Britain, Decline and the Hard Choices Ahead

There are moments in the life of a nation when language begins to fail. Words such as “concern”, “challenge”, “polarisation” and “tension” are no longer equal to the facts. They become bureaucratic sedatives. They soften what must be sharpened. They obscure what must be seen. Britain is approaching — and may already have passed — such a moment.

I do not write this with pleasure. I write it as someone formed, in part, by the inheritance of Britain: its language, its law, its military traditions, its parliamentary instincts, its literature, its humour, and its deep civilisational confidence. For those of us raised in Australia, “Old Blighty” has never been merely another foreign country. It has been part ancestor, part reference point, part cautionary tale and part family memory. But families sometimes tell hard truths to one another. And the hard truth is this: Britain has been getting it wrong for a very long time.

Britain today is not merely experiencing a run of bad policy. It is enduring a crisis of confidence, legitimacy and will. Its borders, while still formally policed, have become porous in practice. Its institutions have grown defensive and evasive. Its universities too often confuse education with ideological formation. Its public broadcaster increasingly appears to speak for the governing class rather than the whole nation. Its police and public authorities have too often seemed more afraid of reputational discomfort than of social disorder. Its political leaders speak in managerial abstractions while ordinary citizens watch the character of their towns, cities and national life change around them at a speed and scale to which they never meaningfully consented. This is not normal democratic friction. It is civilisational drift.

This is not a left-and-right issue. It is a right-and-wrong issue. It is not about tribal party loyalties. It is about whether a nation still possesses the moral seriousness, cultural confidence and institutional courage to preserve itself.

The Roses and the warning of history

England has been here before, though in different form. The Wars of the Roses were fought between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne, beginning in 1455 and ending in 1485. The name came later, from the red rose associated with Lancaster and the white rose associated with York. Both houses claimed legitimacy through descent from Edward III. What followed was not merely a family quarrel. It was a prolonged struggle over authority, legitimacy and the right to rule.

The House of Lancaster drew its claim from John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the fourth son of Edward III. It produced Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI. Henry V’s victories in France gave England glory; Henry VI’s weakness helped bring civil disorder. A crown that could not command confidence invited faction. Around the Lancastrian cause gathered those whose loyalties, ambitions and fears made peace increasingly difficult.

The House of York advanced its claim through a rival line of descent from Edward III. The Yorkists were not mere rebels in the crude sense. They represented a competing claim to lawful authority, sharpened by frustration at Lancastrian weakness, court faction and national mismanagement. Once legitimacy became contested, politics escaped the normal channels of settlement. People no longer merely debated policy. They questioned who had the right to decide.

Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published between 1956 and 1958 by Cassell, remains useful here not because it gives us a simple analogy, but because it reminds us that England’s constitutional inheritance was not born in seminar rooms. It was formed through blood, ambition, weakness, compromise, faith, law and force. The English-speaking world inherited liberty only because previous generations first secured order. When order fails, liberty rarely survives as an abstract principle.

That is the essential warning. Civil conflict rarely begins when people disagree. It begins when enough people conclude that the institutions meant to resolve disagreement no longer command trust. When legitimacy drains away, process becomes theatre. Law becomes selective. Public language becomes unreal. And the distance between citizen and state becomes dangerous.

The Wars of the Roses ended in Tudor consolidation. Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth and his marriage to Elizabeth of York joined the two dynastic claims and ushered in a stronger Tudor monarchy. But England paid dearly before order was restored. The lesson is not that Britain is about to refight the fifteenth century with swords and banners. The lesson is that political communities can drift, through cowardice and cumulative failure, to points at which peaceful correction becomes increasingly difficult.

That is the question now before the United Kingdom: can it still correct itself by peaceful, lawful, democratic means?

I hope the answer is yes. But hope is not analysis.

End times, strange deaths and elite failure

Peter Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, first published in 2023 by Penguin Random House in the United States and Allen Lane in the United Kingdom, argues that political instability is driven by structural forces: popular immiseration, elite overproduction, fiscal weakness, declining state legitimacy and geopolitical pressure. His concept of “elite overproduction” is particularly useful. Societies generate more aspirants to elite status than they can absorb, producing frustrated, credentialled, ideologically motivated actors who compete for influence by attacking the very institutions they seek to inhabit.

