“Something to do with not liking Churchill,” Laura Perrins and the Anglophile Death Drive

Conservatives often like to hover between “my country, right or wrong” and some abstract defence of “the national interest.” But some rightists in Ireland appear to want to buck that trend entirely—and instead park themselves squarely on the tarmac at RAF Northolt, waving a Union Jack and waiting for the Empire to take them home.

Enter Laura Perrins, barrister, commentator, and full-time West Brit fantasia generator, whose latest Substack etching is less analysis and more psychological projection with WiFi. In it, she accuses the Irish public—and the State itself—of engaging in a modern-day “blood libel” for daring to raise an eyebrow at the IDF’s apparent flirtation with famine as a weapon of war in Gaza. 

The piece quickly swerves from Gaza into an unhinged re-litigation of Ireland’s WWII neutrality, hitting every dog whistle along the way. Here’s Perrins, with all the nuance of a Bomber Harris air raid over Dresden.

“The Irish State remained ‘neutral’ while 6 million Jews were being murdered by the Nazi killing machine… Something to do with not liking Churchill… the head of government offered condolences to the German state on Hitler’s suicide. That’s the Irish record on Jews.”

What follows is a breathless rant in which criticism of Israeli military policy becomes Kristallnacht 2.0, the Irish media becomes Goebbels’ press office, and RTÉ becomes Der Stürmer in Donnybrook. According to Perrins, we’re all one Gaza solidarity protest away from torching synagogues in Ballsbridge. It’s absurd—and it’s frankly dangerous.

By conflating Jewishness with Zionism, Perrins pulls the oldest and dirtiest trick in the book: using antisemitism as a rhetorical stick to beat critics of a colonial project. The real target here isn’t hatred—it’s Irish sovereignty. She’s not defending Jews; she’s defending the empire and its anti-Irish legacy.

In tone and content, Perrins mirrors a deeply unoriginal school of thought—akin to Germany’s Antideutsche—that views any form of anti-imperialist politics as proto-fascism. Like them, she wishes to delegitimise not just Irish neutrality, not just Palestine solidarity, but the entire Irish national project.

To be clear, full-throated unionism from Perrins would be welcomed instead of this song and dance critique of Irish sovereignty during the Emergency.

Which is rich, considering Ireland’s neutrality in WWII—yes, that tired hobby horse—is one of the few genuinely anti-imperialist positions a small European country managed to hold in a century of geopolitical carnage.

Let’s be clear: Ireland didn’t join WWII because it had only just staggered out of the rubble of a colonial war, a civil war, and a constitutional settlement with its throat barely stitched together. The Irish Free State, not yet 20 years old, wasn’t interested in propping up a British Empire that had partitioned its land, starved its people, and treated its sovereignty like a clerical error.

Did Churchill think of Irish national sovereignty the way he feigned concern over Poland in 1939 during the Treaty debates? For all the revisionist bile about Irish republican mythologising about Easter Week, nothing comes close to the frankly delusional Churchill cult of the Blitz years.

While Britain was winking at Mussolini, shipping Jewish refugees back to the Reich, and letting Edward VIII play footsie with Hitler, Ireland was condemning fascist aggression in Ethiopia at the League of Nations and drafting a pluralist constitution that enshrined religious freedom, including for Jews. Dev wasn’t perfect even from a Catholic or republican perspective, but compared to Churchill’s eugenics-flirting, India-starving, empire-clinging resume, he comes off like a Scandinavian social democrat.

The Ireland of 1939-45 wasn’t Nazi-sympathetic, it was anti-colonial and defensive—and that terrifies people like Perrins. Because in her worldview, true conservatism must be British, must be Atlanticist, must involve waving through arms shipments to Tel Aviv or London while sneering at Paddy with his neutrality and his 800 years of inconvenient memory and nuance about seeing blasted Palestinian children on his social media feed.

This is less about Gaza and more about a strand of Irish “conservatism” that feels deeply uncomfortable with Irish nationhood itself. You see it in the sneering toward republicanism, the anxiety at neutrality, the barely concealed wish that Dublin was just a nicer Birmingham.

When Perrins frets that Ireland’s recognition of a Palestinian state “rewards the massacre of Jews,” what she’s really upset about is Ireland exercising independent foreign policy at all. Gaza and the diplomatic fallout from it is in fact a moment of Irish sovereign assertion against Brussels, London, and DC, however childish it has manifested itself.

Ireland, for Perrins, is guilty not of antisemitism, but of insubordination.

Her Churchill-fetishising crowd can never quite forgive Ireland for saying “no” to war, saying “no” to NATO, and refusing to march in lockstep with London, Washington, or Tel Aviv. They dress it up in the language of moral outrage, but scratch the surface, and it’s all post-imperial panic dressed in Vatican II drag.

Neutrality, even with all its contradictions, is one of the few remaining expressions of Irish national particularity in the post-colonial world. That’s why it draws the ire of liberals and conservatives alike—from the Atlanticist centre to the Anglophile right. But unlike those who traded in their tricolour for a blue and white flag, most Irish people are ethnically coded to remember what it means to be a colonised people, and still know the smell of propaganda dressed as morality from HM’s media and think tank circuit.

So yes, Perrins’ piece is many things: historically illiterate, morally cynical, and drenched in bad faith. But most of all, it’s a tantrum about Irish sovereignty—and like most tantrums, it tells us more about the screamer than the subject.

In conclusion, De Valera did nothing wrong, and frankly, the Irish state should sponsor a ticker tape parade to the German Embassy in Booterstown each VE Day to rub Perrins and other West Brits up the wrong way.

AN PHOBLACHT ABÚ.