Matt Goodwin’s new book: The missing chapter

Across Britain, people are experiencing the same unspoken sense of shock.

You walk down a street and don’t recognise it. You see customs and cultures you do not share. You hear a language that is not your own. And this is not just true of people holidaying in Aberystwyth who don’t understand Welsh.

The country of your childhood, the country in which your parents and grandparents grew up, and in which your great grandparents suffered severe malnutrition, is gone. It survives only in Powell and Pressburger films, the Bible, and AI nostalgia targeted at racists on Facebook.

No longer do town criers dressed as pearly kings read out the 3pm football results on Thursdays. No longer do WWI veterans with shellshock go scrumping for apples in supermarket CEO’s gardens. No longer do naked five-year-olds sent up chimneys get stuck or suffocate. For if they were, the mob would cancel them for “blacking up”.

Suddenly, the country you yearn for, the country that exists in the imagination of a fourth-rate fifth columnist who microwaves his dinner every night, has gone.

It has been said that the monumental levels of self-pity that run through such thinking are little more than projection. However, if this were true, then the writers of tomes like this would be deeply average academics whose social inadequacies have consumed them to the point that they would rather seek the affirmation of racist knuckle draggers than acknowledge their own insufficiencies. 

The English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” He meant that a nation is more than just a name on a blue passport. A nation is a home built by our ancestors, bound by a shared identity, history, and way of life. 

Which is why, if a Yorkshire miner whose village was reduced by pit closures in the 1980s, and a Buckinghamshire accountant with a second home in St Ives, sit next to each other in Leicester Forest East Starbucks, they’ll immediately start talking about the Battle Of Towton. In contrast, all that the Syrian barista who serves them will be able to contribute is that they’re out of milk.

In the fifth and sixth centuries, Angles and Saxons didn’t simply settle freely in the collapsed post-Roman British landscape. Rigid passport controls and an Australian-style points-based immigration system meant only the most highly qualified Saxon engineers and doctors were allowed in. Yet now, anybody can walk in, regardless of who they are, where they are from, or what they intend to do.

This is not a fringe anxiety. It is a general feeling in modern Britain. In 2025, a survey by the pollsters More In Common found that 44% of all Britons “feel like a stranger in my own country”. And that finding is not in any way undermined by knowing that 14% of British people also think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.   

People from all backgrounds – White, Black, Asian – tell me they feel this way. Is that an anecdotal sop to caveat the racism I’m trying to legitimise? I doubt it. And yet, whenever people try to articulate this, they are mocked by the very elites who don’t invite fellow panellists out for dinner after public debates.

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Dear Matt Goodwin, why are you such a bad loser?

Zoë Grünewald

THE TRUTH WE CANNOT SAY

What we are witnessing is the sustained transformation of the only majority this country has ever known: White British people.

Things that do connect us – like being born at the same time, sharing the same surroundings, living side by side – are irrelevant, whereas categories like “white,” “black,” and “brown” reflect intrinsic differences. 

The fact is, the further back you can trace your ancestry on Google, the more legitimate is your claim to belong here. Even though you hold no more control over the actions of your ancestors than you do over Luke Littler’s ton plus averages, white ancestry is a shortcut to a deeper connection to native soil and a past you didn’t shape or earn.

If you were to put a white British person in any moment of the last millennium, their banter with a medieval peasant, a Jacobean witchfinder, or a pressganged sailor would be more natural and relaxed than with the friendly third-generation Pakistani man in the corner shop off whom they’ve been buying bread for 20 years.

That is not an opinion. It is a truth in the study of nations. The world’s leading scholars, none of whom I will be referencing at any point, all agree: nations depend upon an ethnic and cultural core, a historic majority, and gullible prats who think the past is frozen is aspic.

Britain’s rulers know this. And yet, without democratic consent, they are undertaking the single largest reconfiguring of the population since the last glaciation.

I’M NOT INSUFFERABLE. THEY ARE.

*Yes, it’s satire. For more world exclusives from Henry Morris, read his Substack