Connor Tomlinson is a British conservative commentator, policy researcher, and frequent media voice on questions of migration, culture, and the future of Western civilization. Renowned for his trenchant critiques of liberal multiculturalism and his calls for a decisive political response to Britain’s demographic and cultural challenges, he has emerged as one of the younger generation’s outspoken figures on the right. He sat down with Hungarian Conservative during Scruton Hub’s The Essence of Life seminar to discuss the failures of Britain’s two-party establishment, the rise of Reform UK, the need to confront migration through courage, the repeal of restrictive legal frameworks, and the withdrawal of state benefits from those unwilling to assimilate.
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London witnessed the largest anti-immigration and free-speech march this month, with attendance estimates ranging from 110,000 to as many as 3 million. Could this mark the beginning of the desperately needed change?
As with Trump’s crowd sizes, the truth usually lies somewhere between the media’s attempts to downplay them and Trump’s braggadocious claims that they were the largest events ever seen. Most of the sensible estimates I came across ranged between 500,000 and a million, with the reality probably closer to 800,000. It looked massive. The broader sign that it was seismic came from Nigel Farage—who, as leader of Reform UK, is likely to be the next prime minister and is consistently topping the polls. Since the 2024 general election, Farage has increasingly felt compelled to tack to the mainstream, making concessions to a hostile establishment press while gradually cutting off allies to his right. That included falling out with Elon Musk and accusing Robinson of criminal acts he never committed—such as beating his wife—while branding him as alt-right. Yet, this time, Farage stopped short of condemning the march, and I believe that decision was driven by the sheer size of the crowds it attracted.
There is a mandate based on the feeling that we have been betrayed, that our country has been stolen from us, that the architects of our immiseration are gleeful in dispossessing us of our ancient customs and liberties, our tradition, our inheritance, our homeland. There is a grievance there that is righteous and that has drawn the largest street protest for ordinary men and women—and their children as well—out into London. Largely peaceful, very few arrests, and it was the largest street movement since the anti-war protests in 2003. It suggests that, even if Robinson himself is not leading a political insurgency, even if he’ll never lead a government department, even if he can be accused of acting imprudently in his personal life in the past, he clearly has the ability to command the loyalty of lots of people—he represents a sizable and justifiably irritated working-class, white, indigenous, British patriotic sentiment in the country.
Where does that sentiment come from?
This is derived, obviously, from the injustices of the current system. Take the example of the grooming gangs that have been afflicting about 50 British towns and cities, predominantly across England, who have abused hundreds of thousands—up to a million—white British girls, mainly English girls, for reasons of race and religion. There were entire communities involved in this, where the gangs themselves were based on biraderi theory—Pakistani clans where families would set up rape and trafficking rings, where the mothers, sisters, wives, and cousins of the rapists themselves would know about this. The fact that this has gone on, and our political class have inflicted mass migration on us even though we voted against it in every election and referendum since 1974, the fact that our politicians, our media, our civil servants, our social workers, our police have not only covered up crimes such as the rape gangs, but are imprisoning 12,000 people a year for social media posts complaining about them—that is why up to a million people got out on the streets in the past month. That is also why the uniparty stranglehold on the electoral system is going to be shattered, and Reform will win the next election.
The United Kingdom is one of the Western countries already deeply afflicted by the negative consequences of illegal migration…
Sorry to interrupt, but it is not exclusively illegal migration. People talk about illegal migration because it’s the most visually repugnant—like seeing men sail across the English Channel with the explicit promise of raping white women. Human traffickers market their services on TikTok and Instagram by filming girls on nights out in Manchester and London without their consent—when they’re drunk, when they’re dressed immodestly by Islamic standards—and cutting it alongside videos of burning churches, breaking under the Polish border, sailing over the English Channel, getting to a hotel and having loads of money given to you by the government. The explicit promise is: come here for plunder and conquest and treat all women like meat.
