June 2025 was a now typical month for the British press. It began when, on Tuesday 3 June, the Telegraph’s Sam Ashworth-Hayes and Charles Hymas worried that white Britons, according to new data published by Matt Goodwin and trailed earlier that day in his column in the Daily Mail, will “become a minority in the UK population within the next 40 years”.
There followed a brief calm, interrupted only by the odd article informing us that “London’s decline is now irreversible”, or that “Starmer and Farage have doomed Britain to an endless spiral of decline”. By Friday 13 June, however, things reached a new pitch. That day, former Tory MP Douglas Carswell used his Telegraph column to complain that “low-skilled, non-western immigrants” are a “burden” on the country. We need, he wrote, “a detailed plan to take foreign nationals off the benefit system and remove them from the country”. A day later, the Sun followed up with a report noting that the “majority of Brits say UK ‘is in decline’ and fear civil unrest”. Later, the Telegraph warned the nation of a coming “revolution”, one born from the effects of immigration, state failure and economic stagnation. Here, in full flow, was a new chorus of “declinism”, the fear that the country’s relative global decline is the result of the pathological failings of the British state and society.
This is not, of course, the first time that declinism has lodged itself in the national consciousness. As historians such as Jim Tomlinson and David Edgerton have noted, it is a recurring feature of British politics, a near ever-present national neurosis in which failure in the present is traced to some corruption in the past. During the last great declinist wave, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Britain’s failing industry was blamed on a pincer movement of overmighty unions and a state dominated by an inept upper class who ruled over more qualified recruits. For Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes, these where the “enemy within”.
There has often been a racialised element to declinism. In the late 1970s, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall and his co-authors saw the racial panic around “mugging” as one aspect of the declinist narrative that led to the later dominance of Thatcherism. Thatcher herself, in 1978, famously spoke of the fear that “that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture”. What seems new this time is the degree to which the two are fused. The problem for today’s declinists is not so much Britain’s stagnant economy and eviscerated state but the country’s racial demographics, of which economic decline and political crisis are merely symptoms.
On 19 June, for example, the Tory peer David Frost warned that under the twin evils of immigration and “aggressive wokeism”, Britain had undergone an “unprecedented break in national continuity” – gone was the “Britain of Christianity and the church”, of the Romans and the Tudors, Churchill and the all-conquering Victorians, replaced by the ugly online neologism, “the Yookay”. A day later, David Goodhart, writing in the Evening Standard, pondered the fate of the capital “when London’s white British population falls below 20 per cent in 10 years time”. “Is there some minimum number of natives that a capital requires before it ceases to be the capital?” he asks, after quoting dubious statistics on the national costs of social housing first published on an obscure, anonymous rightwing blog.
Come the end of the month, things had reached such a pitch of wailing hysteria and moral panic that it was difficult to discern fact from wild-eyed projection. The cover story in the summer edition of the Critic, for instance, warned of a soon-to-be-realised Britain of gated compounds and armoured trucks protecting British citizens from ethnic guerrilla conflict, thick with lurid depictions “of gunfire, off in the distance; you’re getting used to it now”. “Fiction, perhaps,” wrote its author, a Conservative councillor for bucolic Scotton and Lower Wensleydale. “But for how long?”
Much of this can be explained as a form of circular reasoning. The same sources are endlessly recycled, with Goodwin’s predictions of demographic collapse and various rightwing memes quoted and requoted in each succeeding piece, in turn justifying the next ratcheting up of racialised panic. Conversely, it is hard to deny that Britain is experiencing something like decline: productivity is stagnant, as are wages for the majority of people; inequality runs rampant, with the country looking increasingly like post-crash Greece without the climate; while faith in the political system and in our politicians and ruling elite reaches record lows. This is a febrile mix, although one only heightened by predictions of state collapse and race war.
What we’re now witnessing in the rightwing press is the real-time creation of a new political myth. By calling forth the nightmare of state collapse under the ever-increasing pressure of ethnic conflict and white replacement, the right has managed to cast itself as saviours. The nightmare serves as both a rallying cry and a legitimation: a call to a middle-class base which is feeling the pain of a stagnant economy, that those at fault are the racialised outsiders who bring disorder and drain the state of its already squeezed resources; and a justification for the tough actions needed to stem the tide of immigrants from across the border.
No mention is made of the policies that might actually help to stem the sense of economic decline that many British people feel, such as wealth redistribution. Nor do today’s declinists have anything to say about the role that austerity played in dismantling the state. In this sense, blaming decline on racial demographics is an opportunity to avoid changes that would be anathema to the right.
As Labour increasingly apes Conservative rhetoric about fiscal rectitude, tanking ever further in opinion polls as it tails the right, space is opening for a new narrative in British politics. It doesn’t matter that the predictions about a racialised apocalypse may never come true, since conjuring these fears opens up new political possibilities. If inter-ethnic conflict is the symptom of decline, then hardened borders and mass deportations can be offered as the solution. This, not ethnic conflict, should be our greatest fear.
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