with or bringing intimidation.

And I do think it’s interesting because for the last few years, we have had a political class in this country, a ruling class, that has been more than happy, more than willing to allow mass protesters to march through the streets of London, Hamas sympathizers, anti-Semites, all kinds of extremists.

And they’ve barely said a word.

But here we have working-class British people protesting peacefully so far—and I’ll come back to that point—and yet Westminster and much of the left in British politics has had a complete nervous breakdown.

I do see a significant amount of hypocrisy.

Now, before getting into what’s caused these protests, what lies behind them, the chaos in the asylum system and some absolutely remarkable figures and evidence that we’ve discovered over the last seven days—and I’ll walk you through all of it—and I’m going to talk a bit about where I think this could be taking British society if we do not get control of the borders, obviously I’m just going to insert the caveat at the top of this podcast.

I do not support violence. I don’t think anybody who’s involved with our newsletter supports violence. We do not support intimidation. We do not support people breaking the law. We do not support people—well, I don’t support people wearing balaclavas. I don’t think they’re particularly useful.

I agree with some politicians this week who have said the best move for Britain is to ban all face coverings, including the burqa and the niqab. We are entering a society here, if we’re not careful, where face coverings are being normalized and becoming mainstream.

But let me be crystal clear at the top of this podcast. Let me tell you what I do support. What I do support is the right of the British people to peacefully protest against what is happening to their country.

And rather than simply condemning these people, rather than simply calling them far-right extremists, misinformed, and then quickly moving on, as much of the political and media class is doing, I think we need to ask a much more important question, which is what I’m going to answer today.

Namely, why is this happening?

Why are people becoming so angry in Britain?

Why is the country being pushed to the very edge?

Why are we seeing so many protests and demonstrations in recent years?

Because it’s not just Dover and Portsmouth. It is Epping. It is Bournemouth. It is Dundee. It is Falkirk. A number of towns and cities now have seen significant public protests and demonstrations against a specific policy that is being imposed on this country from above.

Britain now feels like it’s on the edge. In fact, only recently, the credible pollsters YouGov asked the British people—this is a mainstream pollster—to what extent do you think it is likely that there will be civil conflict in Britain in the next 10 years?

And one-third of all British people, one third, one in three, felt it is very likely that there will be civil conflict, potentially even civil war, in Britain within the next 10 years.

So in this episode, I want to really interrogate this and explore this, focusing in particular on what we’ve learned this week about the absolute chaos that is unfolding in Britain’s asylum system.

Because while all of these protests were taking place, all of the demonstrations in Dover and Portsmouth, something really important was happening in the background over the last seven days.

One story after another broke, one bombshell after another, involving an asylum system in this country that increasingly looks completely overwhelmed and out of control.

And I’m going to walk you through the big revelations because when you put them together, I think you begin to understand something critically important.

The small boats, the more than 209,000 people who have arrived now in Britain illegally on the small boats—and remember, in some polls, immigration is still the number one issue in the country.

It’s why I talk about it perhaps more than other issues.

But the small boats are only the most visible part of the crisis that is unfolding in Britain because behind those boats—and this is the important point—sits an asylum system that is simply not working. Sits a government machinery, the blob, the establishment, that is simply not in control of what is happening in this country.

So let’s go through what we’ve learned over the last seven days, because I think it has been quite a week.

I want to start here with the whistleblower, with a government insider that has blown the whistle on what is really happening behind the scenes. And I want to start with what they have revealed to the British people.

Just 1% of asylum claims in Britain, according to somebody who is working on asylum claims, just 1% are genuine claims for asylum.

That is what they told the Times newspaper. One in every 100.

This is not a fringe. This is not out on the margins or the extreme. This whistleblower went straight to one of the biggest newspapers in the country and said just 1% of asylum claims that they can see that are being processed are genuine.

Now, of course, this is not an official Home Office statistic. This is not an official report. But this is somebody who says that they have personally assessed thousands of asylum claims. And what they have seen is nothing short of astonishing.

They have talked about what people inside the system apparently call package claims. The same stories, the same supporting evidence, the same circumstances, the same excuses, the same motivations for seeking asylum come up time and time again.

In other words, you’re talking about widespread fraud.

The examples they gave: hundreds of Iraqi Kurds all saying they’ve been in a relationship with the daughter of the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan region. So either the daughter of the Prime Minister of Kurdistan really gets around, or these guys are gaming the system.

So many people made the claim, according to the whistleblower, that it became a running joke inside the Home Office.

Another example: hundreds of Pakistani applicants claiming that their lives are at risk because they are in a gay relationship with the same man. That’s right. Hundreds of asylum seekers from Pakistan claiming to be in a relationship with the same man supplied letters supporting the claims.

And many people, by the way, who have applied for asylum claiming to be gay also happen to have been photographed at the very same gay nightclub, which it turns out is now closed.

Now, of course, we’ve heard allegations like this before. Some of you will remember in recent months we had an undercover BBC investigation which found that immigration advisors and immigration lawyers—it’s a real racket—have offered to help migrants manufacture false sexuality-based asylum claims. They have helped them to pretend to be gay, essentially.

So when somebody who actually works inside the system comes forward and says that there is indeed widespread fraud, shouldn’t we be asking some very serious questions?

Because this is supposed to be a credible, reliable asylum system. It’s meant to protect people who are genuinely in need, genuinely fleeing persecution. To some extent, Britain should protect a small number of those people.