‘We should be far less tolerant of other faiths and other cultures that, if fed into our country, do not reproduce England at the end of it’
That is obviously the most offensive part. But it’s only 50,000 a year. Now, while this number is insane—more than the British Army’s reserves—we get 1.2 million legal every year. That’s the same level of legal migration as the United States, and we are the size of New York State. Even if you stop all illegal migration tomorrow—and don’t get me wrong, I think we should just detain and deport every last one of these fake asylum seekers—we are still getting demographically and now biculturally replaced. The demographic replacement is no better just because its agents have the appropriate paperwork.
Could these negative consequences be reversed?
Oh, easily. It just requires sufficient courage and knowing the policy and legal levers to pull in order to do it. The British parliamentary system at the moment is subordinate to the Supreme Court, and the civil service, which in 2010 got the ability to appoint other civil servants—but ministers can’t fire the civil servants. Unlike in Hungary, where the executive branch is centralized to the prime minister, in the UK, the cabinet secretary—a permanent civil servant—has more power than our PM and hires other civil servants to tell ministries the policies they can and can’t pass.
What needs to be done is to repoliticize the civil service. If you interfere with the civil service by hiring or firing someone, it’s political. All institutions are political. You wouldn’t go into politics unless you had political interests. There’s no such thing as a neutral institution. What you need to do is reform the laws to ensure the government carries out the will of its electorate, and ensure the civil servants carry out the will of the government. Then you need to repeal a bunch of laws and legal mechanisms—like the Human Rights Act, the UN Refugee Convention, the European Convention on Human Rights—which stop you from detaining and deporting illegal migrants, and from recalibrating the economic considerations and the cultural considerations that keep legal migration really high.
In order to do that, you need to have politicians with some fortitude because they will be slandered by the entirely ideologically captured media. You need to have ready-made answers; you need to repudiate these narratives in real time, much in the way that Donald Trump and JD Vance have realized the media is your enemy, the deep state is your enemy. We need an oven-ready plan to hit the ground running on day one of the new administration.
Remove all benefits, social housing, subsidies from immigrants, legal and illegal, who are in the country without supporting themselves. I should not be paying to battery-farm people from the Third World. You have no benefit for my country. You shouldn’t be here. You weren’t invited unilaterally. Prescribe certain behaviours we don’t like—halal butchery, cousin marriage, wearing any sort of face veil, niqab, hijab, burka. I think we should be far less tolerant of other faiths and other cultures that, if fed into our country, do not reproduce England at the end of it. We are a Christian country institutionally, which means that any civilization that has a biblical continuity, we can befriend you. We may take some of you over as our visitors, our business partners, you might even marry into our families and gain settlement here. Everyone else must not be welcome. Our immigration policy should be able to determine our friends from our enemies.
That does not mean every single person with a skin shade darker than mine needs to be expelled, but it does mean that the majority of people have not come to assimilate, to contribute, to abide by our culture, to marry into our families. For the few people that have, fine, we can live alongside you, we can have a nice, thriving civilization. These changes could be done mostly by politicians, and they should do that. The only thing stopping them is their own lack of courage.
Why is that?
Ever since 1945, the wrong lesson was learnt from the Second World War, and it was: Hitler committed genocide, he was a racist, being racist leads to genocide, and we’ve redefined racism, Nazism, and fascism to all mean noticing differences between different peoples, different histories, different nations, different heritages, and different cultures. Yoram Hazony has written well about this in his book The Virtue of Nationalism. There are two lessons from the horrors of the Holocaust. You could be the European Union—to be a self-hating empire to ensure that you can never express a preference for your own people, history, heritage, and culture again—even though the nations that fought the Nazi war machine, like England, did so because they wanted to protect their national sovereignty, their identity, their people and their heritage. Or you can be like Israel, which is a nation that is dedicated to the protection of its people, its faith, its way of life, and has a high GDP per capita, a competent military, an ability to vaporize jihadists, above-replacement birth rates—why not?
