Why I WEEP for my country. For more than 20 years, I’ve warned mass migration risks undermining our way of life, says SUE REID. Now I fear the nation we love is slipping away from us

Some mornings I would buy bacon from a café on my way to work and joke with the fifty-something Cockney who delivered it.

He was born in a council house in London’s East End to a hard-working father who believed the charity queue was a shame and a stay-at-home mother who turned the leftovers of their Sunday roast into shepherd’s pie for the next week.

By the way, I’m the daughter of a middle-class Tory father who invented the cat flap in a Lancashire factory. Peter Reid captained a minesweeper with a crew of loyal sailors from Liverpool in the Second World War and proudly flew the Union Flag on a mast in our suburban garden for the rest of his life; That’s something that might invite a police visit today.

The English disease of class may seem to divide me and my Cockney friend. But we have a lot in common. Our families went to church at Christmas and Easter. We both stole the three R’s at the school where Christian prayers were recited at the meeting.

And today, he and I are equally despairing that the world we grew up in — our capital city and our country at large — has been carved so deeply that we barely recognize the place we always called home.

Along with many Britons, regardless of faith, age, sexual orientation or skin colour, we weep for our lost country.

A landmark study recently found that there has been an ‘alarming increase’ and decline in division in the UK over the past few years.

According to pollster Ipsos, a clear majority of people agree with the statements ‘I’d like my country to be like it used to be’ and ‘Culture is changing too quickly in the UK’; The rate of those who disagree with this opinion is only 21 percent.

Israeli fans were placed in a secured basketball court during Aston Villa’s match against Maccabi Tel Aviv. Rival demonstrators, mostly masked anti-Zionists, allowed ‘free movement’

Those who continue to insist that ‘integrating’ millions of foreigners from far-flung countries into the British way of life is a realistic aim may consider that 86 per cent believe there is tension between immigrants and those born in the UK. This number has increased sharply in just two years.

As this survey was being published, more than 1,200 men, mostly teenagers, had sailed here illegally over two days on 18 smuggler boats from France. Nearly 50,000 people have crossed the Channel since Labor came to power in July 2024; but the Home Office states that almost the same number of unsuccessful asylum seekers, foreign criminals and other immigration offenders were removed from the country in the same period (I am told that many came from Albania and the Far East).

Meanwhile, according to Reform’s Zia Yusuf, at least 1.2 million illegal immigrants are at large in Britain; however, others dispute this figure.

Is it any wonder that such a large number of arrivals are disturbing millions of Britons?

100-year-old Royal Navy veteran Alec Penstone captured that sense of loss and uncertainty a week ago when he told Good Morning Britain’s shocked hosts that he believed his comrades’ sacrifices during the Second World War were ‘not worth it’ because of the state the country is in now.

‘In my mind I can see those rows of white stones and hundreds of my friends who gave their lives; why?

‘We fought for our freedom but now [Britain’s] It’s a much worse sight,” he said. It’s easy to imagine that many of his generation of heroes felt the same way.

The truth is that the importation of millions of foreigners, the majority of whom do not share our national faith, is rapidly and inexorably changing these islands.

Recently, during Aston Villa’s Europa League match against Maccabi Tel Aviv in Birmingham, Israeli fans were subjected to the disgusting indignity of being placed in what they described as a ‘Jewish cage’ (protected basketball court).

Meanwhile, rival demonstrators, mostly masked anti-Zionists, were allowed to ‘roam freely’ in Britain’s second city, some chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ he shouted.

As one Maccabi fan, an Israeli Christian, said: ‘This feels like we’re going back to the 1940s again.’

But the tide seems set. For more than 20 years I have written in the Mail about Europe and the mass immigration crisis that is undermining Britain’s way of life.

I spoke to hundreds of immigrants, almost exclusively Muslim men, heading to Britain in France, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Serbia, Hungary and the Netherlands.

100-year-old Royal Navy veteran Alec Penstone told Good Morning Britain he believes his comrades’ sacrifices during the Second World War were ‘not worth it’.

The Royal Navy veteran said: ‘With my mind’s eye I can see rows of white stones and hundreds of my friends who gave their lives; why?’

In the port of Piraeus in Athens, I asked a Middle Eastern young man looking longingly at the Italian ferry where he was going. He told me confidently: ‘London.’

Among the many immigrants I spoke to in northern France, I found only four Christians (aside from a few Eritreans).

