I probably think about Essex more than the average person. I grew up there before my career took me to London. I’ve since returned and now commute between the two.

My upbringing in many respects was the archetypal Essex story. I was born in Dagenham, a town that was once part of the county before it became absorbed into Greater London in the 1960s. As my parents worked full-time, I spent much of my childhood at my nan and grandad’s house just off the Heathway - the main high street leading up to the station.

I would accompany my grandad on his stroll up the Heathway to get the morning paper, enticed by the promise of sweets. The elderly man behind the counter would greet us with a warm but knowing smile. I was too young at the time to understand - and, as is typical of his generation, my grandad never mentioned it - but both men had served in World War 2. It’s strange to think about that now.

This would have been the mid to late nineties. I was around seven. The date is important because not long afterwards, Dagenham changed beyond recognition. The newsagent we’d fetch the morning paper from was replaced by an Afro-Caribbean hair salon. A nail parlour and chicken shop sprang up next door.

I had a good ten more years with my grandad during this period of large-scale transformation before he died, and a particular kind of Britain went with him.

Census data would later confirm my subjective reality. A place that was almost exclusively White British in the late 1980s fell to 80 per cent White British in 2001, then to 49 per cent in 2011, and to just 31 per cent by 2021. Over the same period the Black population rose to around a fifth of the borough, South Asian communities to about a quarter, and other White non-British groups, including Eastern Europeans, also grew substantially.

This rapid demographic shift was compounded by deindustrialisation. Ford Dagenham became a potent symbol of this decline. Once Europe’s largest car factory, bringing jobs and security to generations of the white working class, it stopped making cars in 2002.

No one has a better grasp of the twin impact of these changes than the writer . Like me, he grew up in Dagenham but, being 15 years my senior, lived through that upheaval.

A lifelong trade union activist and prominent figure in the Blue Labour movement, Embery heaps as much opprobrium on Margaret Thatcher as he does on Tony Blair for unleashing market forces that displaced the local white working-class community.

He would have seen the writing on the wall when mainstream politicians framed any local pushback as racist bigotry - a contempt that handed the British National Party its best-ever result in local government elections and later gave us Brexit.

With crime on the rise, my parents, too, saw the writing on the wall. Both had worked tirelessly to achieve enough social mobility to leave the area. We then moved - or were pushed - further out into Essex. I was around nine at the time.

I relay my specific story because it’s now playing out in towns and cities across the country. Migration remains the number one issue for British voters, exceeding the economy and the NHS, the latest polling shows. This trend remains constant month on month. The conspicuous rise of migrant hotels in traditional working-class areas has only increased its salience.

Now elections are fought and won on the perception that politicians will stop the boats. What else explains Reform UK’s meteoric rise in a little over two years?

The people of Essex have a lot to say on this matter, as they were patient zero in an experiment no one consented to - an experiment that has resulted in large-scale white flight and an elitist crackdown on popular resentment.

When this messaging comes from a celebrity, it can shift the centre of political gravity in the country. The most instructive example of this came last year when Essex-born Rylan Clark put his head above the parapet.

The reality star’s extraordinary intervention on ITV’s This Morning came as Epping - a leafy market town in Essex - found itself at the centre of Britain’s immigration debate after an asylum seeker staying at the town’s Bell Hotel was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. He was subsequently convicted.

In a discussion with journalist Camilla Tominey and The Apprentice winner-turned-judge Tim Campbell, Clark said: “I find it absolutely insane that all these people are risking their lives coming across the Channel. And when they get here, it does seem, and I think this is why a lot of Labour voters as well are saying there’s something wrong, it feels like, ‘Welcome, come on in.’ That’s the narrative we’re being fed.

“’Here’s the iPad. Here’s the NHS in reception of your hotel. Here’s three meals a day. Here’s a games room in the hotel. Have a lovely time and welcome.’”

