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This Is How I Feel About What's Happening to Britain and Europe Dan | Restore Britain I want to be honest with you about how I feel. I love this country. I love its churches and pubs, its humour and its history, and the decent, ordinary people who keep it going. Lately I've watched what's happening across Britain and Europe and felt something between heartbreak and anger. This is my attempt to put all of it into words. For years, the people of this country have been told to keep quiet. Keep quiet about the boats. Keep quiet about the hotels. Keep quiet about the grooming gangs, the two-tier policing, the councils taking down our flags and the politicians who line their friends' pockets. Keep quiet, or be called a bigot. Well, I won't keep quiet. Here is everything I've written about over the past months, brought together in one place: what I think has gone wrong with Britain, who I think let it happen, and what I believe we can do about it. 1. The Borders: A Promise Broken by Every Government I've lost count of the times I've heard it. Every government for a generation has promised to "get the numbers down". Every one of them has failed. In the year to June 2023, net migration hit around 906,000 according to the Office for National Statistics, the highest figure ever recorded. That isn't a rounding error. It's a city the size of Birmingham, added in one year, without anyone in Westminster asking the British people whether they wanted it. Then there are the boats. Week after week, small boats cross the Channel from the beaches of northern France. The people on them have already passed through safe countries. They've paid criminal gangs thousands of pounds. Many have thrown away their documents. Let's use the right words: these are illegal entrants and asylum seekers, not refugees by default. A refugee is someone fleeing for their life to the first safe place. France is a safe place. What really gets to me is where many of them end up. In hotels paid for by you. While British families sit on housing waiting lists for years and veterans sleep rough, the Home Office has spent millions of pounds a day on asylum accommodation. Towns that were never consulted have woken up to find their local hotel turned into a reception centre. When residents protest peacefully, they're told they're the problem. Then there are foreign criminals. If you come to this country as a guest and commit a serious crime, you've broken the deal. You should be removed. Instead, too many fight deportation for years through appeals and human rights claims, at the taxpayer's expense, while their victims wait for justice. 2. Europe Is Waking Up When I look across the Channel, I see something that gives me hope. Britain isn't alone, and other countries are starting to act. At CPAC Hungary in Budapest on 30 May 2025, Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, set out his plan in plain words: "We will return 60,000 Syrian refugees to Syria immediately. We want all foreign criminals deported from the Netherlands." He called for the borders to be closed to new asylum claims and guarded by the army. His party became the largest in the Netherlands in 2023 on that one priority. When his coalition partners dragged their feet, he walked out of government in June 2025 rather than break his word. Name one British party in government that has ever done the same. The principle is simple. Protection meant to be temporary should end when the danger ends. Guests who commit serious crimes lose the right to stay. And a sovereign nation controls its own borders. There's a kinder point in this too. As has been argued well, the most humane approach is to help people where they live: in their own region, near their own families and cultures, where every pound goes much further than it does in a London hotel. Bringing hundreds of thousands to Britain helps the few who can pay the smugglers and leaves the poorest behind. 3. Global Citizens, Not British Citizens I often ask myself why this keeps happening. Because too many of the people running this country don't think of themselves as British at all. They think of themselves as global citizens. They're more at home in Davos or Brussels than in Doncaster or Bolton. Their loyalty is to institutions, summits and international agreements, not to the people who elected them. That worldview explains a lot. It explains why borders are treated as an embarrassment rather than a duty. It explains why the views of ordinary people are dismissed as "populism". And it explains why, when the public votes for change, the establishment so often works to water it down. Christopher Hitchens put it in five words that stuck with me: "Resist it while you still can." He was right. The things that make a country a country, its laws, borders, faith, history and shared customs, can be lost slowly, and then all at once. 4. The Grooming Gangs: Britain's Greatest Shame Nothing makes me angrier, or sadder, than this. No issue shows the failure of the British state more clearly than the grooming gangs. In town after town, including Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and