This insight travels well across the Anglosphere. Britain, like much of the West, has produced a class of hyper-credentialled institutional actors who are rich in vocabulary and poor in judgement. They circulate through universities, media organisations, public agencies, NGOs, cultural bodies and political offices. They speak constantly of compassion, inclusion, diversity and justice, yet often appear strangely indifferent to social trust, public order, national continuity and the safety of vulnerable citizens.

They are not revolutionaries in the old sense. They are something more insidious: institutional insiders who speak the language of public service while steadily dissolving the inheritance they were entrusted to preserve.

Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, published by Bloomsbury in 2017, gave an earlier and more elegiac warning. Murray’s title deliberately echoes George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, which examined the convulsions of Britain in the years before the First World War: the Irish crisis, the suffragette movement, the rise of organised labour and the weakening of the old liberal order. Murray’s argument is broader and darker. He argued that Europe was not merely changing, but losing faith in its own beliefs, traditions and legitimacy at the same time as it was undergoing unprecedented demographic and cultural transformation. A civilisation may die not only because enemies defeat it, but because its custodians cease to believe it deserves to live.

Murray’s contribution is important because he saw that immigration, identity and Islam could not be understood merely as policy categories. They were civilisational questions. A confident country can welcome newcomers, assimilate them and be enriched by them. A guilt-ridden, self-doubting country cannot. It confuses hospitality with surrender, compassion with self-erasure, and diversity with the abandonment of a shared national story. That is the strange death Murray described: not conquest in the traditional sense, but a slow internal abdication.

Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, published in 2026 by Northstar, enters the argument from another direction. Goodwin’s thesis is that Britain faces a widening chasm between Westminster and the people, intensified by rapid demographic change, porous borders, elite detachment and a loss of shared national identity. The book has attracted criticism, including criticism of its sourcing and production. A serious reader should acknowledge that. But a serious society should not dismiss the argument merely because it makes polite people uncomfortable.

One need not accept every Goodwin formulation to recognise the force of the warning. Britain is not suffering from one failed policy. It is suffering from the accumulation of decisions made by people insulated from the consequences of their own ideas. When those who make policy do not live with its consequences, democracy becomes performative. The governed are lectured. The governing class congratulates itself. The damage accumulates.

Colonel Richard Kemp has approached the same malaise through the lens of national security and strategic will. In recent articles on Britain’s posture toward Iran, Israel and the United States, Kemp has argued that Britain’s weakness is not merely material. It is moral and political. He has pointed to hollowed-out armed forces, degraded deterrence, fear within government, and a political class more anxious about domestic factional pressure than national interest. His criticism is especially powerful because it comes from a soldier, not a seminar room. He understands that nations survive only when words, will and capability remain connected.

Taken together, Turchin, Murray, Goodwin and Kemp describe different faces of the same crisis. Turchin gives us the structural pattern: elite overproduction and institutional decay. Murray gives us the civilisational diagnosis: a Europe losing the will to remain itself. Goodwin gives us the democratic rupture: a people increasingly estranged from those who rule them. Kemp gives us the strategic indictment: a ruling class no longer serious about defending the nation. Britain’s crisis is therefore not merely administrative. It is structural, cultural, democratic and strategic all at once.

That is why this moment feels so dangerous. A nation can recover from bad policy, economic mismanagement, or political scandal. It is far harder to recover when the institutions charged with correction are themselves part of the problem. When the bureaucracy is evasive, the media ideological, the universities captured, the police uncertain, the borders porous, the political class timid and the national story derided, the system no longer merely malfunctions. It begins to metabolise decline.

The prime ministers of drift

History will judge harshly the governments of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. They did not all fail in the same way. Some accelerated the drift. Some misunderstood it. Some tried to manage it technocratically. Some discovered too late that slogans are not strategy. But each, in different measure, governed during an era in which the British state became less trusted, borders became more porous, institutions became more ideological, and national identity became something officials often seemed embarrassed to defend.

The drift began most consequentially under Tony Blair. That is not easy for me to write. For what it is worth, I am, or at least was, a Blairite in certain respects. Blair was charismatic, highly intelligent and, on many questions, politically formidable. I admired much about the energy of New Labour: its seriousness about electability, its modernising confidence, its willingness to occupy the centre, its impatience with tired ideological habits, and its sense that government should actually do things.

