Carl Wilkinson

We really have reached Soviet levels of gaslighting. A man is murdered, and somehow, the real problem is that people are angry about it. Children are gang raped, and somehow the real problem is that people keep mentioning it and “dividing communities.” This is moral inversion. No. Crime divides communities. Institutional failure divides communities. Cover-ups, euphemisms, cowardice, and elite contempt divide communities.

You condemn ideological reconstruction while endorsing the erosion of the human connections that help people resist it. Kinship, cultural inheritance and the continuity of a historical people sustain loyalties that neither the state nor the market creates. Yet you treat those attachments as suspect when people defend them against the demands of “integration”. Integration into what, if the nation itself becomes nothing more than a population sharing an economy? You cannot tear down the bonds that sustain a people and then act bewildered when abstract ideologies occupy the space they leave. Calling the result “communism” does not excuse your part in weakening those bonds. Yes, the English are waking up. Calling them racist for defending their continuity will not make their attachments disappear. They will resist as a people, drawing on the very loyalties you dismiss. Europe’s peoples have ties to family, place and inherited ways of life that run deeper than any political programme. If you cannot understand their determination to endure, you do not understand the Europe you claim to defend.

Much of what you are discussing was lawful under the legal systems of the time, though we find it morally objectionable today. If we apply modern moral judgements retrospectively and turn them into inherited financial obligations, where does that principle stop? Five generations? Ten? A thousand years? Who owes whom, and on what consistent principle?

My objection to ILR isn’t whether the qualifying period should be five, ten or fifteen years. It’s the entire principle behind it. I would abolish ILR altogether. If someone comes to Britain on a work visa, they come here to work. That is the basis on which we granted permission. It should not automatically become a pathway to permanent residence. If they subsequently wish to become British citizens, they should return to their country of origin and apply through a separate citizenship process. The present system creates the very circumstances subsequently used to argue against reforming it. The Government establishes a route from temporary residence to permanent settlement. People understandably build lives, form relationships and raise families along that route. Those circumstances are then invoked as reasons why the Government cannot change the rules or require people to leave. Article 8 of the ECHR adds another complication, as family and private life claims can be used to resist removal even where the original permission to enter was granted for employment. We’ve created a system in which temporary immigration progressively generates claims to permanent residence, and the consequences of that policy become the justification for preserving it. There is a legitimate question about honouring commitments already made. But that is entirely different from accepting that temporary employment should create an expectation of permanent settlement. Changing the qualifying period from five years to fifteen, or compromising at ten, does nothing to resolve that underlying contradiction. It merely postpones the point at which it arises.

This is the poverty of purely civic nationalism. A passport establishes citizenship, not a people’s historical origins or continuity. Once those distinctions disappear, British, French and German become little more than administrative categories. A nation is more than a collection of taxpayers.

You spent decades promoting a hyper-individualised society, treating people as economic units to optimise for productivity and encouraging competition, mobility, and individual self-interest at the expense of community and belonging. Now you condemn people for acting on the very principles you encouraged, while invoking national duty and collective sacrifice when you need their labour, their money, or their lives. Before lecturing the British people about responsibility, perhaps government should examine its own. You cannot neglect the reciprocal obligations that sustain a nation and then expect unconditional sacrifice from the people you have neglected.

Britain maintains Trident for a reason. It exists to deter existential aggression that could threaten our country’s survival. Any Russian attack on Britain is far more plausibly going to involve cyberattacks, sabotage, infrastructure disruption or limited conventional strikes than an invasion of the British Isles or an all-out nuclear attack. In most conceivable circumstances, Britain would have political choices to make about the nature and extent of its response. What the Army Chief appears to be asking for, however, goes considerably further. He wants the population prepared to accept sacrifices and support military action before the government has established precisely what conflict it expects Britain to fight. You cannot establish public consent to an unspecified future war by first obtaining abstract agreement that national defence is important.

Matthew sounds like a Soviet commissar proudly announcing record wheat production while millions starve. The statistics are glorious, comrades!

