Imagine if, in Britain, there was an ethnic minority that was legally disadvantaged when applying for jobs and university places. This same group is regularly denounced in the press, ridiculed online and mocked by comedians. Imagine that their history is rewritten by academics, who  represent them as villains and monsters. When they engage in protest, whether online or in the streets, state responses are swift and disproportionate. Indeed, imagine that so hated and reviled is this minority, that their daughters can be raped and prostituted, and the police do nothing. Not only that, but when the minority group complains or takes action, the police go after them, and they are accused of spreading dangerous misinformation. 

But I am not describing a minority group, I am describing the status of white, working class, Britons. A combination of civilisational self-hatred and class and educational elitism has rendered the status of disadvantaged white Britons as that of a despised and marginalised group. For years, Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to prey upon vulnerable white children, and nobody lifted a hand to stop it. Not the police, who dismissed victims as sluts. Not the social workers who tolerated and sometimes facilitated the abuse. Not the Home Office, that failed to deport most of the men convicted of paedophilic rape, including the ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang. Not the local councils that covered it up. Not the media that attacked those who sounded the alarm as racists and fabulists. Not the government, which did nothing, other than opening the borders and ordering police to go after “online hate speech”. 

There are those who try to explain these actions as a tragic error, borne of the “noble” goal of protecting the Pakistani community from racial hatred. There are many problems with this idea. For one, if there is a particular culture in this country that tolerates its young men engaging in racialised sexual abuse, then it deserves to be criticised, until it has changed its ways and acted. When the Catholic Church was revealed to have covered up and allowed abuse, deep and searching questions were asked.  

By contrast, there has been next to no scrutiny of how young men, many of whom were married, attended mosque and were active members of their community, felt no compunction about abusing young girls so long as they were white. Had gangs of white men been abusing Pakistani girls in this way, there would rightly have been profound soul searching about racism and misogyny amongst white Britons. No paper or politician would have hesitated to condemn it, and no attempts to claim it was a troubled minority would have held water as an excuse. 

Instead, the outrage has been allowed to bubble away beneath the surface. Much of the country has been kept ignorant of the abuses, or failed to appreciate their full horror and scale, because media reporting has been partial and highly censored. Thanks to social media, and alternative news sources, this is finally changing. After years of courts keeping the details of these crimes from the media, documents have finally started to be available to the public. The details are indescribable. The level of violation experiences by these girls, some as young as 11, is the stuff of nightmares. But it all really happened, and many of the men involved will spend less than a decade in prison, or none at all. None so far have been deported, even though many are Pakistani citizens — but those same British courts keeping the details of these crimes out of the press are far less effective at getting anybody aboard a deportation flight, even when that person is guilty of a crime so heinous that in a time of war would be evidence of an atrocity. Yet not only are such men allowed to walk free after these acts, we cannot even remove them to their country of origin. 

Those who persist in believing these are isolated crimes — despite thousands of victimised girls, and a pattern of abuse so prevalent that in some areas 1 in 73 Pakistani men have been prosecuted — and that the greatest menace is nativism, need to urgently rethink their position. Perhaps few of them will believe me, since I am willing to say what they will not, but I desperately do not want Britain to have a nativist politics. Britain is not, and never has been an ethnostate — it is a pluralistic union of nations and peoples, a hybrid from its earliest history of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples. “White” identity is an alien concept, borne of the experience of European settler communities in the New World, with little bearing on the UK. 

The main sponsors of white nativism are high court judges, left-wing journalists, home office officials, police chiefs, and Labour councillors

Yet a white British identity, and a nativist white politics, is emerging in Britain now, and there is no ambiguity as to who is to blame: our liberal elite. The main sponsors of white nativism in our country are, to name a representative sample, high court judges, academic sociologists, left wing journalists, home office civil servants, police chiefs, and Labour councillors. The answer to what is driving nativism is astonishingly, startlingly simple — unprecedented, uncontrolled mass migration from third world countries, combined with a legal, economic and institutional architecture that systematically disadvantages white Britons. 

The grooming gangs scandal embodies the problem at its most basic — a huge number of people arrive from another culture, they are poorly integrated, and a significant subset of them proceed to abuse and exploit their white neighbours. The initial problem is created by the excessively open border, but it is then compounded and multiplied by those in authority. They recognise that these problems exist, indeed, they are getting huge numbers of reports of the problems. But their view is that it is not good for the public to know about the problem, and that preventing “racism” (in the form of public anger at the Pakistani community) is more important than stopping the abuse. Indeed, as endless reporting has revealed, many of them viewed white working class girls in exactly the same way their abusers did: as reckless, sexually precocious adolescents who were responsible for their own abuse. Police, social workers and gang members all saw these girls as “fair game” because of their class, and the colour of their skin. 

This incontrovertible fact, and others like it — not GB News, not Reform, not Nigel Farage, not Elon Musk, not Tommy Robinson — is driving nativism in Britain today. Who, confronted with the violent and systematic rape of the children of their community, targeted because of their skin colour, by gang members who escape justice because of their skin colour, would not be tempted, even for a moment, by a politics of white racial solidarity? What other option has the average British person been offered by our rotten political and media classes? Fourteen years of “Conservative” government has seen billions spent on housing illegal migrants, and migration surge to unprecedented levels, all as the country experiences stagnating wages and a worsening housing shortage. In a public life where ethnic self-interest for every race other than white people is rewarded and praised, it is hardly surprising that white racial resentment would start to gain serious traction.

What does “never again” look like in this context of racialised progressive politics? First of all, it means restoring public confidence in the policing of both borders and populations. The covenant of British citizenship must regain its value, and its boundaries must be made steep. Systems of racial preference in hiring, education and criminal justice must be eliminated entirely as racist and unjust. Minority communities must be held to the same standards of conduct, individually and collectively, as everyone else, and when recent immigrants fall criminally short, deportation needs to be on the table. Citizenship is a privilege: not a right. 

We should need no other reason than simple human decency to do whatever is necessary to properly punish perpetrators and ensure this can never happen again. But if you need another reason for decisive action, then consider this: we are rapidly becoming a country divided by ethnicity, one in which a politics of white racial grievance is gaining traction. The grooming gang scandal justifies and legitimates this politics, and it implicates the British state at every level. If you don’t like nativism, if you hate and despise racism, if you want to see Britain united across ethnic and religious divisions, then for the love of God — make it so this can never happen again.