Huge peaceful protests in UK over migration
Matt Goodwin: Labour is pushing the UK into civil unrest: Four astonishing things in one weekend
It’s not “the far right” that’s transforming the UK into a place where public protests and civil unrest are quickly becoming a regular feature of our national life; it is the establishment’s complete and utter failure to fulfil the very first duty of the state –to control its own borders, defend itself from invasions, and put its own people first.
It is hard, for example, to call a gathering of mainly women and girls wearing pink and performing a cheerful conga outside a hotel for asylum-seekers “right-wing extremism”….
Our hapless leaders are now importing tens of thousands of people from medieval societies and deeply misogynistic cultures that have been shown, through freedom of information requests submitted to UK police authorities, to produce people who are twenty timesmore likely than British nationals to commit rape and sexual assault. It’s not fashionable to point this out but then some facts are not fashionable.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/labour-is-pushing-the-uk-into-civil
Keir Starmer and the Labour government are pushing the United Kingdom into a dark and dangerous place, a place where the social contract between the people and the politicians who are supposed to represent them is rapidly breaking down.
That’s the conclusion you’d reach were you to look at four things that happened over the weekend, all of which symbolise how volatile and febrile things are becoming.
First, though you won’t have heard much about it in legacy media, largely peaceful public protests against the country’s broken borders and Labour’s extreme policy of importing unvetted migrants into the heart of Britain’s communities have continued to spread across the country.
After starting in Epping, Essex, where an illegal migrant who arrived on the small boats “allegedly” sexually assaulted a 14-year-old schoolgirl, in recent days these protests spread to London, Manchester, Newcastle, Cannock, Portsmouth, Southampton, and Waterlooville, in Hampshire.
While those in power would like you to believe the protests reflect organised “far-right extremism”, and “misinformation” among an ignorant public, the reality of what is now unfolding is far more troubling for the elite class and the state.
On the whole, the protests have been organic and spontaneous, emerging among the people from the bottom-up, not orchestrated top-down by hardened extremists.
While certain newspapers are working overtime to try and portray the unrest as the work of “the far-right”, which in the UK remains fringe and amateurish, anybody who has actually been on the ground will immediately observe a very different reality.
It is hard, for example, to call a gathering of mainly women and girls wearing pink and performing a cheerful conga outside a hotel for asylum-seekers “right-wing extremism”.
Furthermore, as even the Financial Times was forced to note, this weekend, far from confined to white working-class estates that are routinely demonised by a London-based media, the protests now encompass “some of the most exclusive postcodes in the capital city”.
They are attracting mothers, fathers, grandparents and other concerned citizens, all of whom, in a country once famous for avoiding civil unrest, now feel they have no other option but to take to the streets to vent their entirely legitimate anger.
And what’s stoking this righteous anger? It is the Labour Party’s —and before them the Tory party’s— deliberate choice to allow open borders in this country, to think it is somehow acceptable to house illegal migrants in hotels and houses, in the heart of Britain’s communities, next to families and children, to then force the British people to pay £5.5 million every day for a policy they never voted for, and to even allow private firms like Serco to use the British people’s own money to rig the housing market so that landlords prioritise illegal migrants over tax-paying citizens.
So, let’s be clear.
It’s not “the far right” that’s transforming the UK into a place where public protests and civil unrest are quickly becoming a regular feature of our national life; it is the establishment’s complete and utter failure to fulfil the very first duty of the state –to control its own borders, defend itself from invasions, and put its own people first.
And then, secondly, this weekend also brought another truly shocking discovery that underlines exactly why so many people are now protesting in the streets.
On Saturday evening, the country learned that a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, Warwickshire —a 12-year-old girl—was “allegedly” kidnapped and raped by two asylum-seekers, named Ahmad Mulakhil and Mohammad Kabir, staying in these taxpayer-funded homes.
Charged with kidnap, strangulation, and aiding and abetting the rape of a girl under 13 years of age, the two migrants, reportedly from Afghanistan, are merely the latest, sickening example of what the elite class would rather we not talk about.