But charisma can blind a country to consequence. Blair’s own memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, published in 2010 by Random House, is revealing not only for what it says, but for what it does not sufficiently confront. It deals at length with New Labour, public-service reform, Northern Ireland, devolution, Europe, terrorism, Iraq and his relationship with Gordon Brown. These were immense matters. Yet the long-term transformation of Britain through immigration — the scale, pace, cultural consequence and institutional complacency around it — receives nothing like the attention it deserved.

This is a lesson for the voting citizen. We must not only see what is written. We must learn to see what is missing. Immigration, integration and national identity were not side issues. They were constitutional issues in slow motion. The bringing of the wider world into Britain on a scale the country had not democratically understood, or consented to, began most decisively on Blair’s watch. The consequences were softened by prosperity, rhetoric and the carefully filtered public atmosphere of the age. But history was being written all the same.

Gordon Brown inherited the Blair settlement without Blair’s rhetorical gifts. David Cameron spoke of responsibility and the “Big Society”, but governed within the same managerial consensus. Theresa May understood parts of the problem but could not master the machine. Liz Truss barely had time to reveal more than the fragility of the governing class. Rishi Sunak was decent and clever, but technocratic decency is insufficient when legitimacy itself is in question.

Boris Johnson deserves a paragraph of his own. He said many of the right things. He understood, at least rhetorically, the democratic revolt that produced Brexit. He could speak to people ignored by the credentialled classes. Yet what was said and what happened diverged painfully. “Take back control” was a magnificent phrase. But control was not taken back in the deep institutional sense. Borders, bureaucracy, lawfare, public administration and civil-service culture remained more resistant than slogans implied.

That failure sits with Johnson. The buck stops with the prime minister. But as any good strategist, counsellor or organisational adviser knows, the presenting problem is not always the real problem. Johnson failed; that much is clear. Yet his failure also revealed something deeper: a governing machine, media class and bureaucratic culture far more resistant to democratic correction than his slogans allowed. Perhaps Britain’s crisis lies not only in weak prime ministers, but in the dense institutional web around them: media, bureaucracy, courts, universities, quangos, NGOs and cultural gatekeepers who believe they know better than the people, and often better than elected ministers. Here Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister come to mind. We will return to that later.

Keir Starmer deserves particular censure because he has inherited the consequences most clearly. The smoke is visible. The alarms are sounding. The grooming-gangs scandal, immigration crisis, policing controversies, media distrust, university activism, sectarian intimidation and public disorder are no longer hidden in footnotes. They are in the open. A serious leader would see this as a national emergency. A weak one treats it as a communications problem.

Starmer’s defenders will say no prime minister can reverse decades of decline overnight. True. But that defence collapses the moment a leader refuses even to name the decline. Starmer is not being asked to perform miracles. He is being asked to tell the truth. Instead, confronted by porous borders, institutional decay, sectarian intimidation, media evasion, grooming-gang disgrace and a public rapidly losing faith in the state, he offers the language of process, management and delay. That is not leadership under constraint. It is abdication dressed as caution. To see the cliff, hear the warnings, watch the people plead for seriousness, and still proceed as though the problem is tone rather than reality is more than negligence. It is a grave failure of political duty to the nation he was entrusted to serve.

Starmer’s difficulty has often been revealed in symbolic moments. In 2020, while Labour leader, he took the knee in support of Black Lives Matter. In 2023, as the gender debate hardened, he reached for the strange formulation that “99.9 per cent of women” do not have a penis. The point is not to reduce a national crisis to one photograph or one clumsy sentence. The point is that leaders reveal themselves in moments of pressure. A country looking for moral clarity saw, too often, posture, caution and evasion.

The grooming-gangs scandal and the failure of courage

No honest assessment of modern Britain can avoid the grooming-gangs scandal. For years, vulnerable girls in towns across England were groomed, raped, trafficked, threatened and discarded while too many officials looked away. In several of the most notorious cases, the perpetrators were Pakistani-heritage Muslim men operating in groups, enabled by institutional cowardice, cultural confusion and a grotesque fear of naming the truth.

The facts are now beyond serious dispute. The 2014 Jay Report into Rotherham concluded that at least 1,400 children had been sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. The 2022 Telford inquiry found that more than 1,000 children had been sexually exploited over decades. Rochdale, Oldham, Oxford, Derby, Bristol and other towns entered the same grim vocabulary of institutional shame. In June 2025, Baroness Louise Casey’s national audit confirmed blindness, defensiveness, poor data, fragmented responsibility, adultification of child victims, and a chronic failure to hold organisations and leaders to account.