This could be Burnham’s first big political mistake. I don’t think he anticipated the attention his claims about Russian interference in Brexit would attract. As Prime Minister, he cannot simply make the allegation and move on. The government now needs to produce the evidence, explain what interference occurred, and establish whether it actually affected the result. Russian interference and Russia changing the referendum outcome are two very different claims.

Then publish the evidence. What exactly constitutes Russian interference here? Propaganda, social media manipulation, covert funding? Foreign interference is serious, but evidence of an attempt to influence voters does not prove the referendum result changed. What, precisely, is Burnham confirming?

15,000 likes for a basic category error is farcical. American and Australian are national identities of modern settler states. Their equivalent here is British, not ethnic English. A Black person born in Britain can be a British citizen without English ancestry, just as a white Australian can be Australian without Aboriginal ancestry. English also refers to a historic people who existed long before the British state. You’ve substituted British for English, then Anglo-Saxon for English ancestry.

Liberals celebrate a liberal speech from a liberal pretending to be a conservative, and apparently this marks the great conservative revival. What's changed, exactly?

Hmm, I don’t actually have an argument. So I’ll just rearrange a few definitions, call you a racist, and declare that anyone who disagrees with me is a terrible person. No need to explain why British citizenship and inherited English identity are supposedly interchangeable. I’ll just make questioning that assumption morally unacceptable. There. Debate settled. Oh, and don’t forget football!

Quite the media pile-on today. Scroll through the people declaring this the great defining moment of Badenoch’s leadership, and a striking number of them are political journalists. It has the same energy as when Hollywood releases some painfully self-important ideological film: the critics give it 10/10, congratulate one another on its bravery, and then seem genuinely baffled when the audience gives it 0/10. Perhaps wait and see whether anyone outside the Westminster press gallery was actually impressed.

This is not really about you, or any other minority. For once, maybe just maybe, what is happening concerns the English themselves. Yes, I understand why the government wants everyone to feel they belong here. That has been the logic of the whole post-imperial British project. But that does not mean the English have to surrender the right to define themselves as a historic people, or accept that their identity simply means anyone who happens to live in England. Perhaps, for once, the English can ask what is happening to their own country, their own continuity, and their own identity without the entire discussion immediately being reframed around everybody else.

Love of the stranger does not require abolishing the neighbour; universal human dignity does not abolish kinship; and charity does not require a nation to abandon the border that distinguishes those for whom it bears political responsibility from those it receives as guests. A border rightly governed is therefore not the repudiation of Christian charity. It is one of the ordinary instruments through which a political community protects its peace, preserves its common good, and exercises prudence about whom it can receive and incorporate.

In case anyone was wondering, this is the Conservative Party, not to be mistaken for the Green Party Conference.

How can Charles be King of an institution more than a thousand years old when the monarchy has changed so enormously since Alfred? Because continuity does not require immobility. Dynasties have changed. Laws have changed. Territory, religion and constitutional powers have changed. Yet we still understand the Crown as an institution possessing historical continuity through those changes. The same principle applies to a people. The English of 2026 do not need to be genetically, culturally, or institutionally identical to the English of Alfred’s age for the English people to be continuous. And like Charles, I too stand at the end of a chain stretching back into that distant past. I am not an Anglo-Saxon. I do not speak Old English. I do not live by the customs of the ninth century. Almost everything about the world my ancestors inhabited has changed. Yet here I am: another Wilkinson in a long succession of Wilkinsons, the name itself carrying the memory of earlier generations: Wilkin, a diminutive of William, and Wilkinson, the son of Wilkin. One generation following another. That is what continuity means. It does not mean remaining unchanged. It means that change happens to something which persists through time. Charles III is not Alfred the Great. I am not one of my medieval ancestors. The English today are not the English of the ninth century. But none of us appeared from nowhere. Each stands at the end of a historical chain whose form and circumstances have changed, but whose continuity is precisely what lets us say the later thing is connected to the earlier one.