How our hapless leaders are now importing tens of thousands of people from medieval societies and deeply misogynistic cultures that have been shown, through freedom of information requests submitted to UK police authorities, to produce people who are twenty times more likely than British nationals to commit rape and sexual assault. It’s not fashionable to point this out but then some facts are not fashionable.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, we then discovered, thirdly, something else which clearly shows how people in the corridors of power have still learned nothing at all from the equally hideous rape gang scandal, which is still rocking the country.
Shockingly, we not only learned about the rape of a child but that Warwickshire police, who oversaw the case, actually advised local politicians and officials not to reveal the fact that the alleged rapists and paedophiles were asylum-seekers for fear of, you guessed it, “inflaming community tensions”.
Taxpayer-funded authorities, in other words, are now more concerned about managing the possible reaction among the British majority than the horrifying fact that children are being raped by people who are being imported into our communities by our own government.
Was this not the exact same mindset, the exact same logic, that led to the decades-long cover-up of the rape gang scandal to begin with? A decision among out-of-touch and ideologically-motivated elites to prioritise “community relations” and the survival of the state-backed policy of multiculturalism over the need to tell people the truth about what is happening in their own communities and country?
What, exactly, is the logic here —just keep trying to cover stuff up, from the rape of our children to the state importing tens of thousands of Afghans, including members of the Taliban, in the hope nobody notices?
And have state officials learned nothing at all since not only the rape gang scandal but also Southport, when one politician after another similarly tried to suppress the truth from a people who can easily spot the truth from miles away?
Clearly not given the final thing we learned about this weekend, which is that rather than deal with what is actually causing all the chaos, carnage and civil unrest, rather than controlling our borders, our hapless Labour politicians, like those officials in Warwickshire, are far more interested in controlling our speech.
That’s right. Ever since Southport, we’ve had the pathetic sight of Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper doing what the left does best when it is losing an argument —trying to shut down free speech and free expression, impose a stifling regime of censorship, and control the supply of information.
Have you ever noticed how the very first thing to go in a leftist political religion that is now fully organised around ‘diversity’ is diversity of thought? This is because it is the thing the left cannot control.
Which is why, ever since Southport, we’ve seen the expansion of ‘non-crime hate incidents’. We’ve seen plans to impose a new, dodgy definition of ‘Islamophobia’. We’ve seen the arrival of the draconian Online Safety Act. We’ve seen Labour activists rushing off to America with plans to ‘kill’ Elon Musk’s X platform.
And now, this weekend, we discovered that the Labour government and the state are continuing to invest in a ‘disinformation unit’, using the very same tools that were created to fight ISIS online to now try and fight people who are critical of open borders, the ‘asylum hotels’, two-tier policing, and Labour’s policy of mass uncontrolled immigration.
According to documents seen by The Telegraph, the secretive unit, called the National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT), is flagging “concerning” narratives about immigration and two-tier policing to big tech platforms, even prompting officials in the Trump White House, understandably, to say they are “greatly concerned” about these blatant efforts to restrict free speech.
As we all should be. Because today, worryingly, many of us are now living in a country in which our democratically elected leaders somehow think it is appropriate and acceptable to use the same tools that were used to try and prevent Muslims from “radicalising” online, from travelling to fight with Jihadists in Syria, and from carrying out Islamist terrorist attacks, to try and control and contain people who are critical of mass migration and having to live with open borders.
Sorry but no. No. No. No.
While Labour and the elite class appear to have forgotten this fact, let me remind them that we live in a democracy, in a free society, in the original home of individual liberty, where each and every one of us has the right to publicly criticise whatever policy we might want to criticise —especially policies that nobody in this country ever voted for, or asked for.
Nobody in Britain asked to live with open borders. Nobody ever voted for mass uncontrolled immigration. Nobody asked for schoolgirls and children to be raped and sexually assaulted by medieval men who should never have been in this country to begin with. And nobody asked for their elected leaders, for the very people who are supposed to represent them and keep them safe, to prioritise controlling their speech and opinions over the far more urgent need to control their borders and country.
Yet what is now crystal clear after this weekend is that it’s exactly posts and writing like this that are now being closely watched and monitored by the state.
And I have no doubt whatsoever that somewhere in Whitehall and Westminster somebody is putting a black mark next to my name, alongside thousands of others.
So let me just end by saying this.