If you learn that lesson—if you basically copy the Israeli model—you end in prosperity. If you copy the European Union model or the modern British model, you end up being overrun by Islam under the guise of liberal multiculturalism. We need to abandon this belief in the blank slate—which is the guiding principle of liberalism, and which says that every single human being is a fungible economic unit that is only different because of arbitrary cultural, geographic and material conditions that can be readily rectified by a liberal state. That commands Western people to lower their flag and be apologetic about their culture. Because you are actually stopping people from assimilating by causing division by noticing the differences. If you just stop noticing differences and stop asserting your own identity, then the foreign identities will melt into the pot of your identity, and everyone will be equal.
That is just a straightforward lie. It’s never going to happen. Our cultures come from peoples, from families, from histories, from heritages. We should not be apologetic about having distinct—and in many cases much better—identities, histories, heritages and cultures from the Third World, which has not failed because of colonialism or racism, but because it failed on its own terms. And you know what? We can give them some advice. We can export our culture there. We can leave them alone for a few hundred years, like a Petri dish, and see if they have developed into functioning civilizations on their own. But until then, we should shut our borders to them, and we should not indulge in the liberal dream that everyone can be just like you and me if we just give them more money and a few classes on women’s consent and open our borders to the Third World. It’s a disastrous policy that would just end in the destruction of our countries.
What do you think will happen to the two traditional parties after the elections?
The Labour Party, I think, is going to haemorrhage lots of seats to Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Islamic party’ (Your Party). People are calling it Jez-Bollah because he once said Hamas and Hezbollah are our friends. We just found out yesterday that 98 per cent of the second-largest year-on-year increase in our population in history was caused by immigration. We’re adding 1 per cent of our population every year, at least, purely because of immigration, largely from the Third World. And the Third World votes for the Third World, as we’ve seen with Zohran Mamdani or Ilhan Omar or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in America, and as we’ve seen with the new Islamic party and the various independent Islamic MPs that are now an alliance in the UK. We’re going to get ten to 15 Islamic MPs at the next election. Labour are going to haemorrhage to that. They’re also going to haemorrhage because they’re deeply unpopular, both with the left and the right.
The Conservative Party, currently under their present leader, Kemi Badenoch, is also tanking in the polls. They are now fourth and barely above the Green Party. Unless the Conservatives oust her in the next few months—and I think that’s going to happen—they’re not going to recover. Even then, they’ll only ever be junior partners in a coalition with Reform if they are, because their name is mud in most of the country. I think the real function of the Conservative Party will be to ensure that Reform continues to tack to the right. The two are engaged in a mutually reinforcing arms race, and by the time of the next election, Reform will not only be leading in the polls, as they are now, but will also have become the kind of party we want them to be in order to address these existential threats. They are forced into this position because the Conservatives are nipping at their heels, desperately trying to regain credibility—credibility they will never recover, since they were the ones who allowed all the unwanted immigrants in to begin with. They are on the brink of being destroyed.
‘Reform cannot afford to be Trump Term One; they must be Trump Term Two from the very start’
The Labour Party could well be obliterated too, replaced by the Liberal Democrats, the migrant-Islamic grievance party, and then both of them are overshadowed by Reform. The question is what kind of government does Reform form? Are they Trump Term One or are they Trump Term Two?
Britain, unlike America, is already far advanced in social decay and faces dire demographic challenges, with Muhammad now the most common baby name. We do not have the luxury of three election cycles, as America does. We have only one. Reform cannot afford to be Trump Term One; they must be Trump Term Two from the very start. My hope is that enough institutions are being built, and enough external voices are working to shape and encourage them, to ensure that they embody Trump Term Two immediately. That is why I remain on the outside, openly saying what I support and what I oppose. In doing so, I hope to play a small part in fostering the ecosystem that will give them the courage to confront the issues that must be addressed.
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