A deepening ethno-sectarian divide threatens to destroy the British legacy of common citizenship under one shared civic identity. Both the far-left response to the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, and recent riots fueled by the radical right have revealed a scale and intensity of inter-ethnic conflict in the U.K. about which the political class has been largely silent. Except for Northern Ireland where ethnoreligious sectarianism has long been an acknowledged reality, the wider establishment and the main political parties have refused to recognize the simmering tensions between different ethnic groups – predominantly sections of the white working class and certain Muslim groups but also some Hindus and Balkan Roma in central and northern towns of the country, besides a myriad of gangs across London and other metropolitan areas.
The latest wave of rioting across England this summer involved savage attacks on the police by far-right thugs as well as attempts to burn down the town mosque and a hotel housing migrants. Amid the frenzy of objectively Islamophobic and racist hatred, ordinary Muslims mobilized to protect their places of worship and their local community centers. Islamists, by contrast, organized in marauding gangs that menaced members of the public. As with numerous pro-Palestinian protests for the past ten months, groups of masked Muslim extremists waved Palestinian flags while smashing pubs and intimidating the indigenous population in places such as Birmingham or Middlesborough.
While there are proximate factors such as radical economic inequality and racially motivated discrimination, it is also the case that the shift from the postwar attempt of civic integration of different communities to contemporary identity politics has exacerbated ethnoreligious conflict. In a recent essay in the New Statesman, Jonathan Rutherford puts this well:
The left’s anti-Zionism resonates with Islamist hate in a toxic coalition of anti-Semitism. Tommy Robinson, the former frontman of the neo-fascist English Defence League, leads a proletarian movement of ethno-nationalism mythologising the customs and values of the “white ethnic group” in a civilizational struggle of Christendom against encroaching Islam. Hindu nationalism is gaining a foothold in the UK, connecting with Robinson in a shared hatred of Muslims. Muslim communities are organising in response into a “Muslim Defence League”.
Yet instead of addressing the deeper causes of ethnic violence that is often religiously rooted, the British state and most of its representatives prefer to promote a ‘multicultural’ vision of the country based on ‘community cohesion’ and ‘British values’ in order to secure ‘inter-racial harmony’. The official response to riots is an appeal to ‘communities’ and ‘community leaders’ – what the journalist Aris Roussinos recently described in an analysis for UnHerd as “the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.” Ethnicity as a concept and ‘really existing’ ethnic identity – whether at the level of groups or nations – are conspicuous by their absence in both official discourse and public policy.
Even Scottish nationalism, resurgent since the devolution of power in 1998 and the independence referendum in 2014, is couched in political rather than ethnic terms – as a national liberation movement from the English-dominated British state and a struggle for an independent Scottish state. One of the main reasons why this is not a case of atavistic ethno-nationalism is because Scotland’s population remains overwhelmingly Scottish (almost 78 per cent according to the 2022 census) and those who describe themselves as ‘Other British’ represent 9 per cent, while the share of people with ethnic minority background stands at about 13 per cent, up from 8 per cent in 2011. Unlike the Westminster government, the Scottish devolved executive has maintained public spending to fund public services, including social housing – even though there are mounting problems in Scotland’s education system and its health service.
By contrast, demographic change in England – whose population represents 85% of the UK population – has been much more rapid. As David Goodhart reports in a recent essay in The Times, “in 2004 the proportion of the UK population that was not white British (i.e. including white minorities such as Poles) was about 9 per cent; today it is around 26 per cent. Taking England alone it will, thanks to the post-Covid immigration surge, soon be touching 30 per cent.” Scotland has had a much lower share of immigration than England – fewer than 50,000 migrants in 2023 compared with almost 700,000 for England. The sheer pace and volume of immigration is a major concern in relation to pressures on wages and public service provision, notably housing, but also immigration-related crime and the failure of the police to do much about it. According to a report by the U.K. polling organization YouGov in the aftermath of the recent riots, “two-thirds of Britons (67%) view immigration policy over recent years as having contributed to the violence.”
The cultural carapace of Britishness, which has served as an umbrella term to bind together the four indigenous nations of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as immigrant ethnic groups, is breaking apart under the pressure of economic inequality, mass immigration, and radical Islam. Britain’s over-centralized yet weak and ineffective state seems unable to offer a more integrationist model at a time when the country’s social fabric is fast unraveling as a result of rampant individualism. And individualism has left British society at once more atomized and more authoritarian, more diverse and more fragmented. Britons today are freer yet lonelier, more entangled yet less attached, more connected even as they are more divided.