It is precisely because of the truly dire state of our country, as symbolised by the deeply troubling events this weekend, that, like many of you, I will never, ever, ever stop calling out the chaos and incompetence that is now flowing out of Number 10 Downing Street, which is not only putting our people and our children at risk but is now pushing our country into civil unrest.
I will never stop explaining how and why we need to urgently and dramatically change course and nor should you —because, as I say, while our leaders might have forgotten it I still remember what lies in the beating heart of this nation.
Human beings begging for food while the rest of the world sits on its hands.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov guides his Syrian counterpart Asaad al-Shaibani during a meeting in Moscow on July 31, 2025.
Sunday saw another night of protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping. Essex police were eager to clamp down on the subsequent demonstrations, arresting a total of six people and describing the atmosphere as “angry and violent”. Locals had for years expressed frustration at the area being used to house asylum seekers, a feeling which overflowed last week.
This is not the first time protesters have clashed with police over the Government’s decision to place those who cross the Channel in hotels. But the events of the past week should suggest to us that these disturbances will become more common. Epping is not like the largely Northern, post-industrial towns which protested last summer after the Southport attack. It is a leafy area, where you need a middle-class income to afford a mortgage.
One of the videos from Thursday’s protest showed the difference. A mother who looked like she would be more at home on the school run in an SUV than with a megaphone gave a rousing speech, saying that they were there to protect their children. That is because the trigger for the protests was an alleged sexual assault on a 14-year-old girl by a recently arrived Ethiopian asylum seeker, Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, staying at the asylum hotel.
The failure of this Government and the last to stop the small boats crossings is radicalising Middle England. Every week brings more young men from some of the poorest and most violent societies on earth. Some will successfully claim asylum because they claim to come from places to which they cannot be deported. They are often kept in hotels, at a cost of billions to the tax payer. Although the Government brags that hotel numbers are on the way down, asylum seekers are also being put in flats and HMOs across the country.
Increasingly there is nowhere you can go where you won’t find asylum seekers barracked nearby, with all the risks that come with that. Most recently, Eritrean Aron Hadash was convicted of assaulting a 19-year-old with learning difficulties, which make her “very childlike”. That did not matter to Hadash, who was living at taxpayer expense in a nearby Holiday Inn. Intoxicated, he pinned her down, grabbed her breasts, and touched her crotch for several minutes before she escaped. Despite showing no remorse and the judge saying that he poses a “high risk of serious harm to the public”, he was sentenced to only 14 months and has already been released after serving a year on remand.
That is why ordinary people came out onto the streets of Epping. Although there have been reports of members of the far-Right attending, the hand-made signs and mixed nature of the crowd suggests that it is largely locals. Tommy Robinson may have said he will join the protests this coming weekend, but that shows that he too was caught out. Most of the professional protestors were from counter-protestors from Stand up to Racism, who arrived from out of town with their professionally printed placards, only to be run out again by furious locals. That should actually worry the authorities more. A handful of troublemakers is one thing, a community up in arms is another.
There is a logic to such community backlash. Last month, in Ballymena, the horrific rape of a local girl, allegedly by Roma teenagers, led to riots over several days that targeted Roma and other foreigners. In the aftermath, many of the Roma have left or been moved to new accommodation. Many locals are said to be pleased, claiming that anti-social behaviour has subsequently reduced.
This shift in attitudes can also be seen in the increasingly fractious relationship between the police and the public. Images of a police van smashing into a protestor without stopping on Thursday shocked many. The sight of the police evacuating Stand up to Racism protestors in vans was also controversial, even if it was probably a sensible tactical decision to get them away. The revelation last week of a secret, multi-billion pound programme to smuggle Afghans into Britain while muzzling the press has only further reduced trust. People find it hard to believe in the rule of law when our borders go unguarded, while prosperous market towns have riot police on the streets.
Restoring trust requires action. Our broken human rights laws are at the root of the small boat crisis, which is why Suella Braverman and I co-wrote a paper published this week which shows how Britain can leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Once we have regained control of our borders, we can begin closing the asylum hotels and HMOs. Those granted asylum over the last few years should have their cases reexamined, to see if they are genuine or if they were only beneficiaries of our overly-generous laws. This will help make our country safer for women and girls, bringing peace back to our streets.