Andy Burnham’s ‘listening tour’ has got off to a flying start, with some comments about asylum that show just how deaf he is to the public’s fury over illegal migration.

Speaking to GB News, the prime minister said ‘we cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers’, adding that ‘all parts of the country’ need to ‘play their part’.

He’s right on one score. Illegal migration – or asylum, as we’re apparently still compelled to call it – is a class issue. Some of our most neglected towns and cities have borne the brunt of the small-boats crisis, purely because the accommodation there is cheaper.

The injustice is stark. A Guardian analysis in 2021 found that almost one in four asylum seekers supported by the government were housed in just 10 local authorities, nine of which were among the most deprived in the UK.

Burnham knows this all too well. In 2018, as mayor of Greater Manchester, he threatened to block any more asylum seekers being housed in his patch, citing the ‘disproportionate’ burden on the area. Indeed, the north-west of England has more Home Office-supported migrants than almost any other region of the UK.

This has become a recipe not only for anger, but also for unrest. An awful pattern keeps on repeating itself. A community, already on its uppers, lumbered with migrant hotels or HMOs, goes up in flames following a crime committed by one of its newly arrived residents.

The post-Southport riots were like a heatmap of Home Office-imposed asylum accommodation. According to a private cabinet briefing, ‘15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots’ during those grim days in summer 2024 ‘are in the top 20 per cent of local authorities with the highest numbers of supported asylum seekers’.

But the answer is not bussing more Sudanese to Sevenoaks, or more Afghans to Alderley Edge. If anything, the chances of ending up in one of Britain’s more premier postcodes could become yet another one of those ‘pull factors’, making a £2,000 ‘mega-dinghy’ ticket look like even more of a sound investment.

The primary issue with illegal migration is clearly not the uneven distribution of illegal migrants. But rather than leave the ECHR, rip up the Refugee Convention and finally detain and deport those who violate our borders, Labour appears resigned to shifting the problem around.

There is a curious literal-mindedness to how the government is responding to public outrage over asylum. Protests outside of migrant hotels? Let’s move the migrants into HMOs, then! Oh, you don’t like the HMOs, either? Let’s stick them on some old military bases instead! It’s almost like they think we’re mugs.

If Burnham reckons any of this is going to placate the populace, he’s in for a shock. Indeed, the latest place to erupt over the asylum issue is well-to-do Piddington, a village in Oxfordshire, which is threatening to declare independence over plans to stick 1,250 male migrants in the nearby Bicester Garrison – a number almost four times larger than Piddington’s tiny population.

The British people are not heartless, migrant-bashing bastards. They can be incredibly generous to refugees when there is a pressing need, a sense of historical or moral obligation, and precious few concerns around crime or cultural compatibility. Which is why hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Hongkongers have settled here in recent years without anyone raising an eyebrow.

But they’re also not idiots. They know that allowing anyone to claim asylum, provided they can pay a people smuggler enough to ferry them across the Channel, is illegal migration by another name – not least given these people aren’t actually fleeing war, they’re fleeing France.

They also know that opening the door to men, and they are almost all men, about whom we know nothing, often from cultures with frankly medieval attitudes towards women, is unlikely to end well. The now daily stories about horrific sex attacks committed by illegal migrants, have revealed, once again, the wisdom of the masses and the wilful blindness of our virtue-signalling elites.

No one voted for mass and illegal migration. Voters don’t want the effects of it shared out more equitably across the income scale. They just want it to stop. One day they might get a government that is actually willing to listen.

Alarm bells are now ringing loudly over new prime minister Andy Burnham’s lack of any detailed vision for Britain. Yet amid the vague promises of ending the politics of division, and the usual platitudes that Burnham has somehow managed to rebrand as ‘doing politics differently’, he has offered one relatively clear new proposal. Namely, that the UK would have a second No10 in Manchester, and Whitehall’s power would be decentralised and dispersed across the regions. It is, in short, a vision of a devolved and federalised English state.

This is a peculiar prescription for the nation’s ills. No one has asked for such a radical constitutional shake-up. Nearly 30 years of national devolution in the UK have achieved little beyond emboldening regional nationalists who loathe England and Westminster intensely. And beyond Andy Burnham himself, few see local government as benevolent, and certainly don’t want to give it more power.

