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This Is What Is Happening in Britain
David Betz, Michael Rainsborough
_David Betz is professor of war in the modern world, King’s College London. Michael Rainsborough is professor of strategic theory and director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra._
Something is going badly wrong across Western societies, and the sense of political dislocation is no longer a fringe concern. Trust in institutions has fallen, established political parties are losing support and arguments over immigration and national identity have become sharp dividing lines.
In Germany, the president now warns openly of a return to the political divisions of the Weimar era. In France, a protest movement that began in schools has spread across the country, bringing arson, mass arrests and violent clashes with riot police to cities from Strasbourg to Marseille. Across Europe, insurgent parties of left and right prosper on dissatisfaction with political systems that seem increasingly unable to correct themselves. Britain exhibits the same symptoms. The question is why governments confronted by such conditions so often appear to aggravate the problems rather than address their causes.
Aggravating the conditions driving the crisis follows the logic of accelerationism. Most closely associated with the British philosopher Nick Land, accelerationism holds that an existing order contains forces which, once unleashed, drive change forward and ultimately overwhelm attempts to restrain them. Rather than arrest the process, accelerationist thought embraces its intensification, although versions of the idea on left and right differ markedly over where it might lead. The essential rationale remains: if the existing order contains forces capable of destroying or transforming it, remove the restraints and let them run their course.
Judged by that standard, Britain’s ruling classes are accelerationists _par excellence_. They oversee economic stagnation, mounting national debt, growing welfare dependency, the decay of town centres and public services, and deepening social divisions, compounded by rapid demographic change and repeated failures to deliver effective immigration controls. Their own reports document segregation, declining trust and failures of integration, yet governments refuse to change the policies contributing to those problems. As opposition becomes more organised and disruptive, the state responds with surveillance and speech restrictions, as well as two-tier policing and justice. Grievance produces resistance, resistance produces stronger enforcement, and stronger enforcement fuels the grievance.
We first raised the likelihood of Britain moving towards violent social breakdown in a short article ‘The British Road to Dirty War_’_ in January 2019. At that time the prognosis was seen as controversial, not least within our own university. We were ‘cancelled’ and removed from our positions of authority in the Department of War Studies for daring to raise this heretical possibility.
Now, the prospect is no longer confined to supposedly dissenting academics. In June 2026, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch warned that communal divisions risked taking Britain towards civil war. What was once been dismissed as an alarmist prediction was now being voiced by the leader of the opposition. Recognising the danger is one thing, though – reconsidering the policies contributing to the problem is quite another.
Governments are not spectators to the forces at work, which raises the most fundamental – and still largely unanswered – question in the civil war debate: why, despite endless warnings about growing social fracture and the prospect of civil strife, do Britain’s ruling classes continue pursuing policies that exacerbate these tensions? Why persist on a course that threatens to unleash forces capable of sweeping away the very political order upon which their own survival depends?
**Is it simply incompetence?**
The current debate over immigration illustrates this paradox most clearly. So, let’s begin from the obvious explanation: that it is all a case of ineptitude.
There is plenty of evidence of incompetence, but as an explanation for the failure to tackle the wider problems generated by unconstrained immigration, legal and illegal alike, it doesn’t quite wash. For example, consecutive administrations have promised to reduce immigration but then consciously moved in the opposite direction. Brexit should have removed one familiar explanation for the inability to control national borders. Instead, the system introduced in 2021 widened access to overseas labour by lowering skills and salary thresholds, removing the cap on skilled workers and abolishing the resident labour market test. Net migration subsequently reached 944,000 in the year ending March 2023. The rules were later tightened, and the figures fell but remain historically high.
Nor can governments claim that the negative social consequences are a surprise. As far back as 2001, the Cantle Report after the riots in Bradford and Oldham described communities living “parallel lives”. As Home Secretary, Theresa May warned in 2010 that poorly managed immigration placed pressure on public services and damaged community relations. David Cameron declared state multiculturalism a failure in 2011. The Casey Review reiterated many of these findings in 2016. In November 2024, the government stated that its intent was to restore order to a “broken” immigration system. In 2025 Keir Starmer warned of Britain becoming an “island of strangers”, while the government’s 2026 social cohesion plan acknowledges similar problems.
The recurrence of such warnings points towards more than poor judgement. Other forces are clearly at work. For example, large employers, notably in the health and social care sectors, have come to depend heavily upon international recruitment, giving them a powerful interest in maintaining existing arrangements, while the detrimental social impacts are borne by the population at large, including fiscal costs, pressure upon housing, infrastructure, health and welfare services, wage suppression and rising crime, especially in sexual offending.
These social costs did not have to be distributed in this way. Employers could have been encouraged to invest more heavily in domestic recruitment, training and retention. Such choices would have imposed burdens of their own, but political decisions necessarily involve trade-offs. Governments instead accommodated business demands for access to overseas labour while leaving the wider population, especially those on lower incomes and in already deprived areas, to bear the burden.