Although many of us, myself included, would argue that through helping refugees from Hong Kong, helping refugees from Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people—

Not only of genuine refugees, but the taxpayer, the British taxpayer. And we’ll come back to the costs later on because it is frankly absurd.

Another example was people from Bangladesh who claim to be now under persecution because they happen to belong to a particular political party. But when they were asked about the policies and the beliefs of that political party, they couldn’t answer the officials.

You know, we are being completely gamed in this country. And it is the hardworking, taxpaying British people, members of the silent majority, who are being forced to pay billions of pounds every year for this fraudulent scheme.

Now, that whistleblower, that wasn’t the only story this week, because that was followed very quickly by a second story, which also pointed to the absurdity of the system.

The United Nations Refugee Agency, which I don’t think you can describe as a right-wing organization, to put it mildly—it is definitely a member of the woke industrial complex—looked at how Britain has been conducting asylum interviews. And what did it find?

Well, it found that there was a real risk that Britain was giving people asylum who were not entitled to it and that it was making many mistakes. It was refusing people who genuinely needed some protection while also granting asylum to people who are not actually entitled to it.

In fact, it found that in nearly 30 of the 60 interviews for asylum that it examined, there were important credibility issues which had not been resolved. In another 19, the full basis of the asylum claim remained unclear.

In other words, in many, many asylum claims that are being made here in Britain, those claims, those applications, are not even meeting the quality threshold that has been set by our own government.

I mean, this is absolutely outrageous. We’re not talking about somebody on social media, an opposition politician. We’re not talking about a Substack writer even, although they’re great. We’re talking about the United Nations Refugee Agency flagging serious concerns about the quality of decision-making that is currently taking place inside Britain’s asylum system.

And the Home Office’s own numbers tell us something else indeed, because what we’ve also seen this week is a series of revelations that really do need to be known by everybody in the country.

The initial asylum rate, the rate at which people are being granted asylum after applying, has certainly fallen in recent years.

Now, back in 2022, that success rate, that grant rate for people applying for asylum in Britain, was 77%. Almost everybody was getting it, right?

They were just rubber-stamping applications left, right and center.

Today, it is 38%, so nearly 40%.

So we’ve gone from granting more than three quarters of all asylum claims to about four in 10.

Now, Labour politicians will sit on television and say, well, look at this, the system’s working, and they’ll gaslight you, a bit like they’re gaslighting you on the hotels.

Because what they tell you when it comes to the asylum hotels—and you’ve seen it all week again—they’ll sit on Politics Live or Question Time and they’ll say, well, the number of asylum hotels are coming down. Well, on the surface, that’s true.

But what they’re doing behind the scenes is they’re just moving people out of asylum hotels and they’re putting them into HMOs, housing for multiple occupancy, where they put upwards of 10 people in the same house, and they’re moving them into private accommodation.

And then you have private companies like Serco, who are offering landlords more favorable contracts if they take on illegal migrants and asylum seekers than if they take on British people. So they offer landlords, for example, things like no council tax, lower bills, instant repairs, all of this kind of stuff.

But here’s the kicker. Those private companies like Serco are bankrolled, are backed by money from the government, by money from the British people.

So what they’re doing is they’re using your money. They are using your money to outbid you in your own housing market. That is what is going on. That is why I find this so grotesque. It’s why I find it so utterly outrageous.

Which raises another obvious question. What on earth has been happening before these asylum claims have seemingly dropped? Are we actually now getting more decisions wrong? What exactly has changed?

Well, whichever way you look at it, these are not actually the numbers of a system that is inspiring confidence.

If you go back before 2022 into the 2010s, even the 2000s, the number of asylum claims were much lower than they are today. So even at the 40% grant rate, we are still processing and accepting many more applications for asylum than we did in previous years.

It’s a bit like when they say, well, the small boat numbers are down 40%, so therefore everybody should just relax and not be concerned. Well, that’s not the metric.

The metric is what happened before 2018.

And what happened before 2018 is we had no small boats. We don’t want the small boat numbers coming down 40%. We don’t want any small boats. That’s the metric.

But what you see is, through this debate, they are trying to normalize illegal migration. They are trying to get people to accept that this is now a permanent feature of our national life.

When Andy Burnham says, I’m going to move processing centers, detention centers, from poor areas to rich areas, the debate then becomes about redistributing illegal migration when the debate should be about stopping illegal migration.

But the reason they’re gaslighting you is also because they’re not telling you about the appeals process. And this is what we also learned this week.

Let me just bring this one up because this is another unbelievable thing. That’s a great story, another unbelievable piece of evidence that came out this week.

Because even when the Home Office declines an application for asylum, when it rejects that application, that doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody instantly leaves Britain. They can appeal that decision.

And this week we learned much more about what is happening in that appeal process.

Close to 6,000 appeals against rejections were allowed. Another 10,200 cases were withdrawn, normally by the Home Office. And when those outcomes are combined, it turns out that two-thirds—and this is in the Times newspaper again—two-thirds of rejected asylum claims are overturned on appeal. 64%.

64% of asylum claims that were initially rejected are overturned on appeal. Nobody will tell you this on BBC Question Time.

Think about what that really means. So the Home Office makes a decision. It says no. The case moves into the appeals system. And then a very large proportion of those cases either succeed on appeal or they are withdrawn immediately.

Again, what is going on?