Indeed, local government is renowned among the British public for its inefficiency, unaccountability and pettiness. I speak daily to hundreds of members of the public in my job in broadcast media, and people certainly get vexed by, say, the senseless handing over of the Chagos Islands, or the appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. But it’s the issues that materially affect people’s day-to-day lives that really get people angry: infrequent bin collections, overzealous parking restrictions sold off to detestable third-party enforcers, 20mph zones, ULEZ, low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and being fined for pouring coffee down a drain. And yet it’s the bodies responsible for these policies that are to be given more control over our lives under Andy Burnham’s Labour.

I suspect that there are very few members of the general public who want to increase local-government power. Once people realise that Burnham’s devolution plans entail exactly that, they will soon run out of patience with a PM who promises to do things oh-so differently.

Burnham’s plans for English devolution will also further fragment the nation, one already struggling with regional disparities in industry, population, wealth and resources. The reasons why certain towns and areas are poorer than others are complicated, multifaceted and historic. It’s not clear how Burnham’s devolution vision will change this. What sets back Middlesbrough, Blackpool and Redcar now will not change when councils or regional mayors have the ability to tax local residents further.

Furthermore, the consultation process for councils to inform and ask the public what they think of the proposals is desperately wanting. Councils are not required to advertise the consultations, nor are they legally bound to follow the public’s findings. A broken local-media landscape means there will be even less accountability.

Britain is in trouble. The economy is seemingly endlessly stagnant, and sources of common national identity are increasingly thin on the ground. Devolution for Scotland and Wales, and the endless erosion of England’s institutions, mean there is even less to unite the regions today. Burnham’s ultra-regionalised national project will surely only make that situation worse.

The risks of these devolution plans are myriad. If MPs want to get a sense of them, they could do worse than look at the fate of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia over three decades ago. While Britain and England are very different historically, culturally and politically to Yugoslavia, the break-up of the latter during the 1990s should still serve as a partial warning.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, Yugoslavia faced some of the same problems that England faces today. As the Yugoslav economy struggled during the 1960s, Yugoslavia’s leader, Marshal Tito, set up a centrally planned federal wealth fund which slowly ate the country alive from the inside. Wealthier regions paid extra in taxes to give dispensation to the poorer regions. Over time, this simply increased the gap between the rich and poor. Moreover, the wealthier regions of Slovenia and Croatia began to resent the poorer eastern and southern provinces, where abject poverty persisted. By 1980, Tito was dead, and with him a belief in Yugoslavia, and its regional and federalised structure. He left a nation whose constituent parts were increasingly at odds with each other. The writing was on the wall, long before the bloody break-up of the 1990s.

And so a nation vanished, amid economic decline and a rapid deindustrialisation that the state could no longer support. The People’s Republic failed its people and gave way to a vicious ethno-nationalism.

Burnham, of course, is no Marshal Tito, and Britain and England are not Yugoslavia. But in an economically challenged nation, riven with regional disparities and tensions, Burnham’s plan for devolution is only likely to power those forces that would tear us apart.

There is one line in the Home Office fact sheet on this year’s figures for Prevent – the UK’s counter-radicalisation referral scheme – that is more informative than the rest of the report combined: referrals for ‘fascination with extreme violence or mass-casualty attacks’ peaked at 286 between April and June, before falling to 183 over the summer. The Home Office’s explanation? The schools broke up.

Nothing about the threat actually changed (unsurprisingly) with the fact that the sun comes out in July. All that happened is that children went home – and, with them, so did much of Prevent’s ability to see the threats in our midst.

I know this system from the inside. From 2015 to 2018, I worked as a Prevent practitioner in London and later as a counter-extremism coordinator. Prevent is often spoken about as if its figures provide an insight into extremist trends in the UK. That isn’t right, though: it’s a referral system that relies disproportionately on schools, as these are one of the few places where people encounter the state every day. In doing so, it misses the real Islamist threat the UK faces and paints a picture that the most radical people in our society are 11- to 15-year-olds.

Schools generated 34 per cent of Prevent referrals (3,496 in total) in the past year, more than any other source. Those aged 11 to 15 accounted for 36 per cent of all referrals and 37 per cent of cases taken on for deradicalisation through Channel, the government’s follow-up support programme for referred individuals.

So when the report says extreme right-wing concerns once again outnumber Islamist ones (just eight per cent of referrals were for Islamism), it reflects the machinery we’ve built to observe extremism, rather than the true picture of the country. Of course right-wing extremism is real and growing. Think of the neo-Nazi jailed last year for stabbing an asylum seeker or the attempts to burn down a Rotherham asylum hotel during the 2024 summer riots. But this is nowhere close to the majority of extremism cases. Indeed, MI5 says around three-quarters of its counter-terrorism caseload relates to Islamist terrorism. The government’s own counter-terrorism strategy, Contest, attributes 67 per cent of attacks since 2018 to Islamist terrorism, against around 22 per cent to the extreme right.

