Britain is dangerously radicalised. Time is short to turn things round

The Prime Minister’s dismal track record suggests he will just keep pushing us closer to the precipice Daily Telegraph 29/12/25 Isabel Oakeshott Mad as it sounds, I am beginning to wonder how far we are from serious civil disorder.

Outside a migrant hotel in Canary Wharf, a protestor put it succinctly. “The UK is a volcano ready to go bang… We are one incident away from the country erupting. No matter where it’s at in the UK, the entire nation will go off…. People have had enough,” he said. He thinks voters are angry at being ignored, gaslit, lied to, and exploited that the country is heading for something “tenfold worse” than the civil unrest Southport unleashed. The sight of our Prime Minister saying his top priority is to import a racist, anti-Semitic, Brit-hating thug called El Fattah feels like a defining moment. Such rhetoric is easy to dismiss. Reaching for the usual lazy characterisations and smears, our leaders will talk of the rabble rousing of “far Right thugs”, reassuring themselves that the vast majority of British people are too patient; too reasonable; too politically divided, to come together in sufficient numbers to bring the country to a halt. I am not so sure. While the kind of civil war that has destroyed Sudan or Syria is inconceivable here, it does feel as if a mutinous UK is entering new territory. Naturally, nobody in positions of influence or power wants to admit it. Fearful of being accused of somehow encouraging trouble, they would rather not acknowledge that a disturbing number of people are talking about direct action. Take a woman who goes by the pseudonym “MissusKent” on social media. In a large WhatsApp group of disaffected white Brits, she calls for “civil uprising,” lamenting that peaceful protests achieve nothing. “It needs us to start attacking these bloody extremist Islamists and all that… that’s the only way we’re going to survive this,” she says. Similar discussions are not hard to find in other forums. Distasteful? Sure. Wrongheaded too. While “extremist Islamists” of the kind that rulers of moderate Middle Eastern countries abhor and routinely imprison are indeed poisoning our culture, there are not that many such individuals in the UK to fight. Such talk is also at the extreme end. Far more likely than widespread violence is a very British alternative, which aims to force a general election without bloodshed. The real target of public opprobrium is not any particular race or religion: it is our useless leaders and the millions of welfare-dependent foreigners they have let in. To prevent simmering tensions boiling over, we must face up to it. I know the dark mutterings are real, because I make it my business to monitor fringes of social media, and I have had journalistic dealings with perfectly decent seeming individuals who genuinely think that to “save Britain”, they may need to fight. These are not folk with big followings, or public platforms, but there is no denying that they exist. More worryingly for authorities, they are organising. Already, groups of “patriots” are going to northern France to confront Channel migrants and attempt to puncture dinghies. In asylum hotel hot spots like Bournemouth, groups of vigilantes patrol streets, having lost faith in the ability of the police to keep women and children safe. Perhaps most concerningly for an Establishment that just doesn’t want to know, the middle classes are increasingly actively engaged in a more genteel revolt. (Witness the weekly demonstrations in leafy Crowborough.) So far it is all peaceful enough, but if civilised attempts to make the ruling classes listen don’t work, what next? In pubs across the country, you will hear people of all backgrounds talk of their despair at another three years of this. They worry that if this terrible Government clings onto power until 2029, there won’t be much of the UK left to save. And so it is that in the toughest working class areas, there is casual talk of stockpiling essentials, and gathering weapons. Wow. Much of the chatter is driven by ignorance and conspiracy theories, for example, that Channel boats are being used to transport jihadis and AK47s. More stems from a combination of impotence and outrage. While our own people struggle to afford essentials, paying record tax for woeful public services, they watch as what some see as actual armies of illegal immigrants being given everything for nothing. No wonder they are ready to blow. If Starmer doesn’t act fast, the frustration could boil over in ways we cannot predict. The trouble is that neither the Prime Minister nor his cabinet seem to have any grasp of how people feel. Cooling the temperature would not take much. Most British people are just too reasonable; too reserved; too embarrassed or too downright busy to take to the streets, still less turn to violence. They are also too scared. They are acutely aware of the rough justice meted out to those who played little more than bit parts in the Southport riots. The judicial response to those protests was a terrifying illustration of the way in which the machinery of the state can be used to crush political dissent. Starmer’s handling of the riots was shocking, but it was also clever, acting as a heavy deterrent. If fundamentally decent people can be jailed for hot-headed Tweets, who is going to man the barricades? Against this backdrop, thoughtful dissenters will consider whether an early election could be forced by via some kind of general strike blended with a dose of fuel and port blockades. Starmer should start by acknowledging how people feel, then do whatever it takes, right now, to stop the boats, recognising that we cannot go on like this. A Trump-style shutting of the borders to certain groups, pushing back the boats and a clear and genuine commitment to putting the British people first would also go a long way. In 2026, I see no prospect of any of this. The Prime Minister’s dismal track record suggests he will just keep pushing us closer to the precipice. Day by day, he trolls us, allowing the invasion across the Channel to continue and making the human rights of foreigners a greater priority than British citizens. Everything he says and does is so staggeringly tone-deaf it is hard not to wonder: does he actually want the country to rise up?