The ethnic, religious and cultural dimension must not be hidden behind euphemism. For years, the British state, much of the media, and many local officials spoke of “Asian men”, “local men”, “men from the community”, or “groups of males”, when in several notorious cases the perpetrators were Pakistani-heritage Muslim grooming gangs. That fact must be stated clearly. Not because every Muslim man is guilty. Not because every Pakistani-heritage Briton is implicated. They are not. But because truth matters. A society that cannot accurately name the perpetrators of organised child rape has already begun to lose its moral bearings.

The victims were not merely harmed. They were disbelieved, patronised, ignored and, in some cases, treated as troublesome teenagers rather than children under coercion. A child cannot consent to her own abuse. A child in care, a child with learning difficulties, a child from a broken home, a child already known to social services, a child being plied with alcohol, drugs and fear, is not a lifestyle problem. She is a citizen under the protection of the Crown.

The phrase “community cohesion” should haunt British public life for a generation if it was ever used, explicitly or implicitly, to explain away institutional cowardice. Cohesion purchased by the silence of raped children is not cohesion. It is complicity.

There is another question Britain should ask with forensic seriousness: how much was hidden behind confidentiality agreements, settlement agreements and non-disclosure agreements? NDAs have legitimate uses, but across the English-speaking world they have too often been used to silence mistreated employees, harassment complainants, whistleblowers and institutional critics. A serious reckoning should include Freedom of Information requests directed at councils, police forces, health bodies, broadcasters, universities, schools, charities and public agencies. How many agreements were signed? How many settlement payments were made? How many staff, complainants or whistleblowers were paid to leave quietly? How many involved safeguarding, harassment, discrimination, bullying, misconduct or failures toward vulnerable people?

My judgement is that the answer would frighten Britons. Australia is not immune. There have been unconfirmed reports and recurring concerns in Australia that, if the public knew the number and character of confidentiality agreements signed between publicly funded institutions and mistreated staff, it would shock the country. I do not state that as proven fact. I state it as a question worthy of public scrutiny. Publicly funded institutions should not be permitted to use public money to bury patterns of institutional misconduct.

There must be consequences not only for perpetrators, but for those in authority whose acts or omissions permitted such crimes to continue. That does not mean vengeance. It means justice. Former police leaders, council officials, public servants, board members and elected representatives who materially failed in their duties should face investigation. Where criminal misconduct is proven, custodial sentences should be available. Where professional negligence is established, honours, pensions, titles and public standing should be revisited.

This matters beyond the immediate scandal. When ordinary citizens see institutions protect themselves while failing the innocent, trust collapses. When they suspect that public money has been used to buy silence, trust collapses further. And when trust collapses, people begin to wonder whether peaceful, lawful remedies are still available.

Women, safety and the scaffolding of madness

A society that cannot protect women and girls has no right to congratulate itself on compassion. The grooming-gangs scandal is one expression of that failure. The current collapse of confidence around women-only spaces is another. Hospitals, domestic-violence shelters, changing rooms, school facilities, prisons and toilets are not abstract battlegrounds in an undergraduate seminar. They are intimate spaces where privacy, dignity, trauma and physical vulnerability matter.

The issue is not cruelty toward people who experience gender dysphoria. They too are human beings deserving of decency, lawful protection and ordinary courtesy. The issue is whether the language of inclusion has been used to erase sex-based rights that women fought for over generations. A humane society must protect individuals with gender dysphoria while also protecting the reality of women’s vulnerability, privacy and hard-won sex-based spaces. Those duties are not identical, and pretending that they are has produced confusion, anger and fear.

Australia should be especially alert. The debate around Sall Grover and the Giggle for Girls litigation has become more than a dispute about an app. In May 2026, the Full Federal Court upheld findings that Giggle for Girls and Grover had unlawfully discriminated against Roxanne Tickle on the basis of gender identity. For many Australian women, the case has become a symbol of whether Australian law can still speak plainly about biological sex, female-only spaces and the rights of women to organise, gather and protect themselves as women. Whatever one thinks of every legal argument in that case, the political fact is clear: many Australian women believe that both major parties have refused even to discuss what is being lost.