Schools miss a lot, and through fear or political sensitivity, avoid dealing with a lot more. Take the fact that, according to the latest figures, Islamist referrals peak among those aged 31 to 40. Incel referrals peak at 18 to 21. Left-wing referrals peak at 26 to 30. Extreme right-wing radicalisation, meanwhile, is picked up disproportionately among the young (and online) – where schools are, of course, most likely to encounter it.

Then there’s the issue of who gets referred. It isn’t exactly easy to refer a suspected Islamist, not least as Islamists are well versed in intimidating schools (as we’ve repeatedly seen in places like Birmingham). There is also a factor of white guilt: a white teacher may feel far more comfortable referring pupils for far-right sympathies than children from a minority-ethnic background for beliefs they claim are part of their faith.

Then there’s the fact that Islamist extremism is often concealed in the language of human rights or legitimate political activism, or in personal religiosity that people often feel should not be challenged, making it harder to recognise and harder for teachers to police. The average teacher is primed to notice far-right anti-migrant sentiment or white supremacism, but not to notice when Islam, an already unfamiliar faith, becomes politicised.

One thing the Prevent numbers miss completely, as there is no box for it, is anti-Semitism, which arguably should be measured in its own right. It is a hatred that unites Islamist, extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing ideologies, and may be easier for a teacher to spot than the ideology from which it stems. When anti-Semitism is at a record sustained high, and a Jewish person is more likely than any other minority to face violence for their faith, this is an unforgivable blind spot.

Some of the rising figures may also reflect better awareness of Prevent, rather than a rise in extremism as such. Referrals rose 39 per cent to 10,293, the highest on record. The proportion reaching a Channel panel went from 13 to 21 per cent, the proportion adopted for support went from 11 to 18 per cent against a long-run average of 13 per cent, and the number of people adopted more than doubled. Of closed cases, 85 per cent exited with no further radicalisation concern. Much of these rises reflect the aftermath of the Southport attack working through the system. The Home Office credits public awareness of Prevent after the attack, and Lord Anderson traced the record January quarter to publicity around Axel Rudakubana’s trial. There is some good news here. Infamously, Rudakubana was referred three times and his case was closed three times, with no ideology identified. That is the category the system used to ignore: referrals for fascination with extreme violence reached 818 this year, and adoptions by Channel in that category rose from 19 in late 2024 to 88 by mid-2025.

What we need is better training for schools on the ideologies they are missing, and other institutions trained to refer as readily as schools do – primary care, mental-health services and probation are all trained in spotting radicalisation, but not nearly as often. They are obvious places to increase support. If radicalisation doesn’t respect the school calendar, neither should our safeguarding system.

When schools refer an Islamist case, they need to know the government will do more than it has done when schools face extreme anti-blasphemy protests or anti-LGBTQ+ protests. With teachers still in hiding or without their jobs following these incidents, there is zero incentive to ensure such referrals are made.

This Prevent data release is not a map of the extremist threat but a map of the system and its vulnerabilities – it should be a wake-up call to upskill public-sector workers and improve what forms of extremism the risk list can identify. What it absolutely does not show is that the far right poses a greater threat than Islamism.

Nine hundred and eleven. That’s how many people have illegally intruded into our country since Sunday. Just shy of a thousand foreigners, mostly blokes, sailed on to our shores and met not so much as a cough of opposition from border guards. An unresisted tide of newcomers washing upon a sleeping nation. It is intolerable. It is a grotesque insult to the hard-won liberty of this kingdom that armadas of men from distant, regressive lands are permitted to come, week after week after week. For the love of God, stop these boats.

We are witnessing the fatal haemorrhaging of British sovereignty. That’s what the ‘small boats’ crisis speaks to: the deracinated state of British nationhood following years of technocratic rule. The brutish reduction of Britain to little more than an administrative zone, unmoored from its history by bloodless bureaucrats. This is why the public is enraged by the boats crisis – not because they’re ‘racist’, but because they are appalled at the reckless gutting of our sovereign integrity and the consequences it will have for their own liberty, dignity and security.