Oldham, thousands of young girls were raped, trafficked and abused by organised gangs. And in town after town, the people paid to protect them looked away. Police, councils and social workers were afraid of being called racist, so they let children suffer instead. In June 2025, Baroness Casey's national audit confirmed what campaigners had said for years: authorities had avoided the issue of the offenders' ethnicity, and the data had been badly neglected. Only after that did the government agree to a full national inquiry. As Jeremy Clarkson put it: "It's not racist to investigate a rapist." Every girl who was failed deserves the truth, and every official who looked away should answer for it, in Parliament, in a full public inquiry and at the ballot box. 5. Two-Tier Justice I've noticed something, and I know I'm not alone: the law doesn't seem to apply equally any more. Lucy Connolly, a childminder, was jailed for 31 months for a vile but deleted social media post written in anger after the Southport murders. She never left her house. Meanwhile, Ricky Jones, a Labour councillor filmed telling a crowd that far-right protesters should have their throats cut, was acquitted by a jury in August 2025. You may agree or disagree with either verdict. But when the public sees a mother serve a long sentence for words while others walk free, trust in justice collapses. Justice must be blind. One law, one standard, for everyone, regardless of race, religion or politics. 6. Free Speech and the Fight for the Public Square For me, free speech is the freedom that protects all the others. Without it, you can't point out any of the failures above. That's why Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter in October 2022 mattered so much. He restored banned accounts, opened the Twitter Files that exposed how the old platform worked with officials and pressure groups to suppress stories, and rolled out Community Notes, where ordinary users rather than a censorship team add context to misleading posts. Politicians and journalists get corrected just like everyone else. Without X, how many of the grooming gang campaigners, the people questioning small boats and the critics of two-tier policing would ever have been heard? The mainstream media ignored them for years. X gave them a microphone. In January 2025, MEP Branko Grims and colleagues nominated Musk for the Nobel Peace Prize for his support of free speech. Whatever any committee decides, millions of people know what he did. And let's remember the COVID years. Whatever you thought of the virus, the state reached further into our lives than ever before: people fined for sitting on park benches, churches closed, dissenting doctors and scientists shut out of the debate. Emergency powers must never become a habit. 7. Debanked for Your Opinions It isn't only speech that can be taken from you. So can your bank account. In 2023, Coutts closed Nigel Farage's account, and internal documents later showed his political views had been discussed. NatWest's chief executive resigned over the affair. In 2022, PayPal suspended the accounts of the Free Speech Union before reversing the decision after a public outcry. If a bank can cut you off for your politics, you're not free. New rules requiring banks to give longer notice and clearer reasons before closing accounts are a start, but the principle must be absolute: lawful opinions should never cost you your livelihood. 8. One Law for Everyone: Sharia and Threats Britain already has Sharia councils ruling on Muslim marriages and divorces. A 2018 independent review commissioned by the Home Office found real concerns about how some women were treated by them. Parliament was warned, and very little was done. At a city council meeting in McKinney, Texas, Eddie Issa introduced himself as "a Sharia law survivor from Iran" and warned: "You're gonna regret not listening to people like us." Many of the bravest critics of Sharia are people who fled it. This isn't about who anyone prays to. It's about one law. In a clip filmed in the Dearborn area of Michigan, a young man told an interviewer that if someone tried to burn a Quran, "I'll kill him." That isn't protest. It's an attempt to impose a blasphemy law through fear. Britain has seen this before. A teacher from Batley Grammar School has been in hiding since 2021 after showing a cartoon in a lesson. Salman Rushdie was stabbed decades after a fatwa was issued against him. Every time we give in to threats, we hand the threateners a veto over our freedom. A threat to kill is a crime, whoever makes it and for whatever reason. 