This is not theoretical. A survivor of domestic violence with post-traumatic stress may experience a male-bodied person entering a female toilet, refuge or changing room not as a slogan but as a shock to the nervous system. A Muslim woman who observes modesty requirements may not experience a nominally female sign on a door as sufficient if the space itself is no longer female-only in any practical sense. A teenage girl in a school changing room may not have the vocabulary, confidence or institutional permission to object. Yet the burden is increasingly placed on the woman or girl to remain silent, polite and compliant.

That is the deeper authoritarianism of the new status quo. It does not merely ask women to be kind. It tells them that their instincts are hateful, their fear is bigotry, their boundaries are violence, and their objections may cost them employment, reputation or legal peace. One writer has described this as a “scaffolding of madness” around women. The phrase is apt. A civilisation in which women cannot say “no” inside spaces built for their own privacy and safety has not progressed. It has lost contact with reality.

The United Kingdom, chastened by the Cass Review and subsequent legal developments, has at least begun a process of correction. Australia’s correction is less advanced. Indeed, in some respects Australia appears to have travelled further into institutional unreality, with less political courage to name the problem. That matters because the erasure of women is not a niche culture-war issue. It is a test of whether law still recognises embodied reality, whether public institutions still protect the vulnerable, and whether compassion can coexist with truth.

When satire became training material

One of my favourite comedies growing up was Yes Minister and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister. My parents enjoyed it. I later came to understand why. It was not merely funny. It was diagnostic. The series, written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, first aired in 1980, with Yes, Prime Minister following in 1986. Its genius lay in showing how elected authority could be smothered by permanent bureaucracy, procedural evasion and institutional self-protection.

During COVID, in my off-duty hours while serving as a colonel in the Australian Army on secondment to the United Nations in the Middle East — and while acting as Head of Military of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation, exercising the military responsibilities normally held by the Major General in her absence — I went back through the entire series. In the more pleasant days of late 2020, it felt like the perfect United Nations training film.

The United Nations is a noble idea that has too often become a failing institution. It is not failing because peace is unworthy. It is failing because institutions decay when captured by activists, ideological entrepreneurs, ideological extremists, intersectional obsessives and antisemites, while being bent by the interests of some of the worst nation-states on the planet. This is not an article about the UN. But the analogy matters. Institutions do not usually collapse because their founding ideals are wrong. They collapse because the people who inhabit them cease to serve those ideals. They become hosts for something else.

The parasite analogy is uncomfortable, but useful. Toxoplasma gondii is infamous because it can alter the risk behaviour of infected rodents, making them less fearful of cats and therefore more likely to be consumed by the predator the parasite needs to complete its life cycle. That is what ideological capture does to institutions. It alters their danger response. It makes them less afraid of the forces that will destroy them and more hostile to the antibodies trying to save them.

So it is with sections of the media. So it is with parts of the academy. So it is with activist bureaucracies. So it is with those journalists who no longer report reality but metabolise it through ideology before feeding it to the public as moral instruction.
Assimilation is not a dirty word

Assimilation has become a dirty word, much as Zionism has been made a dirty word by those who either do not understand it or understand it too well and therefore seek to destroy it. Both are, properly understood, beautiful words.

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. Assimilation, in the civic sense, is the process by which newcomers enter into the moral, legal, linguistic and cultural inheritance of the society they have joined. It does not require the erasure of private memory, cuisine, language, religion or family tradition. It requires loyalty to the public order that makes pluralism possible.
A nation that cannot assimilate newcomers will eventually fragment. A nation that refuses to ask newcomers to assimilate has already lost confidence in itself.

Many in Western societies have forgotten danger. They have time on their hands and slogans in their mouths. They have been hoodwinked in schools and universities by activists who taught them to see their own civilisation primarily as a catalogue of crimes. They have moved away from the religious and moral teachings that anchored the best of our communities for millennia and helped usher in the greatest period of material prosperity, scientific advance and political freedom in human history.

After the Iron Curtain came down, some believed liberal Westernism had “won”. History, we were told, had ended. The decades after 1989 produced extraordinary confidence. Then came the two decades before 7 October 2023, when many still imagined that commerce, technology, rights language and therapeutic politics could tame ancient hatreds. But history was not sleeping. It was gathering itself.

My judgement is that we are raising our families in an age that future historians may call an antebellum period — the time before the war. Not necessarily one war. Not necessarily a conventional war. But a period before the accumulated contradictions of our societies demand settlement.
Immigration, Islam and the point of honesty
The United Kingdom’s Muslim population is not a monolith. Many British Muslims are patriotic, decent, law-abiding citizens who contribute to Britain’s economy, professions, armed forces, public services, culture and civic life. This must be said clearly.

