Niall McCrae
[speech at Croydon Stand in the Park, 7th July 2025]
Most of you, I presume, were around in the Eighties. Ironically, we can look back at the year 1984 not as George Orwell’s dystopia, but as perhaps the peak of pop culture and freedom. At the time, to a soundtrack of Wham and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, we thought that human progress was inevitable: a future so bright that you’d got to wear shades.
How society has changed since then! Here we are in Croydon, a borough of dramatic development and demographic change, and not for the better. Every time I pass through on the train, another high-rise apartment block is being built. These towers proliferate despite a plummeting birth rate. An obvious reason is mass immigration from poorer regions of the world. The powers-that-be are importing a slave class: –
People with no established culture of rights, democracy and liberty
People who are accustomed to dictatorial rulers and corruption
People low on trust, beyond their kith and kin
People who are different to the host community, in language, norms and beliefs
People who will gladly accept a small urban apartment
People who will do whatever they’re told
The new world order is being built on the passivity and docility of collectivism. China, with its communist regime, is a laboratory for technocratic totalitarianism, as in its social credit system. In the West, millions upon millions of Muslims have settled, replacing white Britons in towns and cities. They are preferred, because they conform. The literal meaning of Islam is submission.
Immigration and Islam are not the only cause of the rising population and relentless building of blocks of flats in city centres. Last week UK Column, an independent news outlet based in Plymouth, reported on a local authority vision for urban expansion. The port city is projected to grow in population to half a million. Many of the new inhabitants will be from abroad, for sure.
But there will also be a movement of people en masse from the county of Devon. Rural towns and villages are likely to be depopulated, with farms closed. This can be achieved by various means, but taxation is easiest. Younger people will not be able to afford to live on Dartmoor, in Newton Abbot or Budleigh Salterton. The tyrants are planning the West Country Clearance, on a scale much large than the Highland Clearances of past centuries.
Smart Cities are being built, and (according to the World Economic Forum), you will own nothing and be happy
Have you observed that the more people are crowded into our towns and cities, the fewer the social amenities? The high street, in all but the richest of areas, is in terminal decline. Yawning gaps are by the closing of banks and chain stores. Independent retailers struggle to survive. Churches and pubs, the two most distinct symbols of British culture, are being erased from the landscape.
Much of our social capital has been destroyed, and we cannot blame immigrants for that. We, collectively, have been poor custodians of our institutions and cultural assets. We stood by as Cultural Marxists imposed divisive woke ideology on our museums, art galleries and theatres. We let safetyism curtail our social calendar, and allowed councils to install surveillance cameras at every turn. We succumbed to Net Zero, based on a contrived climate crisis. Don’t blame Muslims, or other immigrants, for all that.
Yet there is a glimmer of light in our darkened prospects. Belatedly, many people are awakening to the future that predatory oligarchs devise, with humanity controlled by artificial intelligence and a digital matrix. Church pews are filling again, and not only at Easter. A spiritual revival appears to have begun, albeit nascent and ignored by mainstream media.
We need to reconnect with the marketplace. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker – local trades that deserve our support, rather than feeding the beast of Amazon. While corporate chains increasingly abandon cash, independent retailers will be our saviour when the internet crashes (as it surely will). Furthermore, when the government eventually sets a deadline for handing in your remaining coins and notes to the bank, you should hold on. Polymer notes will last for years, and we could use them with an informal network of shopkeepers, avoiding the central digital currency.
Back in the Eighties I thought that whereas shops would come and go with fashion and technology, the pubs would be there forever. I took them for granted. Four decades later, and over half of them have gone. Keir Starmer’s administration is waging a war on the pub, with extortionate tax, public health campaigns against alcohol, and the so-called ‘banter ban’. And so the heart of our community is being ripped out.
But here too are signs of revival. Late in the day, people are realising the truth of the maxim: use it or lose it. The pub is where we share real rather than virtual conversation, where we spend a few hours free from digital devices, and where we candidly discuss the challenges we face. The pub is a forum for truth and irreverence to the authorities, and that’s why Starmer wants then gone. Every pint is resistance!
The Great Reset would atomise society – but we are the Great Resist.
