The row over Pete Hegseth’s D-Day remarks followed a familiar script: condemn the speaker, ignore the argument.
Last week, the US defence secretary stood above Omaha Beach at the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer to mark the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, and used the occasion to issue a warning of his own. Today, he said, “different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies”, and the boats arriving in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria carry a challenge Europe’s capitals refuse to face. When would they do something about it? Or is it already too late?
The reaction came within hours. European officials called the remarks inappropriate; British ministers called them classless. What almost nobody did was engage with the substance. The whole controversy turned on whether he should have said it. Whether it was true went largely unexamined.
And that tells you more about modern Britain, and about Europe, than anything Hegseth said in Normandy.
The country that invented free speech
Start with speech itself. Speaking in Brussels recently, former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss reminded her audience that Britain helped give the world the very idea of free expression. Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights. Yet the former prime minister argued that Britain’s reputation today is for suppressing speech, not defending it.
“We were the country that put forward the idea of freedom of speech,” she said. “But what has happened since then is that our country now has an international reputation for suppressing people’s freedom of speech.”
Her broader claim was that British institutions have been captured by an ideology that puts progressive orthodoxies above the traditional pillars of Western society: Christianity, the family, national sovereignty, and open debate itself. You don’t have to sign up to every part of that diagnosis to see the pattern underneath it. Time and again, Britain has dealt with politically sensitive problems by restricting the discussion rather than confronting the reality.
The grooming-gang scandals are the darkest example. Over two decades, in town after town, thousands of vulnerable girls were sexually exploited, mainly by Pakistani muslims, while police, councils, social services and politicians failed to step in. Critics have long argued that officials held back for fear of inflaming racial and religious tensions; as Truss put it, many in authority decided an accusation of racism was a greater professional danger than failing to stop the abuse.
Accept that judgment or not, the scandal taught ordinary citizens a simple lesson. There were subjects the governing class preferred not to discuss.
A system buckling under its own weight
That perception has only deepened under Keir Starmer. Since Labour took office, more than 65,000 migrants have reportedly crossed the Channel illegally, on top of nearly 200,000 arrivals in recent years. The asylum system now costs taxpayers roughly £4bn a year, over £2bn of it on housing asylum seekers, with support costs that can run past £170 per day per applicant.
For that money, Britain could build a coastguard fleet capable of intercepting every inflatable before it left French waters. Instead, UK home secretary Shabana Mahmood has admitted she cannot guarantee crossings will fall next year. Britons are told to expect “long, painstaking, difficult work”, while the system pays twice: once to support asylum seekers, and again to attempt deportations that disappear into years of appeals.
These are not abstract budget lines. They go to sovereignty, to social cohesion, to whether the streets feel safe.
The recent unrest in Belfast made the point. After a violent incident involving a Sudanese asylum seeker, demonstrations spread across the city, some descending into rioting, arson and attacks on police. Officials were quick to condemn “far-right thuggery”; many residents felt, once again, that the authorities cared more about condemning public anger than about the conditions that produced it. Something similar happened in Southampton, where a white student was stabbed to death by a British Sikh, police initially mistook the dying man for the attacker, and the protests that followed were duly labelled “absolutely unacceptable”.
The complaint you hear more and more is not that the law is too harsh but that it is applied unevenly. “Two-tier policing” is now a fixture of British political debate. Fair or not, the phrase reflects a growing belief that the authorities come down hard on certain kinds of dissent while showing far less urgency about the failures behind the frustration.
The numbers feeding that belief are difficult to wave away. Nearly 11,000 foreign nationals sit in British prisons. The Home Office has admitted it does not know how many failed asylum applicants remain in the country. And plenty of Britons have noticed a government willing to commit billions to Ukraine while struggling to explain how it intends to secure Britain’s own streets.
The vacuum the mainstream created
Demography has become another flashpoint. The 2021 census found that only 53.8 per cent of London’s population identifies as white, and White British children now make up less than a quarter of pupils in the capital’s schools. Supporters of the current policy see a modern multicultural society in those figures. Critics see a pace of change voters never endorsed.
The argument, at bottom, is not about immigration as such. Every successful nation absorbs newcomers. It is about whether a nation still decides who enters, in what numbers, and on what terms assimilation happens — and whether citizens can discuss any of this honestly without risking their reputations or their jobs.
Few put it more bluntly than the Belgian politician Filip Dewinter, who told a Paris conference earlier this year that Europe faces “a demographic time bomb”. He frames the issue in the vocabulary of the “Great Replacement”, claiming that states such as Iran, Pakistan and Qatar spend tens of millions a year helping migrants enter Europe, “islamize it and weaken it from within”. “This is the end of our civilisation,” he warned.
Many will reject that language outright; plenty will find it alarmist, or worse. But figures like Dewinter are not gaining an audience because Europeans woke up one morning as extremists. They are gaining one because millions of voters believe the mainstream parties will not speak honestly about immigration, integration, crime or national identity. Exclude legitimate concerns from respectable debate for long enough, and more radical voices fill the space.
The establishment’s answer, again and again, has been to delegitimise those concerns rather than answer them, and to marginalise the people raising them rather than persuade them. The conversation itself becomes the thing to regulate.
That is why Hegseth’s remarks struck a nerve. His critics talked about etiquette — whether a D-Day commemoration was the proper venue. What they mostly avoided was the reality underneath: many Europeans believe their leaders have lost control of immigration, border enforcement, integration and public order.
Whether Hegseth picked the right venue is a small question. Whether Europe still has the political will to address what he raised is the one that matters.