The former X Factor star’s comments were significant for several reasons. Clark had never made overtly political statements before, so every word landed like a gut punch. He wasn’t playing to his base - evidenced by the hundreds of Ofcom complaints he would receive - but was speaking from the heart.

Clark’s exasperation at how endlessly accommodating the British state is to its new arrivals resonated precisely because of his background; like my parents, who were born in Mile End, he lived in a council house with his mother Linda in Stepney Green before moving out into Essex.

He wasn’t born with a silver spoon; he worked hard to improve his lot. Imagine how it feels, then, when large groups of men cross the Channel on dinghies and are put up in cushy hotels at the taxpayer’s expense. Granting automatic rights to the unearned throws sand in the gears of social mobility. When someone from Clark’s background makes this point, the whole nation listens.

And the impact was felt immediately, generating columns in major newspapers and sparking further panel debates. Tom Skinner, another Essex success story and friend of Clark’s, tweeted: “I’m proud of you mate” as the sharks started circling on social media.

As a sidenote, Skinner’s own meteoric rise reveals something significant about the Essex story. He went from flogging mattresses in Romford to having a “BBQ an’ beers” with America’s vice president JD Vance last year. Skinner also has a growing influence in Westminster and is being talked up as a future leader on the right.

Returning to the Epping saga, one striking aspect was the nature of the protests. Yes, there was occasional trouble, which is to be expected when more than 1,000 people turn up outside a migrant hotel, but the protests largely took place without incident.

The Pink Ladies movement also emerged from the protests outside the Bell Hotel. It’s worth reflecting on the contribution these women have made to shifting the Overton window on immigration. For as long as I can remember, the mainstream media and politicians portrayed anyone who would protest against the influx of new arrivals as knuckle-dragging thugs.

I don’t doubt that this used to be the case, and it still is in many places, but suddenly images of desperate women holding up placards were attracting national coverage - women who could be your mum, sister or neighbour. These images punched through the illusion that this was a fringe issue for far-right football hooligans.

It’s easy to mock the “rough around the edges” Essex stereotype, but in an era that prizes charisma, authenticity and immediacy, it cuts through. It's why Nigel Farage's seat of Clacton, despite the current scandals engulfing his party, could still be his route to No 10.

Then there’s the inimitable Allison Pearson, the Daily Telegraph journalist who lives in Saffron Walden (her column about the bucolic market town in north-west Essex is well worth a read).

The journalist recently received a public apology and a five-figure payout from Essex’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Roger Hirst, after his officers paid her an unwelcome visit in 2024 for allegedly inciting racial hatred.

Pearson's refusal to be intimidated by the Orwellian state - her case became one of the most high-profile in a spate of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) - marks a major turning point in the ongoing fight over free speech in Britain.

Given Essex’s proximity to London, perhaps it’s no surprise that my hometown has proven to be a conveyor belt of influential media personalities. This isn’t a shallow phenomenon. It matters that there is a cohort of successful and inquisitive minds living close enough to the city to witness its destruction while maintaining a safe enough distance to present an alternative vision.

It doesn’t just benefit the South East but those Red Wall seats in northern England. How? Because, whatever our new prime minister might insist, London is the locus of power. When the good people of Essex wield their influence in the city to give expression to local grievances, it resonates across the country.

In my own humble way, I understand this influence. During my two-year stint at GB News, I told stories that I felt were being ignored or suppressed by the establishment media. I instinctively knew who the audience were, because I grew up with them. I subsequently felt a moral obligation to represent their interests as I took local and national government to task. I feel that responsibility at Outpost today.

The Essex story has not run its course. Tensions are simmering in the towns and villages that surround the Wethersfield camp, which sits roughly six miles north-west of Braintree.

The former RAF base is now home to about 800 migrants. In June, it was announced the number of residents would soon rise to 1,245 and the site would remain open beyond 2027. The residents have been getting the bus into Braintree, Colchester and Chelmsford.

All this suggests that, like his predecessor, Andy Burnham will be forced into an uncomfortable marriage with my hometown. Is it too late to relocate No 10 North?