The issue is not “all Muslims”. The issue is whether Britain can tell the truth about those forms of separatism, misogyny, antisemitism, intimidation, sectarian bloc politics and imported grievance that are plainly incompatible with a free society. It is also whether Britain can distinguish between modern, tolerant Muslims and those who use the protections of liberal democracy to build illiberal enclaves inside it.

This distinction is not anti-Muslim. Properly understood, it is pro-Muslim. It is beneficial for the Muslim woman who does not want to be bullied by clerical reactionaries. It is beneficial for the Muslim girl who does not want her life controlled by cousin marriage, forced marriage, honour codes or family coercion. It is beneficial for gay Muslim men, apostates, dissidents, freethinkers and others whose safety depends on liberal-democratic protections whose lives and liberty depend upon the protections of liberal democracy. It is beneficial for Muslims who reject female genital mutilation, forced marriage, child marriage and the mistreatment of women and girls. It is beneficial for Muslims who want to live freely as citizens of a democratic nation rather than as subjects of communal intimidation.

A tipping point exists in every society. Help can become hinder. Tolerance can become surrender. Pluralism can become fragmentation. Hospitality can become self-harm. A serious nation knows the difference between welcoming people and dissolving itself.

The university, the chaplain and the frightened home front Universities are meant to be places where the difficult can be examined without fear. Yet across the Anglosphere they have increasingly become theatres of ideological intimidation. The University of Leeds episode in 2024 was instructive. A Jewish chaplain and his family faced antisemitic threats and intimidation after he had served as an Israeli reservist. Hillel House was vandalised. Jewish students and chaplaincy families were left to experience what many public voices prefer not to name: that anti-Zionist activism, when untethered from moral discipline, can quickly become intimidation of Jews where they live, work and study.

The issue was not merely one campus incident. It was the revelation of a pattern. The Jewish chaplain, the Jewish student, the Jewish academic and the visibly Jewish citizen are increasingly being asked to carry the burden of other people’s radicalisation. They are expected to be calm, nuanced and forgiving while others chant, vandalise, threaten or excuse. Institutions then issue statements, promise reviews, and return to the habits that made the intimidation possible.

This is what cowardice looks like in a managerial age. It rarely announces itself as hatred. It announces itself as balance. It hides behind process. It says all communities must feel safe, while one community is being targeted. It speaks of context while people are threatened. It confuses the refusal to name antisemitism with sophistication. It is not sophistication. It is failure.
The B

At Glastonbury in June 2025, the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan led chants of “Death, death to the IDF”, and the BBC livestreamed the performance before later admitting it should have cut away. Police opened an investigation, though that investigation later ended without further action. Public criticism followed from the Israeli embassy, politicians and others.

This was not a small cultural episode. It was a symptom. A crowd at one of Britain’s most famous festivals could be induced to echo a death chant directed at the army of the Jewish state while media institutions struggled to apply moral clarity in real time. The chant was not sophisticated geopolitical commentary. It was not peace activism. It was the sound of moral rot becoming entertainment.

The same sickness was visible in Kemi Badenoch’s 5 May 2026 Billericay exchange. Badenoch, the Leader of HM Official Opposition and Leader of the Conservative Party, was speaking about the normalisation of hatred towards Jews and recent antisemitic attacks, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, when she was interrupted by an unnamed pro-Palestine heckler demanding that she focus instead on attacks against Muslims.

Badenoch did not retreat. She did not blur the moment into fashionable equivalence. She answered with moral clarity: the issue before her was the targeted intimidation of Jews, and Britain had to stop pretending something else was happening.

That was not a small moment. It was a glimpse of what political courage now requires: the willingness to hold the line when the subject is being deliberately changed. A lesser politician would have softened, blurred, apologised or retreated into the cowardly language of “all forms of hate” before the particular issue had even been addressed. Badenoch did something rarer. She named the specific threat and refused to let it be smothered by activist deflection.

The contrast became sharper after the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation terrorist attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur in October 2025. David Lammy, then Deputy Prime Minister, attended a vigil and was heckled by members of a Jewish community exhausted by words, promises and unmanaged fear. Badenoch, by contrast, visited Manchester and met members of the affected community and responders, speaking in a register that many Jews recognised not as performance but as presence.