Either large numbers of initial Home Office decisions are wrong to begin with—I would not be surprised by that—or new information is entering the process later on, or the system is simply struggling to reach consistent decisions.

Either way, it is a complete and utter joke.

Whatever explanation you prefer, the consequence is the same: more delays, more immigration lawyers, more tribunal hearings, more administration, more money being spent by the hardworking British people during the worst cost-of-living crisis pretty much since the Second World War, going on something they never asked for, they never voted for, and more time before Britain finally establishes whether anybody has a right—

The time, the clock just ticks on.

And now that backlog has completely exploded. This is what we learned also this week. In fact, we learned about this towards the end of the week.

It is, for me, the figure that best captures the total chaos in the system.

For months, ministers have been talking about clearing the asylum backlog. They’ve been talking about improvements. They’ve been talking about getting on top of the system, getting things moving.

You speak to anybody in Westminster, in the SW1 land, they’ll say, “Oh, isn’t Shabana Mahmood great? She’s doing such a good job.”

Except now we’ve discovered something that blows all of that apart because the asylum backlog has not disappeared. It’s just moved.

Because new figures show that at the end of June 2026, there were more than 90,000 asylum appeals waiting to be heard. 90,000. A year earlier, it was only 59,000.

So in just a year, under Labour, the asylum appeals backlog has increased by 51%. Think about that. 51%.

Now, the government speeds up the initial asylum decisions. You get more decisions being made, more people being rejected, but then more people appeal and the pressure just moves from the Home Office into the courts, a bit like the pressure is moving from the asylum hotels onto HMOs and private accommodation.

So if you clear one backlog, you’re just simply creating another somewhere else in the system.

In fact, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has already warned about precisely this problem, referring to repeatedly shifting backlogs rather than actually reducing them.

So it’s like a game of whack-a-mole. The system is just moving this problem from one part of the system to another. And again, it is the British people, it is the silent majority, who suffer.

Because we don’t really have an asylum backlog anymore. What we have in this country is a chain of backlogs running through the system. And the system is now completely incapable of dealing with this issue, of resolving this issue.

And that is why so many people out there, millions of people out there, are feeling so utterly frustrated.

There are now more than 155,000 outstanding asylum cases in this country. 155,000.

The government itself said only weeks ago that the average wait for an asylum and immigration appeal to be decided by a judge was around 67 weeks. More than a year.

This is why I think the political debate completely misses the point.

We are always hearing ministers boast about how many initial decisions they’ve been making, but who cares how many pieces of paper they are actually processing if the cases are just piling up elsewhere?

The real test of an asylum system, in my mind at least, is incredibly simple. Can Britain quickly decide who is entitled to remain here? And then crucially, when somebody is not entitled to remain, can Britain actually remove them from the country?

I mean, we’re now in such an absurd position that even the Times newspaper this week has now adopted the Reform UK position.

Now, the Times newspaper, in case you haven’t noticed, has launched an all-out war on Reform UK, targeting Nigel Farage and the people around him, spending basically the entire summer trying to derail Reform UK.

Now, whatever you think about Reform UK, it is a bit hypocritical for the Times newspaper then this week to adopt Reform UK’s policy, which it did, when it called for the immediate detention and deportation of all illegal migrants.

And anyone who enters Britain illegally, according to the Times, should not be given asylum. They should be immediately deported and moved offshore to a third country. And the Times suggests perhaps use the Falkland Islands.

Now, what’s the difference between Reform UK’s policy and what the Times newspaper is advocating? Very little indeed.

And this is the absurd position that we find ourselves in. The establishment attacks the anti-establishment party while parroting the anti-establishment party’s position.

So this is why, again, I’m optimistic. Those of us in, let’s call it, common-sense land, who have been arguing against the establishment now—

I would argue, by the way, if you look across Europe, that is what is happening.

The other thing we saw this week: the enormous election results in Germany.

What we are seeing there is hugely significant. The Alternative for Germany is replacing the failing liberal, established Conservative Party, the CDU. The AfD is replacing the dominant, historically dominant right-wing party while calling for a much tougher position on migration.

You look at France in the polls. Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, who I met last week at the Reform Conference, they are topping the polls, likely to be the next president and/or prime minister of France.

Look at Austria. The Austrian Freedom Party, number one in the polls.

Look across Europe, you see much the same. We are winning the argument when it comes to the issue of migration and border security because a lot of people looked at those scenes in Ceuta, Spain earlier this summer and they can see what’s coming.

They can see what is coming down the track if we do not change course.

And in Britain, as I’ve written previously on the Substack, what that means is building Fortress Britain.

It means leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. It means repealing Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act, and it means immediately detaining and deporting anybody who arrives in this country illegally, turning back the boats and sending in the Navy, but fundamentally changing the legal architecture around this country.

There is no point being in the Refugee Convention in 2026. It was made in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is not fit for purpose.

There is no point being in the European Convention on Human Rights when we cannot control our own borders and our own laws and our own policy.

The reason people voted in 2016 to leave the European Union is because they were tired of being stuck in an illiberal, undemocratic regime that imposed policies on them that they never even voted for and they couldn’t influence.

But that is precisely what we have with the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR. We cannot control these decisions. Unelected judges, influenced by unelected lawyers, influenced by a political class in Westminster that is wholly focused on maintaining and upholding the broken status quo.

Now, millions of people in Britain might not know the detail in the asylum system that I’ve just talked about during this podcast. They might not know the exact numbers.

