On a grey September afternoon, the “Unite the Kingdom” march filled London’s streets with flags, chants, and fury over migration. Addressing the rally by video, Elon Musk told the crowd: “There’s something beautiful about being British… It began with a slow erosion, but it is now rapidly accelerating with massive uncontrolled migration.” He warned that “violence is coming” and declared: “You either fight back or you die.”
If George Orwell were watching, he might believe he’d stepped into one of his own dystopias – only even he might have struggled to imagine this. The world’s richest man, with more wealth than most can fathom, now uses his vast platforms to persuade ordinary people that their misfortunes stem not from inequality or exploitation, but from the poorest in society: immigrants and asylum seekers.
Orwell’s villains were never just individuals, but systems. Yet what we see here is an almost perfect fusion of the two: a man whose economic power allows him to dominate communication channels, and who then deploys them to deflect blame from the structures that create insecurity onto the most vulnerable.
The problem is not the migrant or the neighbour down the street. It is an economic model that permits staggering concentrations of wealth while wages stagnate and living costs rise. It is the normalisation of billionaires shaping public opinion while paying poorly those who make their fortunes possible.
Orwell wrote that liberty meant the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. What people need to hear now is that their hardship does not come from asylum seekers, but from an economic system that lets the richest accumulate unimaginable power while the rest struggle to get by.