This is not an argument that any one politician can solve Britain’s crisis. No serious person should pretend that. But conduct in moments of communal trauma matters. There is a difference between managing optics and sharing grief. There is a difference between performing concern and making people feel seen. In an age of distrust, the manner of presence is itself a form of leadership.

That is why Badenoch matters. She may not have every answer. But she is willing to disturb the consensus of evasion. On antisemitism, borders, grooming gangs, social cohesion and national culture, she appears to understand something many in Britain’s ruling class have forgotten: a nation cannot repair what it refuses to name.

This is what happens when activism masquerades as journalism, campaigning or spontaneous moral witness. Public conversation becomes not the pursuit of truth but the enforcement of permitted emotion. The person who names the problem becomes the problem. The catastrophe itself is managed, euphemised and allowed to continue.

The gangrene problem

As I argued in When Our Light is Tested: The Bondi Massacre and the Choices Ahead (Post Hill Press, 2026), the analogy of gangrene and an infected limb is unpleasant because the subject is unpleasant. If the choice is between losing the limb and losing the patient, the former is the least-worst option. Penicillin will not always work. Sometimes infection has advanced too far. More invasive procedures are required.

The analogy is apposite, but it must be handled carefully. People are not limbs. Citizens are not diseased tissue. The moral and legal obligations of the state remain real. But political communities can be infected by ideologies, networks, funding streams, institutional incentives, imported conflicts and criminal cultures. If those infections are not treated early, the eventual treatment becomes more invasive, more painful and more morally fraught.

The hard question is this: how much worse must it get before Britain explores tough choices and course-corrects?

A serious state would begin with lawful severity, applied carefully and without collective blame. Deport foreign nationals convicted of terrorism, rape, grooming-gang offences, violent extremism and serious organised criminality wherever legally possible. Strip citizenship from dual nationals involved in terrorism where the law permits and due process is observed. Investigate family and community networks where there is evidence of complicity in radicalisation, coercion, trafficking, forced marriage and abuse. End public funding to organisations that promote extremism or antisemitism. Prosecute incitement without fear or favour. Protect women and children inside minority communities with the same moral urgency extended to anyone else.

This is not blood guilt. It is not collective punishment. It is the restoration of consequences.

The word “re-migration” is already entering the lexicon. It must be handled with care. In its crude form it will be used by extremists as a fantasy of ethnic cleansing. In its lawful form it points to something democracies will increasingly have to discuss: the removal, return or repatriation of people who have no lawful right to remain, who obtained status fraudulently, who abuse asylum systems, who commit grave crimes, or who demonstrate active hostility to the constitutional order that shelters them.

Sensible political leaders and bureaucrats in failing institutions need to think creatively to conserve and preserve what still works. Not all progress is sensible. Some change is decay wearing fashionable clothes.

Daylight, bureaucracy and the market test

Daylight is the best antiseptic. Britain needs a royal commission-level audit of institutional failure across borders, policing, universities, media, local government, public broadcasting, schools and the civil service.
Bloated bureaucracies across the Western world have become employment schemes for people whose main skill is moral performance. The BBC, schools, universities, government departments, diversity offices, publicly funded NGOs and cultural institutions must be asked a simple question: do you benefit the nation that sustains you?

If not, why do you exist?

Individuals subject to market forces tend to act more rationally than those protected by trust funds, institutional sinecures or ideological bureaucracies. A person with a sociology degree and a government salary may indulge radical fantasies at low personal cost. Put that same person in the open market, where goods and services must persuade real customers, and reality returns quickly. The mortgage concentrates the mind.
This is not philistinism. It is civic hygiene. A country cannot indefinitely subsidise its own undoing.

Universities are a natural place to begin. Reform them thoroughly. Not by banning thought. Not by policing private opinion. But by restoring the distinction between scholarship and activism. Start with those faculty networks involved in boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns against Israel. Begin where academic freedom has been most cynically inverted into selective exclusion. Universities that treat the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate while ignoring worse abuses elsewhere are not teaching moral seriousness. They are laundering prejudice.

The coming question for Australia

Britain, France, Sweden and other European nations will be witnesses — and actors — as this plays out. Some may still muddle through. Some may rediscover courage. Some may not. But my primary readership is Australian, and Australians should not look at Britain with smug detachment.