Over time, the logic acquired a momentum of its own. Dependence upon overseas labour was increasingly cited as a reason why immigration could not substantially be reduced. Policy created dependency; dependency became the argument for continuing the policy. Cue the inevitable smug _Question Time_ audience member who bewails that without migrants, who will staff the NHS, and more importantly, who will serve us in Pret?
Incompetence alone cannot explain why governments pursue policies that heighten the danger of civil strife. Governments have certainly miscalculated, but they have also made deliberate choices, sustaining existing arrangements long after the resulting social tensions had been officially admitted.
**Another failure, another report**
Faced with declining social cohesion, governments have proved far readier to devise new administrative remedies than to reconsider the policies contributing to the problem. The latest example is Protecting What Matters, the government’s 2026 social cohesion plan. It acknowledges that large-scale migration makes community bonds harder to maintain, points to continuing segregation and records falling trust and worsening tensions.
Having diagnosed the problems, Whitehall proposes national integration standards, local cohesion plans, new mechanisms for detecting communal friction and a Social Cohesion Measurement Framework. After 25 years of reports documenting deepening societal divisions, the answer is apparently another programme for managing the consequences, while leaving the policies contributing to those divisions untouched. One set of policies creates the problems that justify another.
To illustrate the contradictory thinking at work, in March 2026 Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood accepted that people seeing illegal small-boat arrivals and the pace of immigration more generally had good reason to feel that matters were “out of control”. Yet having conceded the failure of control, she turned to what she regarded as the more grievous threat: the growth of ethno-nationalism. Government policies, in other words, had provoked precisely the political reaction she now proposed to combat.
Combating the rise of the ‘far-right’ gives government a new set of tasks. Anger over immigration is treated as a threat to social cohesion; hostility towards immigration becomes a potential source of extremism; communal tensions require monitoring and intervention. The policies generating much of the discontent stay in place, while government expands its efforts to contain the political reaction.
The accelerationist dynamic can therefore be summarised as a feedback loop. Policies that generate discontent are maintained; government seeks to contain the reaction they have caused; containment further exacerbates the grievance against the state. By treating the political expression of that grievance as a problem to be suppressed, the authorities intensify the very forces they are trying to control.
**When political correction fails**
Democratic politics depends upon the possibility of correction. Governments can be removed, policies reversed and lost arguments fought again at the next election. People can profoundly dislike a policy while accepting the political system, provided they retain confidence that democratic institutions offer a peaceful means of changing the direction of policy.
The scale and pace of recent immigration have tested that bargain. Governments of both major parties have promised greater control, yet policy has either barely changed or failed to deliver the promised results. The lesson is corrosive: when elections fail to translate public demands into political change, the appeal of seeking redress through other means inevitably grows.
Loss of faith in the capacity of elections to bring about meaningful change also extends to the institutions responsible for implementing government policy. The civil service, courts and police cease to appear as neutral instruments of democratic governance and come to be seen as obstacles to popular will, seemingly unresponsive to demands expressed through the ballot box.
Mismanaged immigration also accelerates the communalisation of politics. Competition over housing, schools and public resources, alongside disputes over cultural norms and practices, becomes organised increasingly around ethnic or religious identities. Government reinforces these divisions when it consults faith and community organisations, directs programmes towards particular groups and seeks representatives to speak on their behalf. A state that encourages minorities to consolidate politically along communal lines should hardly be surprised when the majority begins to do the same, and nativist demands follow.
If elections fail to change policy, while institutions meant to arbitrate political disputes are themselves seen as favouring competing communal interests, confidence that the system offers a peaceful route to political change begins to collapse. Opposition then moves beyond electoral politics. Protest becomes more confrontational, direct action more attractive and resistance easier to justify.
**When containment becomes escalation**
As opposition moves from protest to direct obstruction, the full weight of the state is brought to bear against those who resist. At Eastney Marina in Portsmouth, the authorities facilitated the landing and onward transport of migrants brought across the Channel by criminal smuggling networks, despite fierce local opposition. The determination to secure their passage stood in stark contrast to the refusal to reconsider the policies that had provoked the confrontation.
Such confrontations become tests of government authority: whether the state can enforce its decisions in the face of organised resistance. For those resisting, the same confrontation raises a question of legitimacy: whether governments that have consistently ignored demands for political change can still claim the obedience of their citizens.
Once resistance challenges the state’s authority, changing course becomes politically more difficult than an earlier correction would have been. A policy reversal secured through ordinary politics can be defended on its merits; one made under pressure from direct action risks demonstrating that disruption works. The policy becomes a test of the government’s resolve, giving ministers another reason to hold their ground.
For those resisting, the lesson is precisely the opposite, providing another reason to question the state’s legitimacy. Elections, manifesto promises and official reviews have failed to deliver the promised reductions in immigration. Yet a government perceived as unwilling to secure the national borders proves ready to deploy its coercive powers against those challenging its decisions. The contrast reinforces the belief that open defiance is the only language the state appears to understand.
The two responses feed upon each other. Resistance gives government stronger reasons to assert its authority; the resulting enforcement deepens the grievances driving resistance. A classic escalatory dynamic develops, with each side supplying the other with reasons for its next move.