But this is about so much more than Afghanistan. It’s about the West and the wars it has chosen to fight in the 21st century. Trillions of dollars have been spent, thousands of Western troops have lost their lives and Britain and America have been engaged in almost continuous military operations, while China has grown into an economic superpower. With the Taliban now controlling the whole of Afghanistan, the National Resistance Front still fighting and another American war underway in Iran, the question is whether the West has learned anything from twenty-five years of conflict, or whether it will continue to start wars without knowing how they will end.

That lunacy, he says, found its most farcical expression in a Home Office booklet for new migrants explaining rape and that men and women are “equal”. Colin asks why a daily drumbeat of sexual assaults, so shocking in their depravity, barely makes front-page news anymore. Confronting these hard questions, he reaches a startling conclusion about how we got here.

Jason Arday, the youngest Black professor ever appointed by Cambridge, staked his reputation on a Homeric struggle against adversity. That story has since unravelled in the most devastating fashion.

Contrast this with Ray Honeyford, a white Bradford headmaster who had a hardscrabble childhood. He wrote one honest article criticising multiculturalism in 1985 and was hounded out of his job.

Colin explores why one man was lionised for saying what people wanted to hear, while the other was destroyed for telling the truth.

I'll be the first to admit, journalists in Britain are a nuisance. Our pursuit of the truth can be obsessive, our methods and execution abrasive. "Can you soften the language?" was the constant refrain I'd get from No10 every time I asked for a right of reply.

The current media landscape leaves much to be desired, too. Westminster hacks seem to care more about having a skinful with staffers down the Westminster Arms than holding MPs to account, and I’m not overly enthused about stuffing media organisations with former and current politicians.

The public interest defence is also doing a lot of heavy lifting when a celebrity’s dating history is dredged up in the wake of their death.

And yet, despite these shortcomings, I’m thankful that I live in Britain, not Russia, where merely calling Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine a “war” can result in a 15-year prison sentence, a life in exile or even murder, and all independent media organisations have been banned.

It would seem that a growing number of politicians, high-profile commentators, and even fellow journalists violently disagree. They appear to relish Britain becoming an autocracy.

I’ve reached this disturbing conclusion after carefully weighing the response to the tragic death of Jason Arday, the former University of Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row, who was found unresponsive in his London home on Friday.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski and actress Jameela Jamil are among the 90,000 signatories to a petition calling for an “immediate public inquiry into how to ensure a responsible press”.

The letter, issued by the Good Law Project, which had been representing Arday after he stood down from his Cambridge role, noted that many of its signatories had warned several media outlets that the “relentless pursuit of Dr Arday risked his suicide”.

One notable signatory, Lord Woolley, principal of Homerton College at Cambridge, said Arday had been subjected to a “vicious witch hunt”. Left-wing commentator Narinder Kaur decried the “racist media” for killing Arday and called for a “Leveson 2” – presumably to muzzle the press. Marina Purkiss, the other go-to leftie, was incandescent with rage as she told Jeremy Vine that the sheer volume of articles written about Arday amounted to a “bloodsport”.

The writer Matt Haig urged Andy Burnham to change the law so journalists face “consequences” for what he calls a “politically motivated campaign” (I call rigorous reporting).

Then there’s the nasty campaign to discredit Nathan Cofnas, the journalist who broke the story about Arday. The hurty words brigade have called him every defamatory name under the sun, from a “eugenicist” to a “white Jewish supremacist”. One user on X made his doxxing explicit, announcing that he was starting a “witch-hunt” against Cofnas with his post. The accused made the point that he probably would have been murdered if he were in London the night throngs of activists attended a vigil for Arday.

Likening these attacks on the media to flirting with tyranny will strike some as unfounded hyperbole and even self-serving coming from a hack - these are just basic appeals to human decency, right? Think again.

Press freedom is a sliding scale and its retreat is barely noticeable at first. But the environment can soon change. And powerful interests are increasingly looking for pretexts to crack down on those asking too many questions.