But what they do know, because the British people are not idiots, is that the system isn’t working and they are not being respected. They are not being treated fairly.

The old argument about British culture is that it was always based on fairness. It was based on the idea of fair play. And that is so important to the British people.

But what they can sense is that the very politicians on the left, Labour politicians and also Tory politicians too, Lib Dem Conservatives, that when they tell the British people, when they lecture the British people about fairness, about compassion, about empathy, what the British people can now see, like people across the West, is that those words do not mean what they used to mean.

Because what we have now is a political class in the West that is absolutely, absolutely dominated by the mindset of suicidal empathy, obsessed with suicidal empathy.

They want to show so much empathy to people who do not come from Western nations that they are destroying Western nations along the way.

That is what I see when I look at these numbers.

150,000 unresolved asylum claims. 210,000 people arriving illegally on the small boats. That’s more than twice what we have in our standing army.

It is completely and utterly insane.

Which brings me back to the protests that are now erupting very regularly across the country, which brings me back to Dover, brings me back to Portsmouth, brings me back to the anger, the tension.

And what we’re witnessing, the establishment response to those protests, has been utterly predictable.

Andy Burnham, Emma Reynolds, every woke celebrity, many mainstream journalists have condemned the protesters. Many mainstream newspapers have.

Ironically, many of the same newspapers that claim to represent public anger on immigration were some of the quickest to condemn people who were protesting peacefully.

They’ve been called thugs. They’ve been called far right. We’re back to the Keir Starmer playbook. They’ve been talking endlessly about people presenting a threat to British society.

Now look, as I said at the outset, if you’re committing violence, if you’re intimidating others, if you’re breaking the law, then of course the police should act, and I don’t support people engaging in violence.

But what I find absolutely remarkable is the complete lack of curiosity in Westminster and the media class about the bigger question, about why all of this is happening.

What I find remarkable is the hypocrisy.

I do not remember Shabana Mahmood, who has come out this week and said the police must get tough on the hard right, I do not remember Shabana Mahmood coming out and saying the police must get tough on those balaclava-wearing thugs from Muslim communities in East London who were marauding through the streets.

I do not remember the political class saying the police and the system must crack down on all of those hate marches through our capital city for the last three months—or four years.

I do not remember them adopting the same mindset when it comes to sympathizers of Hamas, the Islamist organization, by the way, that happens now to have praised the UK Labour government twice in as many years.

I mean, my question, as I wrote in the Substack this week: what on earth did Britain’s political class expect? What did they think was going to happen? What did they think the British people were going to do?

Because for years, for decades, pretty much ever since May 1997, where in my mind this hideous experiment begins, the British people have voted for immigration to come down. They’ve voted for demographic change to be slowed.

And for years, governments, whether Labour or Tory, have promised control. They’ve promised they would lower immigration. They’ve promised they would secure the borders.

Beginning with Tony Blair and Jack Straw and David Blunkett, running right through to Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer and now Andy Burnham.

But what have the British people been given instead?

One betrayal after another.

Small boats crossing the Channel. Asylum hotels opening. Five-star accommodation for people breaking our laws. Legal experts, lawyers, courts working overtime to prevent the British people from controlling their own borders, their own country.

An asylum system that is now riddled from top to bottom with fraud, with fraudulent claims. It’s become a Ponzi scheme. Rejected applications disappearing into an appeals process.

And now what we see is righteous public anger, legitimate public anger. People saying enough is enough.

And what I wrote about towards the end of this week, which actually has turned into one of our most-read pieces this year, what I wrote about is my concern, my fear, to be frank with you, about where this is heading.

A few years ago, I read the work of David Betts, a professor at King’s College London, an expert in conflict, military conflict and war. David’s very well respected. He’s very well cited in academia. He’s a serious man with a lot of studies, papers and books behind him.

David got some attention a few years ago, as some of you will know, for daring to suggest, having spent much of his career looking at civil conflict and civil war in developing states, that actually the conditions for civil conflict are now present in Western nations like Britain, and that actually we are already sliding into some kind of civil conflict.

The wheels, he argues, are already in motion.

Now, I explain his theory in the Substack. I talk through the different dynamics that he points to, the things that you would need to be present for that to happen.

But let me just read one of the quotes from his excellent report with a co-author, because I think it sums it up:

“The consequence,” he writes, “is a political culture that’s no longer defined by left and right, but by something starker. A belief that politics itself is theatre, with real decisions scripted elsewhere, beyond scrutiny or correction,” or we might add, the people. “In this sense, the central political belief of liberal democracy, the conviction that voting matters, has withered away.”

And I think that is what those people at the protests, those people in Dover, those people in Portsmouth, can sense.

It doesn’t matter, based on the last 30 years, how you vote. It doesn’t matter if you support Labour. It doesn’t matter if you support the Tories because nothing ever changes.

Immigration levels keep going up. The borders become weaker. The boats keep coming. And the bill, the billions of pounds that have to be paid, is forced onto the British people.

That is why I genuinely believe, even though I was skeptical of David Betts’s argument at first, that we are now entering a very dangerous period in British politics.

Because the social contract is being stretched beyond what is acceptable and what would support democracy and social cohesion and the legitimacy of the state going forward.

When millions of people start to conclude it’s not just that the state cannot do its job, it’s not just that the state is incompetent, but when millions of people start to conclude that the state itself is working against their own people, against its own citizens, well, then we’re entering a very dark place indeed.