If we believe the mess Old Blighty has got itself into is not coming our way, we should take a dive into a winter swimming pool to alert our senses. The same institutional habits are here. The same activist language is here. The same loss of civilisational confidence is here. The same bureaucratic cowardice is here. The same negligent political leadership is here — elected officials who see the warning signs, hear the public concern, and still choose evasion over courage. The same temptation to call ordinary people bigots for noticing reality is here.

Australia has time, but not endless time.

The warning extends beyond borders, antisemitism and universities. It extends to the treatment of women, the capture of public broadcasters, the intimidation of workers who dissent, the refusal to learn from overseas experience, and the habit of treating ordinary citizens as morally suspect when they ask plain questions. If Australian women are angry at both major parties, those parties would be foolish to dismiss that anger as fringe resentment. It may prove to be one of the more important signals of institutional overreach.

Numbers matter. Pace matters. Absorptive capacity matters. Culture matters most of all. A nation is not a hotel. It is not an airport lounge. It is not an economic zone with a flag. It is a moral inheritance. It is a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn. To inherit it is not merely to enjoy its benefits. It is to preserve it.

The hard conversation

Some will call this barbaric. Some will say that even discussing severe remedies risks punishing the innocent. They are not entirely wrong to worry. Liberal democracy must never become careless with persons. It must never abandon law. It must never confuse ethnicity with conduct, religion with criminality, or ancestry with guilt.

But there is another barbarism: the barbarism of avoidance. The barbarism of letting children be raped because officials feared accusations of racism. The barbarism of letting Jewish citizens be intimidated in the streets while institutions debate vocabulary. The barbarism of allowing women inside minority communities to suffer because progressive elites prefer cultural sensitivity to moral courage. The barbarism of telling women and girls that their fear inside intimate spaces is bigotry. The barbarism of leaving our children to inherit problems we were too cowardly to name.

Judges and lawyers schooled in better times may be ill-equipped for antebellum conditions. The law must remain, but law must also recover its survival instinct. A democracy armed with nuclear weapons cannot afford to drift into sectarian paralysis, institutional illegitimacy or jihadist intimidation. That is not alarmism. It is prudence.

I am not running for political office. I do not profess to have all the answers. I have pointed to horrible and invasive options that I wish we did not need to contemplate. But the line often attributed to Einstein remains useful even if the attribution is contested: insanity is doing the same thing again and again while expecting a different result.

Britain has tried denial. It has tried euphemism. It has tried multicultural flattery. It has tried elite-managed drift. It has tried calling critics bigots. It has tried hoping that the next generation will somehow assimilate without being asked to assimilate. It has tried outsourcing moral judgement to activists and bureaucrats.

We should stop assuming that civilisations are infallible, or that nations cannot fail. They can fail. They can regress. They can descend into disorder, civil conflict, political violence, social fragmentation and institutional collapse. History is not a steady escalator to improvement. It is a record of achievement, complacency, decay, renewal and, sometimes, catastrophe.

The easy answers may now be behind us. But the choice is not yet between terminal decline and pretending nothing is wrong until the problem becomes unsolvable. There remains a third option: to bring serious, clear-eyed, courageous people to the table; people with new blood, new ideas and the honesty to confront reality.

Elected officials must remember that they are not managers of decline. They are representatives of the people. Bureaucrats, in turn, must remember that they are not philosopher-kings, moral tutors or permanent guardians against the democratic will. They exist to implement lawful decisions made through the representatives the people elect. The Sir Humphrey instinct — the quiet conviction that the official knows better than the minister, the voter and the country — has become more than comic material. It has become a governing disease. Those who helped create this mess are ill-suited to resolve it. A serious state would thank some for their service, remove others from authority, and stop promoting the cardboard clones they have spent years grooming in their own image.

It has not worked.

The binary is simple. If our generation, which votes, exercises agency and still has some power to decide, avoids the tough conversations, the honest introspection, the painful options and the hard choices, will it be easier in twenty years, when we have departed the scene and our children are left to manage the inheritance?

My judgement is no. It will be vastly more difficult.

That is why this argument is offered humbly, responsibly and honestly. Not because I want conflict, but because I fear it. Not because I despise Britain, but because I love what Britain has given the world. Not because I have abandoned liberal democracy, but because I want liberal democracy to survive contact with reality.

Before the roses bloom again, Britain must decide whether it still wishes to be Britain.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC Ret’d is a former Australian army officer and the founder of The 2023 Foundation, an initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism.