All of our contacts expressed hatred for Muslim immigrants and radical Islamic terror groups. However, their deepest hatred was reserved for mainstream politicians. All mainstream politicians had abjectly and spectacularly failed. In fact, many of our contacts claimed that mainstream politicians had actively facilitated the degeneration of a once-great nation. They had capitulated to the EU and allowed immigrants to disturb what our respondents believed had been England’s settled economy, national culture and regional variants. Politicians had made the British social security system a soft touch, and so prospective immigrants from all over the world were fighting hard to get into the country so that they could enrich themselves at the expense of white taxpayers. Politicians had enforced an illogical and unfair multiculturalism that subtly established a new range of injustices and antagonisms, and they displayed scant regard for the nation’s history and culture. Chief among these new injustices was an institutionally and culturally legitimised prejudice against the heterosexual white working class.

The heterosexual white working class, our respondents believed, had been unfairly ascribed a broad range of regressive and illiberal characteristics, and they were now the only remaining cultural group without vocal political representation. Our respondents felt short-changed and used. They had been catapulted from the centre of English society and culture to the margins. England had been turned inside out, and politicians had actively assisted minority groups in this endeavour. Our contacts believed that politicians had been seduced by the image of ‘the exotic’. They had grown to loath ordinary white working-class people. They wanted to appear cutting-edge, forward-looking, open, cosmopolitan and progressive. They wanted to embrace ‘diversity’ and cultural novelty, and the white working class was an uncomfortable reminder of times past. Ultimately, the career politicians of the centre-left and centre-right, keen to secure the liberal middle-class vote, wanted to forget the world the white working class represented. It’s the future that counts, and the old proletariat didn’t appear to figure prominently in the political class’s visions of a go-getting, efficient, high-tech, business-friendly, cosmopolitan 21st-century Britain. Politicians wanted to forget the class system and industrial work cultures and reaffirm their commitment to a new global society built on openness, meritocracy, diversity and tolerance.

Our contacts believed that public policy now favoured minority sexualities, religions, ethnicities and lifestyles. They talked of occupational quota systems, and the drive to ‘diversify’ workforces.