And I suspect at the radical tip in Dover and Portsmouth, that is indeed what all of those men and women have already concluded.

There’s no point actually waiting three or four years for a general election. Nothing’s going to change. They need to protest and demonstrate peacefully because they’ve given up, clearly, on not just the establishment, but they are giving up on the social contract.

That is a very, very, very dangerous place for a country to be.

The mainstreaming of two-tier politics, the mainstreaming of a sense that mass migration is completely out of control, the mainstreaming of a sense that the state now prioritizes minorities over the majority, and the mainstreaming of the belief that it is the people who are being forced to pick up the tab.

Tens of billions of pounds that should instead be going on building primary schools, secondary schools, building prisons, building hospitals, building roads, building infrastructure for the British people. Investing that money in our national defense, for goodness’ sake.

We’re now in the absurd position in Britain where the establishment says we don’t have enough money for the Royal Navy, for the Royal Air Force, for the British Army, while every year, every single year, we are sending £23 billion either overseas in foreign aid, funding things like contraception programs in Pakistan, eco farms in Nepal, or going on welfare payouts for people who are not even British.

Now, if that isn’t suicidal empathy, I don’t know what is.

And I think that is why so many people are so frustrated.

Now, I attract a lot of criticism. I’m going to be really honest with you. The reason I am Mr. Unpopular in certain circles in BBC SW1 land is because I’ve come to the conclusion that if we do not do those things, this country of ours, our home, will not only become unrecognizable, but it will enter something that will both look and feel very dark indeed.

That’s all for the Silent Majority this week with me, Matt Goodwin.

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Does the Right in Britain need to unite? It’s one of the biggest questions in British politics right now — especially with rumours of an early general election once again swirling around Westminster. And it’s a question I address directly on today’s episode of The Silent Majority Podcast, in which I explain why the Left currently has a strong in-built advantage over the Right ahead of the next election.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the Silent Majority Podcast with me, Matt Goodwin. My goal is simple, to tell you the truth, to bring you information you won’t get anywhere else, and to challenge an establishment that’s lost touch with millions of ordinary people. No groupthink, no political correctness, no forbidden questions.

Just the issues that really matter to you.

Come and join us at mattgoodwin.org.

Welcome everybody to the Silent Majority Podcast with me, Matt Goodwin. Now this is a podcast for people who are tired of being ignored, dismissed and shut out from our national conversation. Every Friday, I’m going to give you my unfiltered view of what is really happening in Britain and the West.

I’m going to bring you the evidence, the analysis, the statistics, the figures that you probably are not going to hear on the BBC. You’re probably not going to be able to get them anywhere else.

And I’m going to challenge the establishment. I’m going to challenge the establishment narratives that we are given from the BBC, from the institutions, from the dominant political class.

And I’m going to challenge The groupthink, the lazy groupthink that dominates our culture by asking questions that I think far too many people in politics and the media are too scared to ask or they don’t want to ask because of that lazy groupthink.

And today we’re starting with a big one, a really big question: Does the right in Britain need to unite? I’m going to show you some things you might not have seen before. I’m going to do this because I think it’s one of the most important questions of all going into the next general election in the United Kingdom, which I think millions of people can sense is going to be one of the most important general elections in our contemporary history.

But before we get to that, because this is our first episode, I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to to explain to you exactly why I decided to do this podcast and what I want it to become. Because I think today, if you look around the media landscape, if you look around the political debate, if you want to call it that, we already have countless podcasts.

And so many of those podcasts are made by the same kinds of people for the same kinds of people. They are podcasts that are created by people who have exactly the same underlying assumptions, who ask exactly the same questions, who reach exactly the same conclusions. Who often went to the very same schools and universities and who, to be frank, are completely disconnected from what millions of ordinary people out there in the country and indeed the West really think and believe.

So that’s why I wanted to try and do something a little bit different. I don’t want to have guests yelling at each other and talking over one another.

I don’t want to have any carefully We’re not going to rehearse talking points. We’re not going to cling to the establishment consensus. We’re not going to follow the lazy group think. I’m not going to tell you what you should think.

What I am going to do once a week, every Friday, is give you my unfiltered, honest view of of the biggest issues facing our country and Western nations. And I’m going to present to you and share to you evidence and information that you’re not going to get anywhere else and which I think will challenge the consensus.

So hopefully every week you learn something new.

Maybe you come across a study or some findings or some evidence that you’ve not really seen or heard anywhere else. I’m hopefully going to contribute to the conversation and I’m going to speak up and represent the silent majority, the millions of people out there who really feel as though their voice is not included in the conversation.

And I simply don’t think that ordinary people are being told about it. And that’s what I want to try and do with this podcast. That’s what the silent majority is really going to be about.

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You can also, of course, put your questions directly to me, and you can join all of our private discussions. So that’s that. That’s why I decided to set up a podcast. That’s why I wanted to do something different.

What I want to ask is our first question, which is, does the right in Britain need to unite? Because what I want to show you today is actually what is going on in the United Kingdom. And one of the problems for people on the right, one of the problems for people who perhaps feel so frustrated with things like mass migration, broken borders, record taxes, record energy bills, woke ideology, political correctness, one of the big problems that I see is that the left, left wing parties have figured out how to win under our election system.

