Labour's neglect of ordinary people’s concerns with a sprinkling of contempt is fuelling rage and despair - Kwasi Kwarteng

How did we get here? It’s been clear to many for years that there is a gulf between the Westminster elite and the large body of people outside London who just want to get on with their lives.

For the Westminster elite- and I was certainly one of them- immigration and other social issues are relatively unimportant.

To this elite, immigration is about multiculturalism, diversity, different cuisines and, let’s face it, cheap labour.

Yet the scale of the immigration we have seen in recent years simply dwarfs the numbers witnessed in the 50 years after the Second World War when many immigrants, including my own parents, came from the old empire to settle in Britain.

The average net figure for migration was about 50,000 a year. It would be right to say that this represented a substantial change in the population and ethnic composition of the United Kingdom. However, what’s happened in the last few years has been on a wholly different scale.

The announcement last autumn that net legal migration was 745,000 sounded the death knell of the conservative government in which I served as a cabinet minister.

In 2010, David Cameron promised “tens of thousands” a year as a net migration figure. The last figure, under the Tories, of 745,000 net migration in one year showed how catastrophically we had failed on this issue.

The Reform Party started to gain traction roughly at the time of this announcement, when, coincidentally, the recall of David Cameron to the Cabinet occurred. Reform has obviously been boosted by this one issue of immigration in the face of Tory failure and Labour indifference.

This context is crucial to understanding what’s going on in Southport and the tragic murders of three innocent children.

The suspect Axel Rudakubana,17, is the son of Rwandan refugees who came to the UK in 2002. We know very little about them or the circumstances in which they brought up the suspected killer of those innocent girls.

What we do know is that Rwanda in 1994, when Rudakubana’s parents lived there, experienced a bloody rampage of genocidal violence, the like of which people in the West can hardly imagine.

We do not know the impact of this violence on the parents and the way they brought up their children. We have no idea how these traumas affected Rudakubana’s own upbringing.

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It is perfectly legitimate to ask these questions about people and families who are coming to our shores from some of the most violent and lawless places on earth. The effects of this type of immigration on settled communities in the West must surely be a matter of debate.

Yet the liberal left elite, which now is firmly in power in Britain, will not ask these questions. They will not even allow any debate.

Anyone who asks such a question is called a racist. The Prime Minister, Sir Keith Starmer, called the people who demonstrated against these appalling murders “thugs". He said very little about the crime itself- the cold-blooded slaughter of three innocent girls under the age of 10.

He said nothing about the causes of such a bestial crime. The PM, as a lawyer, might say he did not want to say anything that might prejudice the trial of the suspect, but his silence confirmed to many that the left-liberal establishment simply didn’t care about the victims, their families, or the communities from which they came.

This lack of concern, this neglect of ordinary people’s concerns is what is fuelling a large degree of rage and a despair across the UK.

This rage is being exploited by extremist thugs. That much is clear but our left-liberal masters do not understand much of the country. It is this lack of understanding, laced with a sprinkling of contempt, which forms a large part of the reason for the scenes we have witnessed in the last few days.