According to the watchdog RSF (Reporters Without Borders), global press freedom has hit a 25-year low. Over half of the world’s countries now fall into “difficult” or “very serious” categories as hostile political attacks, economic pressures, and expansion of legal weapons make the environment in which independent media operate increasingly challenging.

This decline is sharpest not in countries that have long been ruled by strongmen but in ostensible democracies – a profoundly chilling development because, as The Economist has shown, graft rises as press freedom falls.

This negative feedback loop extends to trust in the media. The more politicians are scrutinised for their actions, the more likely they are to frame journalists as part of “the establishment” out to get them and sow public distrust.

The rise of social media has made their jobs infinitely easier. When the likes of Alastair Campbell go after the ‘right-wing press’ for creating the conditions that led to Arday’s death, pay close attention to who likes and retweets these posts.

Blaming the mean old media also wilfully ignores the hard truth behind the whole tragedy: an obsession with race has left two children without a father. A system built on sand propelled him into the ivory tower because no one interrogated his claims. Living a lie ultimately consumed him.

It exposes the ugly myth at the heart of identity politics: that an immutable characteristic affords a person special insight. The truth is, knowledge is knowledge: it doesn't change when refracted through the prism of race, gender or sexuality.

This argument would land differently coming from any number of black intellectuals and journalists I hugely respect, but that’s again missing the point. We need to break out of this straitjacket that insists identity matters in the pursuit of excellence.

Graham takes us through the issue’s highlights, including a major summer books bonanza, meanwhile over in the sport section, Boris Starling’s looks at what happened to England’s 1966 World Cup heroes.

The issue also features some important reposting concerning the continuing controversy around the Government’s digital ID plans, and David Shipley’s investigation into the crisis at the Atheneum Club.

Henry Hill then walks listeners thought his cover story: is Andy Burnham really the “new Boris Johnson”? Henry examines the striking parallels between the two politicians, from media-driven politics and North-South rhetoric to the promise of devolution without confronting its difficult trade-offs.

Tom, Henry and Graham discuss Burnham’s political honeymoon, the looming realities of his first budget, the prospects of an early general election, Reform UK’s growing strength, and whether the idea of “Manchesterism” has any substance at all.

Read the Summer Double Issue and listen to the full conversation on The Critic Show.

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Andy Burnham is considering exempting foreign care workers from Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s planned visa crackdown, which would extend their route to permanent residency from five years to ten, as part of his proposal for a new National Care Service.

Care workers were one of the largest groups who came in the so-called “Boriswave”, which saw unprecedented levels of legal immigration under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. It has been calculated that 1 in every 25 people in the UK today came between 2021-24.

Between 2022 and 2024, the government issued 249,594 main visas on the Health and Care visa, with another 366,672 visas issued to dependants. Under the current rules, they will be eligible for permanent residency after five years of work, a deadline that many will soon reach. Estimates of the long-term fiscal cost vary, but they are often in the billions.

Carving out an exemption for care workers is poor policy, not least because the evidence is that low-skilled workers like them will switch jobs once they have residency. That means that any exemption to benefit the care sector will likely only be temporary.

Once they have residency, it only takes another year, a few fairly easy tests and a small fee to acquire citizenship. Currently the language requirement is only B1 level, which is the intermediate level where you can write basic emails but would struggle with anything more complex. Once they are British nationals, such people and their children will be a permanent part of the nation.

The most recent immigration statistics show that in the year ending March 2026, there were 237,000 grants of citizenship. That’s actually a decline from last year, when numbers were closer to a quarter of a million. Such huge numbers mean that the country is changing fast, yet there is very little debate about the subject.

That is typical of British immigration policy. Before the Second World War, nearly everyone in the British Empire was a British subject, able to move around largely freely. The high cost of travel and the lack of any welfare state meant that in practice very few people did, with much more emigration from Britain than migration to it.