And people on the right are currently not doing what they need to do in order to win the next general election. And let me just say this at the outset that I believe firmly that we really only have maybe one election left to save Britain, to save the country.

Because of all of the things that are profoundly transforming Britain like other Western nations, mass uncontrolled immigration, which nobody ever voted for, broken borders, which nobody ever asked for, rapid and relentless demographic change, which, let’s be honest, is making many of our cities, our towns, our villages is leaving them completely unrecognisable.

Not to mention the way in which many of our taxpayer funded public institutions have moved sharply to the left. Over the last 10 or 20 years, while ordinary people have stayed exactly where they are, or if anything, they’ve moved a little bit to the right on issues around culture and identity. All of this has really left an enormous chasm at the heart of our politics. And it’s left many people desperately searching for an alternative.

And I think the next general election is going to be one of the big ones. It’s going to be a historic turning point, I think, in the history of the United Kingdom, one that will either push the country into more of this radical, if not extreme political and cultural change and essentially making that permanent.

Or it will see millions of people join together to say, no, actually we want to push the country in a completely different direction. We want to end the policies of mass uncontrolled immigration. We want to fix the borders. We want to embed a principle of national preference into the country.

We want to put the British people and British young people first. And we want to establish a country that gives power genuinely back to the people who have built that country, who make that country work and who want to pass that country on to their children and their grandchildren.

And I think many people can sense just how profound, fundamental and important the next general election is going to be, which is why, which is why if you look at the current polling and you look at what is happening in British politics today and you look at what would happen if there was a general election tomorrow, you can begin to see the problem that many of those people are going to encounter.

If you take all of the polling and I’m talking to you here in early September, 2026, if you take all of the polling and you run what’s called a forecast model and look at what would happen at the next general election.

And as of today, the result would be another five years of left wing, liberal left wing government. The Labour Party would fall 60 seats short of a majority, but would be able to cobble together a working majority with the Liberal Democrats. There would be a sort of Labour led coalition.

And the reason for that, for those of you who are watching this podcast and can see the numbers on the screen, the reason for that is because of the division on the right, because of the division between the Conservative Party, the Reform Party, and to a much lesser extent, Restore Britain.

If there were an election tomorrow, the Conservative Party are predicted to win 119 seats. Reform would replace the Conservative Party as the dominant party on the right of politics with 132 seats, obviously a very historic shift. Restore most likely would pick up perhaps one or two seats, maybe one in Great Yarmouth, and that’s about it.

But the key point here is that even though you see that significant takeover of the right by Nigel Farage and Reform UK, Nobody on the right actually enters power because they are well short of the 326 seats that you would need in order to win a majority and take control of the country.

Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, with over 50 seats, potentially, of course, alongside the SNP, would be able to cobble together some kind of working coalition. Now, this is the reality that is facing the right.

This is the reality that is facing the right in British politics. And the reason we’re seeing some of this is because the left is consolidating and the right remains divided. So what we’ve seen since Prime Minister Andy Burnham has come into office is he’s doing a better job at winning back people who have switched to the Greens.

He’s doing a better job at winning back some Liberal Democrats, and he is doing a better job at winning back People that voted Labour in 2024, but were then alienated by Keir Starmer’s premiership. So slowly but surely, this explains the bounce that the Labour Party have had in the polls. Andy Burnham has consolidated part of that left wing vote. But the right remains more divided than ever.

Now, I have a funny feeling. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is probably going to go for a general election earlier than many people think. And there are a few reasons why I think that’s going to happen.

One is he feels locked in by the 2024 mandate. He feels locked in by the manifesto that Labour campaigned on in 2024. He feels that he cannot get sufficient radicalism when it comes to economic and social policy. He won’t be able to move too far away from that manifesto. I think he’s also going to be looking at the debt markets, at the bond markets, and how they’re moving.

And what we can see currently is a great deal of concern in the financial markets about the direction of travel, rising costs, The cost of servicing Britain’s enormous pile of debt, we now have nearly three trillion pounds worth of debt.

The cost of servicing that debt is going up and up and a debt crisis, a big debt crisis of some kind looks likely. And it may be that some within the Labour Party want to potentially go to the country before that really does implode.

But the main reason Andy Burnham, I suspect, will go much earlier than people think will be because of this division on the right. And a strange place to start, but I think an important one is what happened at an obscure local election in Kent, Dover, Last week, where I just want to show you exactly what took place in the Guston Kingsdown and St Margaret’s at Cliff local by-election.

Not many people would have been watching it. But what was so fascinating about this contest is that parties on the right, between them, reform, the Tories, restore, polled 55% of the vote in this ward. More than half of all voters voted for the right.

And actually, you see this in many national polls. The right is polling upwards of 50%. So you can see the appetite is there for a change of direction in Britain and the country. But the Green Party ended up winning this local election on just 28% of the vote. In fact, it won the election by just 34 votes.

How is that possible, you might ask?

It’s possible because of how that right-wing vote was split three ways between reform, which emerged as a dominant party on the right with 27.5%, the Tories, 10 points behind on 17%, and Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe’s party, even further behind on 10%.

The reason I’m showing you this is because if the right do not get organised then this is exactly what is going to happen at the next general election in Britain. It might not be the Green Party winning, it will be Andy Burnham and the Labour Party.

Because under first-past-the-post, all you need to win a seat is not 50% and above. But in Britain’s election system, you just need one more vote than the second place party.