9. Our Faith Under Pressure My faith matters to me, and it hurts to see what's happening. Around the world, Christians are the most persecuted religious group, from Nigeria to Pakistan to the Middle East. They are beaten, jailed and killed for their faith. Lands that were once centres of Christianity now have shrinking, frightened Christian minorities. At home, the pressure is quieter but real. People have been arrested for praying silently near clinics. Christians have lost jobs for stating their beliefs. Our cathedrals and village churches were built to the glory of God, and our laws were shaped by Christian teaching. Forgetting that isn't progress. It's amnesia. "Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people." (Proverbs 14:34) 10. Our Children and the Classroom I believe parents have a right to know what their children are being taught. Too often, gender ideology has been pushed into schools without parents' knowledge, and children have been encouraged into confusion they're too young to understand. Schools should teach reading, writing, maths, history and pride in our country, and leave contested adult politics to adults and families. 11. Our Flag, Our Pubs, Our Heritage When ordinary people put up the Union Flag and the St George's Cross on lampposts, some councils rushed to take them down. Ask yourself: what kind of country is embarrassed by its own flag? Flying it is not hate. It's pride. Britain gave the world the steam engine, the railway, the telephone, the television, the World Wide Web, penicillin and much more. We abolished the slave trade and sent the Royal Navy to stamp it out. We have nothing to apologise for in being proud. And I'll defend our culture to the end: the village church, the local pub, the Sunday roast, the dog walk, the pint with friends. Church. Pubs. Dogs. Sunday roasts. This is Great Britain. But look at our high streets. Walk down too many of them and you'll see betting shops, pawnbrokers, vape shops and empty units. Business rates, crime and neglect have hollowed them out. A high street isn't just shops. It's the heart of a community, and it needs saving. 12. Same Game, Different Party The cronyism never stops. It just changes colour. During the pandemic, PPE Medpro, a company linked to Conservative peer Michelle Mone, was fast-tracked through the government's "VIP lane". In October 2025, the High Court ordered it to repay about £122 million over gowns that didn't meet the required standard. Labour, meanwhile, has faced its own rows over donors, gifts and favours. Same game, different party. Whoever's in charge, the well-connected do well and the taxpayer pays. Look at Birmingham, where the council effectively declared itself bankrupt in 2023, then faced an all-out bin strike by Unite members in 2025. Rubbish piled up in the streets of Britain's second city. That's what decades of mismanagement look like. 13. The BBC and the Licence Fee It frustrates me that you're forced by law to pay for the BBC, whether you watch it or not, and then you're lectured by it. The licence fee is a tax on owning a television, enforced with the threat of prosecution, and it falls hardest on the poorest. A national broadcaster should reflect the whole nation, not the views of a small metropolitan bubble. If it can't, it should earn its money like everyone else. 14. The Stars Who Stopped Staying Quiet I feel that something has changed. People with everything to lose have started speaking up. John Cleese has publicly backed Rupert Lowe. Rylan Clark spoke out on This Morning in August 2025 and was hit with hundreds of Ofcom complaints for it. Sir Jim Ratcliffe said Britain had been "colonised by immigrants" in February 2026. Football's John Terry and Dennis Wise have backed the cause, and Duncan Bannatyne has backed a Restore Britain candidate. When people like that are willing to take the heat, you know the mood of the country has shifted. 15. When They Can't Win the Argument In October 2026, the Armenian parliament descended into a brawl, with a deputy speaker throwing a chair, and the prime minister calling it "proportionate and right". It's a warning: when politicians can't win the argument, some reach for force. Ours reach for bans, smears and silence. We must answer with argument, evidence and votes, every single time. 16. The Answer: Restore Britain So what do I think the answer is? Not another review. Not another summit. Not another promise. For me, the answer is a movement that says plainly what it will do, and means it. That's why I joined. Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain stand for: Secure borders: stop the boats, end the hotels and bring net migration down sharply. Deport foreign criminals: no more endless appeals. Justice for the grooming gang victims: a full inquiry with no cover-ups, and accountability for every official who failed. One law for everyone: no parallel courts, no two-tier policing. Free speech: no debanking, no arrests for lawful opinions. Pride in Britain: our flag, our faith, our history and our culture. Honest government: an end to cronyism, whichever party is in power. Those who failed us must answer for it, in Parliament, in public inquiries and at the ballot box. That's how a free people takes its country back: peacefully, lawfully and without fear. I'm not writing this out of hatred for anyone. I'm writing it because I love my country, and I fear for the Britain my grandchildren will inherit if nothing changes. I don't want to look back and know I kept quiet. Britain is worth fighting for. Let's restore it. I'm a paying member of Restore Britain, but I write in a personal capacity. These are my own views, not the party's, and I get no money from them.