I met three of them in Calais a few years ago: a Chadian, a Zimbabwean and a South Sudanese man. They hid their crosses under their t-shirts.

Just a month ago I found a fourth Christian, also in Calais. Bahram, a 28-year-old Iranian man, was bravely displaying his cross (pierced through his ear) and living under plastic sheeting in a fence near the French port.

‘If I showed my face in the main migrant camps in the jungle, I would be killed in a day,’ he said.

I’m not alone in fearing the prospect of social unrest – in fact we’ve only seen examples of this in the riots following the Southport atrocity last year and local protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping after an immigrant staying there sexually assaulted a teenage girl in the town.

As Elon Musk said at the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in London in September: ‘This is a message to the reasonable centre, to people who don’t normally get involved in politics, who just want to live their lives… If this [mass-migration crisis] If you continue, violence will come to you: you will have no choice.

‘You are in a very basic situation here… You either fight back or you die. I guess that’s the truth.’ I hope he is wrong and Britain will somehow assimilate all these newcomers.

However, the prospects do not look very encouraging. While we import millions of religious young people from different faiths, our church pews remain empty even at Christmas and Easter.

Those who dared to speak openly about the dire consequences of unrestricted illegal immigration faced an angry backlash both on social media and in person. When I exposed the so-called ‘grooming gangs’ scandal in 2010, I was associated with fascism by the left-wing New Statesman magazine.

I first reported that white British and Sikh girls were routinely raped by Muslim men, many of whom were of Pakistani origin, while police, social workers and even charities remained tight-lipped for fear of being called ‘racist’.

The same anxiety now appears to have been a factor in Sara Sharif’s horrific death at the hands of her despicable father. Despite their suspicions, both neighbors and some officials did not want to intervene for fear of being branded as bigots, as noted in a report this week.

SUE REID writes that millions of us who feel the same way as Alec Penstone must raise our voices to defend a country built on liberal values ​​and cultural integration.

I also found ‘racist scum’ written in big yellow letters on my doorstep in a succession of attacks at different addresses over three years, after reporting on the large numbers of migrants waiting on the French coast to enter Britain.

On social media, the same crude two-word term so beloved by left-wing illiterates was hurled at me just last month when I reported on the injustice of giving free social housing to those arriving by boat while tax-paid British families languished on waiting lists that would take 100 years to clear in some areas at current rates.

This deep and justified sense of injustice underlies much of what makes this country feel socially and culturally displaced. When those of us struggling and taxpayers who make up what is now called ‘Alarm Clock Britain’ read the news about immigrants entering the country illegally in small boats and being immediately given free beds and board, it is no surprise that the famous British sense of fair play is stretched to breaking point.

When we read about these immigrants being bussed to Hilton hotels or four-star mansions, we wonder if the world has gone mad – and that’s before details emerge about what the Government is offering them.

Free healthcare, dental care, university courses, driving lessons, football tickets and yes, even hair extensions – all of these are given to asylum seekers, and very few of them, as we well know, leave Britain once they reach these shores.

And we are the ones who will pick up the bill. The government currently spends £2.8 billion a year supporting asylum seekers and refugees; this is a fifth of the UK’s overseas aid budget.

Even those who came here legally seem to be finding ways to take advantage of our generous benefits system. Take my encounter a few years ago with a certain Rudi Ion, who invited me to his terraced house in Nottingham and gave me his views on life in his home country.

‘I love England and its welfare system,’ Ion told me as we recorded the interview in his kitchen. It’s like finding a bag of money on the road and picking it up and no one telling me I shouldn’t.’ All ten relatives at home nodded in agreement.

The Home Office has told me more than once this year that anything I write about that department requires a response.

A few weeks ago an officer went further. I was asked to submit my research (again, regarding the injustice of giving newly arrived asylum seekers priority over the British in housing) before it was published under the headline of this newspaper.

When I objected and told the officer that there could not be a media organization in this country that allowed the government of the period to review the news, he responded with the following words: ‘You would be surprised.’

So I take my hat off to patriots like the centuries-old hero Alec Penstone, whose comrades died to protect our freedom of expression and our right to criticize any religion, cult or belief if we so choose.

Britain wasn’t always perfect. Change comes to every society over time. But the millions of us who feel the same way as Alec Penstone must raise our voices to defend a country built on liberal values ​​and cultural integration. If we do not fight back, we will find ourselves watching the nation we once loved and respected disappear from us in the coming years.

I’m afraid he’s already started doing that.