And so what you might see at the next general election is the result that we saw in Dover playing out from one seat to the next from one part of the country to the next as a divided right is outflanked by a more consolidated left.

Now, one of the reasons why people on the left really have an advantage at the moment over people on the right is because of what is actually going on underneath the surface, and that is tactical voting.

And I think this is going to be one of the big stories at the next general election in Britain, if I’m honest with you, because tactical voting is not impacting the left and the right equally. This is the big challenge that everybody on the right needs to think about and really needs to reflect on.

If you look at people on the left of British politics, Labour voters, Liberal Democrat voters, Green voters, they are much more likely to say they will vote tactically to stop the right than people on the right are in saying they would vote tactically to stop the left. Labour voters, for example, roughly 69-77% of Labour voters say they would switch to the Liberal Democrats to stop the Reform Party, or say they would switch to the Greens to stop the Tories and say they would switch to the Greens to stop Reform.

The overwhelming majority of Labour Party voters, in other words, would happily lend their vote to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens in order to stop the Right.

And if you’re watching this podcast, rather than listening, you’ll be able to see the numbers from a YouGov study just a few months ago that makes this crystal clear.

You have a much greater degree of discipline on the left when it comes to tactical voting than you have on the right.

Now let’s look at the right. Let’s look at how reform UK voters would vote under similar tactical voting scenarios. Well, imagine you were in a seat where it was Tory versus Lib Dem or Tory versus Labour or Tory versus Green.

In these scenarios, only between 37 and 41% of reform UK voters would switch to the Conservatives to help them get over the line. A much larger number would stay loyal to Reform UK. They are much less likely, Reform voters than their counterparts in the Labour Party or the Greens, to switch over and support another party tactically.

And you see exactly the same thing with Conservative voters. Conservative Party voters are much less likely than Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters to vote tactically.

This is what YouGov said when they were concluding that study. “Tactical voting among supporters of right-wing parties is both less common and less mutual, though it is still less present. The key line there being less common, less mutual.”

Now, how does Restore Britain fit into all of this? Well, it wasn’t included in that particular study, but there was another fascinating poll which asked Restore Britain voters whether they would be open to voting for Reform UK.

And only 36% of Restore Britain voters said they would be open to voting for Reform UK. 36%. And only 23% would be open to supporting the Conservatives. So again, what you see among Restore Britain voters, much lower numbers compared to those big 60-70% figures for Labour, Lib Dem and Green.

Restore voters are less willing to switch over to support reform UK at the next general election and to do so tactically. You might say to me, well, actually, Matt, maybe one tiny local council by-election in a corner of Kent is not going to predict what happens at the next general election.

But what I am saying to you is, it is a warning.

It is a warning of what is going to happen in this country, what is going to happen in If the right of politics does not actually get its act together.

If the right of British politics does not start to vote tactically, then it will lose the next general election. And then you need to think about what that means.

If the right in Britain loses the next election, it will be more mass uncontrolled immigration. It will be more broken borders. It will be more Woke ideology.

It will be more putting people ahead of the British people who are not even from Britain. It will be more of the sectarianism and the illegal family voting that we’re seeing across large parts of the country.

The kind of illegal family voting I warned about when I stood for Reform UK at the Gorton and Denton by-election and people said that I was a bad loser.

And yet two weeks ago, Birmingham City Council reveals that there had been election interference in 50 polling stations across our second city. And that comes after that study in Greater Manchester in the seat of Gorton and Denton, which found illegal family voting in more than two thirds of all polling stations.

This is what’s going to happen if the left win the next general election. More and more of our political system We’ll come under the influence of things like sectarianism, illegal family voting, and more and more of our cities, our towns and villages will become unrecognisable because of relentless demographic change.

The kind of change that Labor, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are entirely comfortable with. So what I am saying, and let me be clear, what I’m saying to everybody on the right is this:

If you do not start to vote tactically, if you do not start to consolidate around one alternative to the establishment, then you will lose the next general election and the left will dominate Britain well into the 2030s.

I also would urge everybody to remember what happened in 2019. In 2019, When Boris Johnson promised to get Brexit done, Nigel Farage realised how close the country was to having that democratic vote for Brexit undermined and blocked by the establishment in Westminster.

And Nigel Farage decided on that basis to put the people and the country before his own interests by standing down candidates in hundreds of seats. Now, people at the time were unhappy with Nigel Farage for making that decision, but he put the country first. That allowed Boris Johnson to put together the realignment of British politics to outflank left-wing parties in large parts of the country.

Because Conservative voters, they are distributed more efficiently than left-wing voters. And it allowed Boris Johnson to win over Middle England. And what you saw was Labour, the Greens, Lib Dems and others piling up lots of boats in the cities, piling up lots of boats in the university towns, but they weren’t able to match the power of that people led realignment of the system.

Now, we know what happened next.

Boris Johnson and the Tories completely betrayed the people who had voted for them by presiding over the Boris wave, importing millions of people and basically nearly destroying our country. Only one in five of the people who came over under the Boris wave came on a worker visa, one in five.

Many of them brought 10, 11, 12 of their relatives. It was a complete betrayal of what the people asked for. But the realignment that made that election possible in 2019 remains very visible today. And that is why Reform UK have been able to power to the top of the opinion polls because they’ve started to lean into that realignment.

They’re now the most popular party among the working class, and the most popular party among Brexit voters. They’re also very, very popular among men. In some polls, they’re most popular party among men. And they’ve been putting back together that post-Brexit realignment.