Following the end of the war, the Dominions began to develop their own citizenship laws, which necessitated working out what British citizenship meant. A classic compromise was created, allowing Commonwealth citizens to have many of the same rights as British citizens. New waves of migration, initially Afro-Caribbean but followed by South Asian, led to political anger over the issue of immigration and a tightening of the immigration laws by the 1970s.

Having substantially restricted immigration, the subject once again receded from public interest. Then in 1997, New Labour inaugurated a period of mass immigration which resulted in levels of net immigration never again dipping below 100,000 a year (except during COVID).

Many of those migrants have subsequently been granted citizenship. Although the case of Alaa Abd El Fattah is exceptional, it is also indicative of the lack of care taken when it comes to British citizenship. Despite only having a tenuous link to the UK, the Egyptian dissident was granted British citizenship. The discovery of years of anti-British and anti-white postings on social media didn’t affect that. Having already made him a citizen, the government argued that revocation of that citizenship should require a high bar, such as fraud or being a national security threat. Easy to grant, hard to revoke.

At the same time, the post-war compromises meant that privileges reserved for citizens in many countries are available to foreign nationals here. They can be part of a jury, vote in British elections, and even win political office in some parts of the UK.

In a democracy, voting is the exercise of political power. It may have been an acceptable privilege to grant voting rights to the few Commonwealth citizens here in the immediate post-war period, but it is clearly incompatible with having a population of 6 million foreign nationals, a substantial portion of whom are Commonwealth citizens.

News that the government may introduce mandatory electoral registration and compulsory voting should therefore be a concern. Currently, resident Irish and Commonwealth citizens are all eligible to vote and therefore would, along with British citizens, face fines for failing to vote if voting were made compulsory. That could mean that a future general election victory might be decided by the votes of foreign nationals forced into the polling booth by the British government.

There is therefore an urgent need to reform the way that citizenship works in Britain. First, there should be no automatic assumption that coming to Britain for work or asylum means eventual citizenship.

Secondly, the barriers to citizenship should be raised, to ensure that it is granted to those who truly earned it and wish to become fully British. Thirdly, the privileges granted to some foreign nationals should be revoked and political power placed only in the hands of British citizens.

It’s a bad time for British academia. The University of Cambridge faces a credibility crisis after its faculty was taken in by what appears to be a serial fantasist.

The plagiarism allegations dogging Jason Arday, until recently the youngest Black professor ever to walk these hallowed halls, expose the extent to which woke ideology has corrupted Cambridge’s hiring practices.

Is intellectualism merely an affectation? How could these academics be so incurious? Is equality of opportunity now secondary to identity and victimhood? Unsettling questions abound.

The outrage is, therefore, understandable. That being said, the Arday affair was not the most chilling revelation to emerge from Britain’s elite institutions last week.

The Oxford Union finally released its debate on Islam following months of pressure, which, before it got drowned out by the Arday affair, exposed the religion’s influence on polite British society.

The particular moment I’m referring to was made all the more shocking because it was antithetical to the Union’s core value: the right to express one’s opinions freely and have them challenged.

This is the same debating society that likes to impress upon you just how much it values free speech.

Sitting proudly on its website is Harold Macmillan’s proclamation that the debating society, which was founded in 1823, is “the last bastion of free speech in the Western world”.

The quote’s attribution reads, or rather shouts: ‘PRIME MINISTER OF THE UNITED KINGDOM 1957-63, LIBRARIAN OF THE UNION, 1914’, underscoring the point that freedom of expression and the pursuit of knowledge are the central pillars upon which human greatness rests.

The Union’s commitment to free speech has been no stranger to controversy throughout its 200-odd-year history, not least because it has tended only to reflect the views of a cossetted and craven elite.

The most infamous example of this was in 1933, when students voted 275 to 153 to pass the infamous motion, “That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country”.

The resolution ignited a national firestorm, with Winston Churchill going as far as to say that Adolf Hitler would draw the conclusion that Britain had lost the moral courage to fight his aggression.