The gaslighting we have been subjected to over the boats crisis is extraordinary. Even now, even following the arrival on Monday of a mega-dinghy containing a record 230 people, they are waging psychological warfare against us. It was put to Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, that ordinary people will feel ‘rage’ over the government’s gutless unwillingness to defend the borders. ‘Well’, she said, puffing herself up with phoney virtue, ‘these are desperate, vulnerable people…’. They are often ‘women and children’, she said.

They’re lying to us. As I listened to Rayner trot out that knackered line about hard-done victims from overseas scrambling for the sanctity of our shores yada yada, I was looking at a photo of the mega dinghy. I saw man after man – fit, able, strong blokes from distant climes. Rayner’s doublespeak would make Orwell blush. ‘Women and children’, she yelps, as we all watch with our own eyes the arrival of yet more fighting-age men. They hold us in such depthless contempt they don’t even bother to make their bullshit believable.

Or look at the media coverage of the mega-dinghy. ‘Asylum seekers’, they’re all saying. Are we still playing this game? Are we still trying to dazzle and pacify the public with linguistic trickery? Every free-thinking soul knows that the twentysomething Eritrean fella who treks through safe country after safe country to get to Blighty is seeking not asylum but economic opportunity. It’s brazen. It’s undeniable. And yet you risk expulsion from polite society if you say it.

The elites thuggishly police our language on the immigration issue. You’re damned as racist if you use phrases like ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘swarm’ or ‘surge’, and you’re hailed as righteous if you propagate the establishment’s cherished untruths about ‘refugees’ and ‘women and children’. This muzzling of what we are permitted to say is fundamentally about controlling what we are allowed to think. It is a tyrannical effort to bury the truth about the elites’ craven surrender of our borders. It is an attempt to dress up treason as virtue.

It’s the fatalism on the boats crisis that is most galling. Consider Andy Burnham’s insistence this week that the leafier parts of Britain must start taking their share of these ‘refugees’. ‘We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive [them]’, he said. Now, it’s true that it has been ‘left-behind’ Britain that’s been forced to accept hundreds of foreign men into their local hotels, while the well-off ‘Refugees Welcome’ mob scurry back to their plush communities where the only migrant they ever meet is the Pole who fixes their plumbing. Yet the idea of ‘sharing out’ the burden of illegal immigration – Burnham is implicitly admitting it’s a burden – is predicated on the batshit belief that there is nothing we can do to stem the daily arrivals.

It is a toxic mix of ideological derangement and outright moral cowardice that leads the political class to think the daily breaching of our borders is a fait accompli. Drunk on the Kool-Aid of globalism, bewitched by the bourgeois cult of pooled sovereignty, our politicians fundamentally think our borders aren’t worth defending. Their fealty is less to the little people they rule over than to the high-minded international treaties Britain has signed up for. The concerns of working-class Brits count for shit in the face of the ‘refugee’ diktats issued by the soulless ghouls of globalist institutions.

Then there’s the spinelessness. We all know what must be done to defend a nation’s borders. We’ve known for centuries. Forces must be mobilised, rules strictly enforced, intruders sent packing. It’s not a lack of know-how that has let the sacred perimeters of our nation go to rack and ruin – it’s a lack of will. When the government fails to fight for its nation’s borders, what it’s saying is that there is nothing in the nation worth fighting for. Our identity, our history, our communities: it is their staggering disregard for the very lifestuff of Britain that leads them to abandon Britain’s perimeters.

All we get is deflection. Both Burnham and Rayner are blaming ‘criminal gangs’ for ferrying ‘asylum seekers’ across the Channel. Others blame the French for letting the boats set sail in the first place. But it is not France’s job to secure the sovereignty of the United Kingdom. The truth is that it is Britain’s own snivelling liquidation of its sovereign rights that entices foreign opportunists to encroach upon our lands. They know they will be provided with a hotel room and food and pocket money. They know they will not be deported. They know they will be permitted to disappear into the black economies of our self-ravaged half-nation. The criminal gangs who oversee the Channel crossings are merely parasites on the carcass of our own surrendered sovereignty.

The ‘racist’ libel won’t work anymore. The working classes are at breaking point and they won’t be silenced by a turbo-smug activist class that cynically derives both virtue and servants from out-of-control immigration. They are fuming about the border crisis, not because they hate foreigners, but because they love sovereignty and the things it protects: national identity, democratic rights, the social contract itself. They know the nation that can’t even prevent the arrival of 230 men is a nation in name only, one that prefers the suicide pact of globalism to the virtuous ideal of independence. Enough is enough – stop the goddamn boats.