My view, given some of the disagreements among individual politicians and leaders of political parties who are clearly struggling to find some kind of alliance, my view is that it would make much more sense to explain to voters, to have a conversation with voters, about the critical need to vote tactically at the next general election.

The people we might call the patriotic majority. That broad coalition is out there. Reform voters, Conservative voters, Restore Britain voters, and also millions of non-voters who don’t usually participate in general elections.

About two million non-voters came back into the political system to vote for Brexit, of course. That’s what made Brexit possible.

To say to all of those people, you have to now come together, consolidate, and support one clear alternative to the establishment. To the establishment that wants to continue with mass immigration, that wants to continue with open borders, that wants to continue putting people who are not from Britain ahead of the British people.

And that is the biggest task facing the right ahead of the next general election, because I do not believe that we can afford to lose that general election.

So the evidence is clear. The reason I suspect Andy Burnham will go for an early election is because of these divisions on the right.

And unless we’re able to get some unity among voters, to get that tactical voting among the supporters of reform, the Conservative Party and to a much lesser extent, restore Britain, which is really not very competitive outside of Great Yarmouth, then I fear the result will be the continued dominance of the left.

There are times in the history of a nation When you have to put the interests of that nation ahead of individual egos and individual political parties. And I genuinely believe the next general election is one of those times.

I want to thank you for listening to this week’s Silent Majority.

We’re putting out the early one or two episodes completely free on all platforms but soon free subscribers will only be able to access the first few minutes. If you’d like to join us in the future, come over to mattgoodwin.org. Join us as a subscriber. You’ll get not only all of the podcast episodes, but you’ll get all of our articles and no paywalls.

You’ll also be able to join our live discussions and you’ll be able to join our group chat. But for this week, that’s it for now. Have a think about what I said. Come and join us in the debates, in the chats, and I’ll see you there. Bye-bye.

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SOMETHING NEW IS STARTING

After thinking carefully about where I want to take this community of ours next, I’m delighted to announce that next Friday we are launching a brand new weekly podcast.

THE SILENT MAJORITY with Matt Goodwin

The idea behind it is simple.

Look across the mainstream media today and you’ll find countless political podcasts that are all made for exactly the same group of people.

A minority of liberal progressives and centrists who represent no more than 10-15 per cent of the population but who dominate our political and media debate.

They all look the same.

They all sound the same.

They all think the same.

And they all believe the same things.

Immigration is good. Nationalism is bad. Globalism is to be applauded. Patriotism is to be opposed. Elites know best. And the people should not be trusted.

But what about everybody else?

What about the millions of people who are looking at what is happening to Britain and the West with a growing sense of alarm and dread?

What about the millions of people who are profoundly worried about mass migration, broken borders, two-tier justice, the erosion of our identity and culture, and a political establishment that seems to prioritise everybody except their own people?

And what about the countless numbers of people who rightly feel they are being shut out of the national conversation and written out of our national story?

EVERY FRIDAY on all platforms

That is who this podcast is for. The Silent Majority.

Every Friday, I’ll be releasing a new episode of The Silent Majority right here on Substack, as well as on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.

And every week I’ll cut through the noise and talk directly and openly about issues that actually matter to millions of ordinary people.

Immigration. Borders. Two-tier justice. An out-of-touch establishment. The populist revolt sweeping the West. And what comes next for Britain and other Western nations.

My promise is simple.

In roughly 20 minutes or less, I’ll give you evidence, information, and data you’re unlikely to hear on the BBC — alongside a perspective that openly challenges the lazy Groupthink that has taken hold of our political and media class.

No groupthink.

No political correctness.

No avoiding the difficult questions.

Just somebody speaking up for the Silent Majority of hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens who are sick to the back teeth of being treated like second-class citizens in their own country.

I want this to become something you look forward to at the end of each week.

Something you can listen to while walking the dog, going on a run, doing housework, driving to work, or commuting home on the train.

And the timing could hardly be better.

Parliament returns next week. We have huge elections coming in Europe. And we may even be heading toward an early general election here in Britain.

There is an enormous amount coming. And we’re going to cover all of it.

Every Monday and Wednesday, you’ll continue to receive my written posts. And then every Friday the Silent Majority podcast brings the week together.

Free Subscribers will be able to hear the opening of the show. Paid supporters will receive the full episode every Friday.

So, if you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid supporter and unlocking everything we do, then now is the time to join us.

LAUNCH OFFER - 48 HOURS ONLY

To celebrate the launch, I’m offering a 20% discount on subscriptions for the next 48-hours. And there’s something else.

The first 30 people who upgrade will also receive the audiobook of my latest Number 1 Sunday Times bestselling book completely FREE.

The audiobook is read by me and tells the story of how Britain reached this point — and what I believe needs to change. Once the 30 audiobooks are gone, they’re gone.

So, when you become a paid supporter, you’ll get:

* The full Silent Majority podcast every Friday.

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This community has grown because tens of thousands of people believe there should still be somewhere you can discuss the big questions facing our country openly and honestly. We’ve built that community together and through Substack and our social media it is now reaching tens of millions of people every single month.

The Silent Majority podcast is the next stage of that journey, which I hope will further widen our reach, influence, and impact.

And I really want you to be part of it.

This is one of our videos for Inner Circle and Paid Subscribers.

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