The charge that the Union is stacked with progressive appeasers is therefore nothing new, but it hit a new low this year, when leaked WhatsApp messages revealed that its president Arwa Elrayess described Hamas’s murderous assault on Israel on 7 October 2023 as “proportional” and said that groups branded as terrorists were often later “lauded as heroes” in a student group chat (she said the allegations made against her were “categorically untrue” and that her comments had been taken out of context).

Let’s also not forget that her appointment followed George Abaraonye, the previous president-elect, who was ousted for celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk (he posted a message on Instagram which read “Charlie Kirk got shot loool”).

As odious as I find their positions, I defend their right to hold them. As the great novelist Salman Rushdie once famously said: “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

I find it sanity-restoring, then, that in the spirit of free speech, Elrayess - the Union’s first Palestinian president - invited Tommy Robinson to debate the motion “This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam”.

More admirable still is that she faced a barrage of hate for doing so and defended her decision in an article in The Telegraph.

You can imagine my disappointment, then, that Elrayess and the other speakers opposing the motion were all too willing to renege on their commitment to free speech for fear of offending Muslims.

I’m referring to the moment the Chamber descended into chaos after Laurence Fox, who was arguing in favour of the motion, brandished an envelope purportedly containing a cartoon picture of Muhammad.

You can feel the temperature rising in the room as Fox says the cartoon picture in his envelope “instills in me feelings much more worrying than suspicion” and “My wife asked me not to show this for fear of repercussions for my family” but “I will not be commanded to love or submit to ideas or ideologies”.

That same president who’d shown a rare flash of bravery leading up to the debate suddenly leapt out of her chair in a skittish state and attempted to cut the speaker off.

“Is it not enough that half the team that invited you to this debate were Muslim women who wanted to hear your expression and your arguments? Is it not enough that I, as a Muslim president, have invited you to this Chamber to give your arguments? Is it not enough justification and evidence for you to believe that we do believe in free speech?,” she bleated.

Even Jacob Rees-Mogg, who, like Macmillan before him, was elected Librarian of the Oxford Union, joined the rising chorus, asking whether the ban on using props in the House of Commons extends to the Union in a desperate attempt to stall Fox.

His ploy was ultimately dismissed after a point of order ruled that there’s no ban on using props in the House and a young chap in the audience rather brilliantly made the point that no such prohibition was applied to PLO flags that had been flown in previous debates.

Yet when it came to the grand reveal, a collective terror paralysed the debating chamber. It was as if Fox was about to utter Voldemort’s name and activate the curse that summons the Death Eaters.

Instead, he opened the envelope and unveiled a cartoon picture of Rees-Mogg. It was a stroke of comedic genius that proved his point entirely and, to my mind, instantly won the debate.

The nervous reaction was no laughing matter, however, and there are serious lessons that need to be drawn from it.

I’m not saying the collective hysteria wasn’t understandable. From armed Islamists storming the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and murdering 12 people to the beheading of the French teacher Samuel Paty and the Batley schoolteacher who, at the time of writing, is still in hiding, the message is loud and clear: showing depictions of what Laurence Fox provocatively called the “very oversensitive sky wizard” can put your life in mortal danger.

“Oversensitive” being the optimal word. How can an open society founded on the ideas of the Enlightenment live cheek by jowl with a group of people who desire nothing more than to police thought and freedom of expression, and who are this combustible when you don’t comply?

Before the usual suspects pile in, I’m not saying most Muslims are Islamists - I draw all the necessary distinctions between moderate adherents of the faith and its radical arm.

I also acknowledge that there’s no way of knowing exactly what percentage of the two billion Muslims worldwide are sympathetic to extremists or are in fact extremists.

But there are some concerning data points. In 2006, as thousands gathered across the Muslim world to burn European embassies, issue threats and even take hostages in protest against 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper, an Ipsos poll of British Muslims found that 62 per cent agreed that Muslims were right to be offended by the cartoons, while 22 per cent disagreed.

More concerning still, in a survey of 1,000 British Muslims undertaken for the BBC by the polling organisation ComRes in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack, four-fifths (78 per cent) of respondents found it ‘deeply offensive’ when the Prophet Mohamed was depicted in images, while almost one-third (32 per cent) of British Muslims said they were not surprised by the attacks on the magazine offices.

However, more than two-thirds of those polled said violence against the cartoonists and publishers behind the cartoons was unjustifiable. Almost all (95 per cent) described feeling loyal to Britain, while 93 per cent believed they should obey British laws.

Extrapolating the results of these surveys on a global level suggests there are potentially millions of Muslims who are to varying degrees sympathetic to the motives of terrorists, even if they wouldn’t carry out these attacks themselves. This presents a moral challenge to the West.

One theory as to why this religious intolerance has resisted modernity is that it has found strange bedfellows in the West. Attributing a mystical power to words and images is central to identity politics movements, or what their critics commonly refer to as the new religions.

Infantilising adults by treating them as too fragile to be exposed to certain words and images is a common tactic among identitarians and religious zealots alike. It’s a cunning way to shut down legitimate debate about untested and often dangerous ideas.

The rub is that human flourishing requires constant inquiry and error correction. Identity politics isn’t interested in either. Much better to hide behind protected characteristics and cancel anyone who questions them.

The most absurd example of this came in 2018, when Netflix’s top spokesman Jonathan Friedland was fired by the streaming giant after using the N-word during a PR meeting about sensitive language, where he was discussing why certain offensive words should not be used. Apparently, his good intentions counted for nothing. The mere utterance of the word made him disappear.

Whether it be Islam or anti-racism, no set of ideas or system of beliefs should go unchallenged. We desperately need the adults back in the room. The future of Western civilisation depends on it.

The conversation explores the modern appeal of Stoicism, its popularity among young men and the danger of reducing ancient philosophy to simplistic lifestyle advice. David explains what figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius and Plutarch can teach us about human nature, politics and virtue, before considering whether today’s renewed interest in the classics will become a lasting cultural revival.

David ends his personal recommendation for your classical reading fix, which is the poet and philosopher Lucretius.

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From the Home Office’s shadowy Research, Information and Communications Unit to the way grieving families’ statements are used to shut down legitimate debate, Colin traces how Britain’s institutions are more concerned with managing public emotion than confronting uncomfortable truths.

Elon Musk recently said in an interview with The Economist that his “batting average” for predicting the future was “very high for a human”.

Coming from virtually anyone else on the planet, this would be an audacious act of self-aggrandising. Coming from someone who has almost single-handedly transformed the EV market, commercialised space travel and accelerated the AI revolution, it’s a modest claim.

However, even the best batters occasionally swing and miss, and on this occasion, I believe Musk missed.

He was clarifying a tweet he posted in 2024 in response to the unrest sparked by the murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

Pressed on whether he still stands by his prediction that ‘civil war is inevitable’ in a country that has seen rapid, large-scale immigration and the attendant problems that come with it, the first trillionaire told The Economist’s editor-in-chief that he does, adding the caveat that this was based “on current trends”.

As he explained to a visibly indignant Zanny Minton Beddoes, when a society like Britain imports a large group of people from overseas whose ideas and beliefs are incompatible with those of the West, at some point, there will be a “reckoning”.

Before Stasi Britain locks me up like Lucy Connolly, let me make one thing clear: violence is never the answer. But the idea that decent Britons have finally had enough of the status quo and have the courage to do something about it is a romantic fantasy, one that harks back to the days of Empire when we still ruled the waves and forged our own destiny.

I say “we” because, as Minton Beddoes was quick to remind Musk throughout the interview, Britain is “my country”, not his. Unlike The Economist’s editor, however, I invoke that fact not as a cudgel to beat Musk with, but to argue that his vision of Britain is not dystopian at all.

