A winter turning point

In 2025, our problems became too big to ignore

It feels as if 2025 has been a watershed year in which we have been forced to confront the true extent of the problems we face.

Britain’s Muslim rape gangs did not begin operating in 2025. But it was in January this year, thanks to Elon Musk’s X-intervention, that the scandal became impossible for the government to sweep under the carpet. Likewise, anti-Semitism certainly did not begin this year. But the sight of anti-Israel marches continuing week-in, week-out; the appalling treatment of, and police-backed lies about, Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans; the Glastonbury chants of ‘Death to the IDF’; and the brutal slaughter of Jews at a Manchester synagogue, has meant that this year, anti-Semitism has become too blatant to ignore.

The excuses we once told ourselves have been exposed as false.

Woke ideology has not been defeated. Speak to anyone working in a university, the NHS, or the public sector more broadly, and it is clear that racialising decolonise initiatives, gender ideology, and platitudes about diversity and inclusion are still alive and kicking. But this year, with the Supreme Court’s ruling on sex and gender, Reform rising high in the opinion polls, companies ditching performative advertising campaigns, and the growing popularity of alternative media sources like GB News, it is impossible to see woke as anything other than the elite’s imposition of their own ‘luxury beliefs’ on the rest of us.

At the same time, 2025 has also revealed the incompetence of the technocrats. Britain is facing problems on every single front. The economy is tanking; young people are struggling to get work, and far too many are parked on benefits with mental health problems; immigration is out of control; the NHS is teetering on the brink of collapse, and petty crime is rampant. Yet the Labour Party, presented as ‘the adults in the room’ just last year, has only made things worse.

Rather than developing solutions to any of these problems, all the current government has to offer is authoritarianism. Labour wants to scrap trial by jury for people facing sentences of less than three years (conveniently, all ‘hate speech crimes’) and to make greater use of facial recognition technology and digital identity cards. We are monitored and controlled to an unprecedented degree.

In 2025, it became impossible to ignore the fact that the current government is both devoid of ideas and fundamentally incompetent. Having rejected the Conservative Party the previous year, opinion polls suggest voters have now abandoned the Labour Party, too. But this year has revealed something bigger than just the problem with parliamentary politics.

The moral vacuum at the heart of Western civilisation has been exposed. We know that diversity, far from being ‘our strength’, has led to the rape of working-class girls and the slaughter of Jews.

The Canadian professor Gad Saad has popularised the phrase ‘suicidal empathy’. It suggests that elite virtue-signalling leads not just to the death of Western values, but, in a very real sense, threatens citizens’ lives, too.

Painful though this year’s reckoning is, the unravelling of the status quo is necessary for us to rebuild nations with strong borders and a strong sense of moral purpose. Where migrants are not dumped on Balkanised communities but properly integrated. Where working-class kids have more to look forward to than a life on sickness benefits. Where Jewish people do not live in fear, and those who call out Islamism are not arrested for hate crimes. Where women do not have to put up with men in dresses invading their private spaces. Where working-class girls who report sexual assault are taken seriously by police and social workers.

We also need a country that works. Where people can afford to heat their houses, can see doctors and dentists when the need arises, where trains run, and mail arrives on time, where schools and universities inspire children and young adults with the best that has been thought and said, rather than encouraging them to see themselves as mentally ill. Where there is a productive economy with plentiful employment opportunities.

We face a huge challenge. But, at the very least, we now know the scale of the task facing us. We need to be better at defending democracy, free speech, education, the nation, our citizens and our history. I hope to use my platform here on Substack to do exactly this. If you have not already done so, please subscribe and share this post.

Thank you very much to everyone who has supported my work this year. I am extremely grateful. I could not write without the backing of my paid subscribers.

Until next year, have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.