Given the extent of Britain’s societal fragmentation, it is unsurprising that ethnic tensions erupt periodically. Over the past fifty years or so, the U.K. has seen a mix of interethnic and ethnoreligious conflict: the Brixton and Toxteth riots of the 1980s, the mill town riots of 2001, the Tottenham riots of 2011, the BLM protests of 2020, as well as clashes between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester in 2022 and riots by Balkan Roma in Leeds earlier this year. In each case ethnic and religious minorities mobilized against discrimination, racism, and police abuse such as using ‘stop and search’ powers to target ethnic minority groups or the state seen to be meddling in their family lives.
Then there is the role of social media in fostering the eruption of interethnic violence. The recent riots that started in the northern town of Southport and spread across the country were triggered by fake viral claims published and promoted on tech platforms. Before fire and fury engulfed Southport, there was feverish speculation on X (formerly known as Twitter) that the perpetrator of the appalling attacks killing three schoolgirls and severely wounding six others was Ali Al-Shakati, a supposedly 17-year-old Muslim. Posts on X wrongly claimed that he was an “asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year” and was on an “MI6 watchlist.” By the time a court named the real suspect as Axel Rudakubana, born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents in 2006, it was too late.
What started as a bogus story turned into an epic conspiracy peddled by far-right figures including Tommy Robinson and the social media influencer Andrew Tate, with the connivance of fake news outlets linked to Russia and the American alt-right. Their tweets helped to mobilize marauding gangs who went on to commit crimes of arson, frenzied acts of looting and vile intimidation of both ordinary people and journalists. Meanwhile Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, poured petrol on the flames by highlighting Robinson’s poisonous posts and claiming that “civil war [in the U.K.] is inevitable.”
Yet Britain is not sliding into civil war. Nor is it nearly as racially divided as the U.S. or as culturally split as Sweden, the Netherlands, France or Germany. According to the author Tomiwa Owolade, the U.K. is ‘not America’ precisely because race in Britain should be seen through a British, not an American, lens and black Britons should not be reduced to their race. They are “British first and foremost, and thus are likely to have more in common with other Britons than with black people in other parts of the world,” especially contemporary America that is in thrall to ‘race relations’ and culture wars. While Britain continues to be divided along social class and geographic lines, its history and institutions have in the past greatly tempered racial and religious divisions as a result of a civic conception of nationhood – an established Church that provides an official recognition of the importance of faith and institutions such as the monarchy or the armed forces which bring together people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Up to a point, this legacy endures. In her 1998 essay entitled ‘Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain,’ the academic Elaine Thomas argued that “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries.” Compared with France or other continental European countries where aggressive assimilation and secularism have in the past led to the ghettoization and self-segregation of Muslim immigrants, the British experience of partially successful integration was the result of granting full political rights to new arrivals without requiring full assimilation.
Paradoxically, that is the U.K.’s strength and weakness – an exceptionally liberal generosity and tolerance that works for as long as both the indigenous and the immigrant population adapted to one another. Key to this was a common culture both locally and in the imagined community of the U.K.’s multi-national polity, so compellingly captured by the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. But when the dominant culture turns intolerant and aggressively secular, then ethnoreligious minorities seek increasingly to remain separate from the mainstream, an impulse which is exacerbated by social media bubbles and by cities becoming majority-minority such as London, Birmingham, Leicester and Luton – places that have experienced some of the worst riots in recent years.
Yet for all the official silence about ethnoreligious tensions, the U.K. remains relatively moderate, both culturally and politically. Unlike the European continent, Britain has no extended history of ideological totalitarianism. Neither communism nor fascism gained a foothold, and populist insurgencies on the far left or the radical right have either fizzled out or been absorbed into the political mainstream, as with Jeremy Corbyn’s failed leadership of the Labour Party (2015-2019) or the repeated attempts by Nigel Farage to infiltrate or supplant the Conservative Party. This, helped by the U.K.’s hyper-majoritarian electoral system, means that the country is far less politically polarized than other Western countries. The two main political parties are dominant and can win sufficient seats to form majorities with the support of a little more than a quarter of the total electorate. For example, the new Labour government holds two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons with a share of the popular vote of less than 34 per cent on a turnout of less than 60 per cent.
What is more, the two main parties have until recently acted as filters for political tribalism, absorbing radicalism into the moderate center. The narrative according to which Labour inevitably is Antisemitic and the Conservatives are bent on being Islamophobic cannot be allowed to take hold as it has in the Westminster political and media bubble. Both parties need to take a clear stand and face down any extremist MP or party member. This is vital to safeguard a situation where at present there are no far-right or revolutionary-left parties or movements with any significant parliamentary representation – no equivalent of the Alternative für Deutschland or Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Both UK domestic politics and UK foreign policy are therefore more insulated from the political extremes than elsewhere, for now.
