Britain Is a State at Odds With Its Own People

This piece is a tale of two borders. In the United States, Republican commentators are passing sporadic commentary on a migrant caravan headed to the Mexican border. The Department of Homeland Security has made bullish statements, insisting that no one will be let in, and the manpower is there on the ground to see this through.In Britain, illegal migration has seen a similarly forceful response. The landing of a “small boat” filled with 149 illegal migrants means the town of Gosport has been under a Section 34 order for two days now, and will remain so until Tuesday morning, giving the police the power to compel people to leave, and to arrest them should they refuse to do so. The key difference is that the British state is putting on this show of force to deter domestic protest. Images show lines of police officers, ready for conflict. In Britain, though, the officers are there to smooth the arrival of the illegal arrivals. They have done a marvellous job. So far, to date, Britain has brought in some 20,000 illegal migrants this year. To an audience overseas, this might seem like a perverse outcome for the state to enable. To an audience in Britain, it is merely the latest in a series of reflexively antidemocratic responses to calls for border security.The core issue is straightforward: Britain’s elite class has settled on a consensus which makes stopping the flow of illegal migrants effectively impossible. The people who have governed Britain have converged on views which are wildly out of step with the population.Some are concerned with the human rights implications of ending commitments to refugees, still adhering to a post-war consensus that was never intended to function as a backdoor for mass economic migration. Others are opposed to the existence of borders at all, viewing them as a barrier to human flourishing. Some, on the Left, are cynically open to reshaping the population if it means a larger vote for their politics. Others are still vaguely of the idea that any increase in the population will, in the long run, put the country on a better financial footing.At the same time, these politicians want to remain part of the governing class, and are acutely aware that an increasingly angry electorate is beginning to rail against the repeated breaking of political promises. As a result, these self-appointed guardians of liberal democracy find themselves in the position of having to protect this system from citizens who stubbornly insist on voting the wrong way, and holding the wrong views. Putting police officers on the streets to facilitate illegal migration is merely the most visible manifestation of a state which looks increasingly as if it is locked in a counterinsurgency campaign against its own people. There are currently ongoing consultations which would see the British government mandate social media companies to put trusted state broadcasters at the top of people’s feeds.There are constant arrests for speech infractions, when people rail against policy in intemperate terms. There are dedicated state units devoted to producing “counter-narratives,” and deploying terrorist tracking software to monitor anti-migrant sentiment. Too, there is a system of two-tier justice, where anti-migration protesters are held on remand while literal terror suspects are allowed to roam free. Britain is far from the only country to have experienced such flashpoints. The standoff between the Texas National Guard and federal border patrol units in 2024, under the Biden administration, was a particular lowlight in America. Britain is unique in the Anglosphere in its unwillingness to wrestle with the fundamental issue, to offer solutions to the problem of illegal migration, and its willingness to use the power of the state against its own people. As a result, while it is common to talk about a crisis of state competence and political leadership, it is hard to shake the feeling that we are careering towards a crisis of legitimacy.

Britain Is a State at Odds With Its Own People

Britain Is a State at Odds With Its Own People

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