Implicit in Musk’s insistence that Britain will snap if it’s pushed too far is an assumption that there is courage still to be found in this sceptred isle.

This is not my experience at all. I see a nation utterly defeated. A population too pusillanimous to push back against the forces that seek to destroy it. A collective malady has set in, with symptoms ranging from resignation to blithe indifference.

With voters restive about immigration and Reform riding high in the polls, my assessment might appear at odds with the national mood, but scratch the surface and it’s the same old story.

In what calls to mind a famous observation made by the French philosopher and diplomat Joseph-Marie de Maistre, “Every nation gets the government it deserves”, British voters claim they want to save this country, then head down to the ballot box and commit an act of national self-harm.

Makerfield was merely the latest example of this. Presented with the choice of sticking two fingers up to the establishment or voting for a socialist who is part of it - and who had engineered the by-election to return to Parliament - voters plumped for the latter.

If Reform’s candidate, Robert Kenyon, had won the seat, the resulting chaos would have cemented the case for an early general election, which is sorely needed to turn this country around.

Instead, we now have a (slightly) more competent leftie running the country who promises to rewind the clock on 40 years of neoliberalism, “reindustrialise” the heartlands, offer sweeteners on energy bills and bus fares, and believes carers “should be the best paid people in society” - not those working in AI or other cutting-edge industries that could boost productivity growth and make Britain a competitive player on the world stage.

The best we can hope for now is to cling on to America like barnacles on a ship as it dukes it out with China for AI supremacy. Or not. In Burnham’s Britain, it’s all about good vibes, statist intervention and nostalgia.

Who cares about the big picture stuff, anyway? The same voters who Musk has so much faith in have just given Burnham a bounce: Labour have now overtaken Reform to lead a national poll for the first time in 16 months.

Let’s not forget that Britain got itself into this mess in the first place because these same voters couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed at the last general election. Our last dud of a prime minister only secured around 33.7 per cent of the vote – one of the lowest vote shares ever to produce an outright majority.

This supine quality long precedes the present moment, of course, and arguably found its most grotesque expression during the height of Covid, when tens of millions happily complied with the government’s onerous lockdown restrictions and grassed on their neighbours for flouting them.

As Peter Hitchens recently pointed out on an episode of Triggernometry, if No 10 had “decreed that everyone had a pink extension on their nose, people would have done it”.

This was around the time that the gormless do-gooders were sharing black squares on their social media profiles to show solidarity with a black man who was killed 4,000 miles away on the streets of Minneapolis.

At least there was Brexit. That once-in-a-generation revolt against the unaccountable elites. Alas, even here, the British can’t stay the course, with 57 per cent of Britons telling YouGov that it was wrong to leave the EU, including 23 per cent of Leave voters.

Equally depressing is a recent survey that found 50 per cent of young people in Britain would not fight for their country under any circumstances. My bet is that they wouldn’t even look up if the rockets rained down. Then again, for the reasons I stated above, can you blame them?

With immigration consistently ranking as the public’s top concern, surely this is the one issue the public would not roll over on. Sadly not. It turns out voters are willing to compromise if they see a notable improvement in other areas of their lives.

For example, Ipsos polling from last year found many Conservative voters who were defecting to Reform over immigration would return to their traditional party if it were performing well on the economy and the NHS.

In other words, while immigration may be driving voters into the arms of Reform, dissatisfaction with the Conservatives’ broader record is what keeps them there. Address those wider concerns, and anger over immigration might subside.

In his recent monologue, my colleague and veteran broadcaster Colin Brazier attributes Britain’s decline to a growing incuriosity about the world. We’ve grown lazy and, in the process, let our guard down, he argues. Our enemies, meanwhile, are growing ever more curious.

For more defence and geopolitical analysis, alongside original reports and documentaries, follow and subscribe to Outpost on Substack, X, YouTube and Facebook.

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For more defence and geopolitical analysis, alongside original reports and documentaries, follow and subscribe to Outpost on Substack, X, YouTube and Facebook.

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