The confrontation over illegal Channel crossings thus develops into a more fundamental struggle over political power: whether change can still be secured through ordinary politics, or whether the outcome will increasingly be settled by force.
**The self-preservation trap**
As things deteriorate, the state is much better equipped to suppress a protest than to address its underlying causes. No comparable machinery springs into action when a policy fails for 20 years. Revising immigration policy requires ministers to confront organised interests, institutional dependencies and assumptions embedded across government. Arresting someone who blocks a port is considerably easier than reconsidering the policies that brought them there in the first place.
The grievances behind such protests have accumulated through years of political choices whose costs have been deferred, dispersed or transferred elsewhere. Some difficulties have arisen from governmental inaction; others are the direct result of policies deliberately pursued. Yet governments that have shown little inclination to address these problems become remarkably decisive when the resulting tensions threaten their authority. The authoritarian impulse asserts itself as those in power seek to defend the political order over which they preside.
**Accidental accelerationists?**
Accelerationism ordinarily implies intention. There is little reason to presume that Britain’s ruling classes consciously seek the social upheaval or political destruction that accelerationist ideas envisage. Governments, however, are hardly innocent bystanders to the forces they help set in motion. They decide which interests to accommodate, determine which costs they are prepared to impose and follow the same course long after the dangers are plain to see. Absence of intention does not imply absence of responsibility.
Mass immigration and multiculturalism provide the clearest illustration. Neither simply happened to Britain. Both reflected political choices and, in some quarters, ideological convictions about diversity, national identity and the kind of society Britain ought to become. No democratic mandate was ever sought for so profound a transformation of British society.
The political and institutional interests sustaining mass immigration and multiculturalism also evolve over time. One government liberalises immigration for economic reasons; another preserves the system because public services have become dependent upon overseas recruitment; institutions built around multicultural policies acquire constituencies, practices and assumptions of their own. Later governments inherit both the policies and the costs of dismantling them. Choice becomes interest, interest hardens into dependency, and dependency is then presented as necessity.
Britain’s present difficulties are therefore no mere accident. The policies contributing to them were consciously chosen, defended and sustained despite successive official warnings about their effects.
**So, are they accelerationists?**
Why, then, do Britain’s ruling classes continue along a course that increases the danger of civil conflict? The answer lies in how the different forces we have examined combine to reinforce one another. Six propositions bring the argument together.
**1. Incompetence explains part of the failure but cannot explain the refusal to change course**. Governments make bad decisions, misjudge consequences and fail to deliver what they publicly promise. But such failings cannot adequately explain why, when the dangers have long been recognised, governments of both major parties nevertheless pursue much the same policies.
**2. Powerful interests have a stake in maintaining the status quo.** Employers and public services have become heavily dependent on overseas recruitment. Their interests are organised and well represented in government. Governments face stronger incentives to accommodate these organised interests than to address the consequences borne by the population at large.
**3. Ideology shapes what governments are prepared to recognise and reconsider.** Immigration and multiculturalism reflect convictions about diversity, national identity and the desirability of social transformation. Such beliefs influence which outcomes governments welcome, which difficulties they tolerate and which objections they regard as legitimate. Political commitments can survive mounting evidence that the resulting changes are generating serious divisions.
**4. Political choices create institutional dependencies that make reversal progressively harder.** Employers and public services organise staffing around overseas recruitment, while government builds institutions around the society its policies have helped create. Over time, decisions acquire powerful defenders and become embedded in administrative practice. Reversing these policies then requires governments to confront interests, assumptions and dependencies that their predecessors helped establish.
**5. The failure of democratic correction encourages opposition beyond ordinary politics.** Voters are promised greater control over national borders, but governments fail to deliver. Reports identify problems without resolving them; elections change governments without changing the direction of policy. As confidence in democratic redress weakens, resistance becomes more organised and disruptive. The failure to address grievances through established political channels creates the conditions in which more confrontational methods acquire greater appeal.
**6. The defence of political authority can become a source of further escalation.** Once resistance challenges the state’s ability to enforce its decisions, changing course risks appearing to reward direct action and weaken formal authority. Governments therefore become more inclined to suppress opposition, even as the causes of discontent go unaddressed. Stronger enforcement, in turn, reinforces the conviction among opponents that the democratic process offers no effective remedy. The effort to preserve authority risks intensifying the confrontation that threatens its legitimacy.
So, are Britain’s ruling classes the ultimate accelerationists? Not in the literal sense, of course. Accelerationism consciously embraces forces within an existing order whose intensification drives towards its destruction or transformation. Britain’s ruling classes, one assumes, do not subscribe to any such doctrine. Yet their policies have set in motion a recognisably accelerationist dynamic. As elections repeatedly fail to produce the promised changes in policy, governments become more determined to assert their authority over those who resist. Governments unable to address the causes of political conflict prove considerably more capable of policing dissent. Suppressing resistance is easier, at least in the short term, than correcting the conditions that generate resistance.
Britain’s ruling classes need not seek the destruction of the existing order. They need only defend it until self-preservation becomes self-destruction.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