The exception is the potential influence of radical Islam. In the last UK general election held on July 4th, four independent candidates defeated the candidates of the now governing Labour Party by campaigning on a pro-Palestinian platform. Like the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, their protest politics fuses opposition to Western imperialism and colonialism (and therefore Israel) with support for national liberation struggles (and therefore Palestine). The underlying Antisemitism equates Jews with capitalism, imperialism and racism of which the ‘Jewish foreign policy lobby’ in the U.S and the state of Israel are the embodiment. And according to the identity politics that now dominates sections of the political left in the U.K. and the rest of the West, the Palestinians (including Hamas) and Muslims more generally (including Islamic State) are anti-colonial movements resisting Western domination. Hence the reluctance of center-left political parties, including the British Labour Party, to confront the ideas that drive pro-Palestinian demonstrations and university encampments.
The current leadership of the Labour Party that forms the new U.K. government rejects this narrative, but the question going forward is whether it will make concessions to some of its more militant backbench MPs and party members and how it will combine its support for Israel’s right to self-defense with its backing for an independent Palestinian state that is not ruled by Hamas. Another key task is to reduce mass immigration, which is economically exploitative in both sender and recipient countries and improve the integration of migrants whatever their ethnicity or religion. The latter requires a renewal of the civic culture and identity that Britain tried to forge after the end of World War Two and the end of its empire, with shared institutions and cultural practices rooted in language, history, class, religion and nationality. This will require a much more consistent application of the law in relation to free speech, as increasing cultural diversity currently involves evasions and silence to minimize frictions when people with very different values live side by side, and much more robust anchor institutions capable of binding together once more an increasingly fragmented and fractious population.
While this is a generational project, reducing immigration is more readily attainable. For many years, the political and policy debate in the U.K. has focused predominantly on illegal immigration in the tens of thousands per year, notably boats crossing the Channel, rather than legal migration, which in 2023 stood at around 750,000. The policy proposed by the previous Conservative government of deporting illegal migrants to Rwanda was a failure for two reasons: first, it rested on a new British law declaring Rwanda a safe country when the reality is otherwise and, second, it would have processed few arrivals at exorbitant costs. A constructive alternative is for the British government to work with France to limit Channel crossings as part of a reset in UK-EU relations post-Brexit, including joint patrols and a systematic clamp down of smuggling routes.
The much larger problem though is the economic model that drives the huge numbers of legal migrants. Britain needs to replace a dysfunctional and inhumane immigration policy with one that provides shelter for genuine political refugees but radically limits economic migration — whether legal or illegal — by providing more affordable housing, better skilled and paid jobs and much better and comprehensive vocational and technical training for both the indigenous and the recent immigrant population. This, in turn, requires a new political economy based on production and the creation of shared value in partnership with business and labor unions instead of an economy powered only by tech and finance founded on debt and speculation.
Faced with ethnoreligious conflict at home, the twin priority for the U.K. is to drive down economic migration and put in place a model that insists on the integration of law-abiding migrants and the swift deportation of criminals. Meanwhile, British foreign policy has to balance two competing causes. One is the concern for the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and support for Palestinians in the West Bank in resisting the dispossession that successive Israeli governments have enacted. The other is continued backing for Jews who face existential threats from the forces of radical Islam and for Israel as the only country in the Middle East with civic institutions such as free and democratically self-governing trade unions and a welfare state, with shared prosperity and well-being, with women’s equality, with rights for sexual minorities and with a free press. The threat of dispossession and oppression is not limited to the Palestinians.
Diversity – ethnic, cultural, religious, social – is a strength and an asset, but to achieve a balance with solidarity requires not just profound policy reforms in the areas of housing, welfare, and immigration but also the fostering of a common culture. The danger for the U.K. is that the legacy of a civic model of integration is being irretrievably lost by the political and economic elites who are blind to the deeper causes of the ethnoreligious strife which is dividing the country. The new Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised a ‘decade of national renewal’. His policy of characterizing the rioters as ‘rightwing thugs’ who will face the full force of the law has for now calmed the situation but will not prevent the periodic outbreak of further unrest.
What’s missing is a strategy to address popular resentment about porous borders and mass immigration, the ensuing pressures on already underfunded public services as well as the general degradation of everyday existence – crumbling infrastructure, a lack of affordable housing, run-down high streets, broken families and communities. British politics needs to offer at once concrete improvement and realistic hope to those who are excluded and abandoned. A new national story has to bind together the top 20-30 per cent who are doing well and those whom the editor of the New Statesman Jason Cowley calls “the neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous. What do you do about these people and their anger, suffering and despair?”. How the new Labour government answers this question will determine not just its political fate but also the U.K.’s national destiny for decades to come.
