The intractable problems pulling modern Britain apart

This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.

Multiculturalism was meant to be a vibrant carnival at the End of History. Instead the brotherhood of man has resulted in a campaign of rape, sectarian politics, state-enforced censorship and cultural destruction. It has led the case management director at the Free Speech Union, Ben Jones, to conclude, “We cannot have both liberty and diversity”: it is an oxymoron.

Island of Strangers takes its name from the “regrettable” speech Keir Starmer gave at his immigration white paper press conference in May 2025. In his speech, the Prime Minister declared that “migration is a part of Britain’s national story” and something to “celebrate”, but that the mass immigration “experiment” is also “slowly pulling our country apart”.

“Britain, in two fundamental ways, is ceasing to be a society at all,” says Jones. It has become a “chance collection of people” — something Aristotle long ago warned civilisations to guard themselves against if they wanted to avoid being “troubled by factions”.

“There are more Muslims living in the British Isles than there are Welsh people.” “One in 30 people living in Britain arrived as a migrant in the last four years.” This demographic disturbance — unprecedented in the history of these isles — has led to a diminishing sense of national character.

“People are left with no sense of what ‘our’ values are because who ‘we’ are has been radically destabilised” — to the point that people cannot agree upon the name of the country: is it “Great Britain and Northern Ireland”, the corporate “UK”, or the ethnic “Yookay”?

Realising that the vision of “Modern Britain” has failed to inspire love between the established citizens and the new settlers, the state will coordinate — or coerce — accordance between the disparate groups. “Rules,” Keir Starmer declares, will cure the “chaos”.

“Authoritarianism,” Jones argues, “is implicit in the management of diversity.” This is not new. Throughout human history, civilisations that have needed to accommodate many peoples curated cohesion under the totalising power of empire. One narrative, one banner, one religion: one people. When an empire fails to offer a coherent and inspiring narrative account of itself, disintegration follows: citizens inside the empire will revert to their antecedent clans and fight over the spoils of the empire.

“All tribes have an authoritarian instinct to protect and insist upon the sacred ideas that bind them.”

I sense that Jones does not consider this a bad thing. But when there are multiple tribes within one territory each insisting upon these protections? “This is what we are now seeing.”

Within a few years, Britain’s streets have seen conflicts between disparate groups over a dizzying array of issues: empire and decolonisation, BLM and the racial justice movement, Islamic terrorism, depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and the burning of the Koran, Israel–Palestine and the historic conflict between Muslims and Jews, sexual crimes and migrant hotels, the murder and attempted murder of two dozen schoolgirls, rape gangs …

Often the impression is that police and local authorities do nothing to restore order and protect the established British population. They have tried to negotiate a settlement between each community’s idea of justice and the British rule of law.

Worse still, they have been complicit. They have ignored the warning signs of mass murderers and terrorists in the making — such as the Southport Killer and the Manchester Arena Bomber — and turned their backs on some of the worst abuses perpetuated against children in this country. And all because they fear being called “racist” and inflaming “community tensions”.

In failing to protect its citizens from the rogue justice exacted by lawless migrants and “community leaders”, the government is causing ordinary people — at least 50 per cent of British citizens — to self-censor and restrict their movements. In being unable or unwilling to challenge moral offences such as blasphemy show trials, the British state has set a precedent. As Jones explains, Islam expects the UK to conform to its demands.

The authorities know what the reaction will be if they do not comply — demonstrations, riots and inevitably assaults on individuals.

Given the choice between suppressing the complaints of immigrant communities and suppressing the complaints of established citizens, the government has hedged that it is safer to suppress law-abiding British citizens than rule-breaking immigrants. The distress of citizens is condemned as “divisive and hostile rhetoric”, not legitimate expression of grief, anger and confusion at finding themselves displaced, harassed and silenced in their own communities.

“Diversity and freedom of speech,” Jones says, “are in implacable conflict with one another.” As he plainly states, “The result of all of this has been not only a society where people are not free to speak, but something even more dangerous: a society where people think that speaking, or voting, improves nothing.”

Included in the right to freedom of speech is the freedom to receive information. Yet the Establishment considers knowledge of mass immigration, migrant crime, Sharia courts and rape gangs to be a bigger threat to Britain’s security than the acts themselves.

“Even knowledge of the basic facts of day-to-day life in modern Britain can be said to represent a threat to public order,” writes Jones. “Merely talking about the abject state of the Yookay is viewed as akin to further destabilising it.” To this end the British government devotes time and state resources to suppressing dissenting views and encouraging the uptake of British values️ in the younger population.

But British politicians have found themselves with an intractable problem: intractable people. How does one indulge the 68 per cent of British Muslims in the UK who think “insulting Islam should be a criminal offence” and at the same time preserve an Englishman’s right to be offensive towards Islam or anyone else?

Further still, how does one reconcile the fact that over a quarter of British Muslims (28 per cent) have “dreamt of Britain one day becoming an Islamic state”, or the 32 per cent who “favour the implementation of Sharia law”, with the fact that 53 per cent of Brits think “Islam is not compatible with British values”.

It is no more possible, Jones argues, to accommodate these demands within a unified legal framework — let alone a cultural understanding — than it is to forge a “common community … between Jews and those who want all Zionists to be killed”.

This leads me to ask: When does upholding free speech become an act of self-sabotage? It is a question Jones neither asks nor answers in this book but it is a thought that is prompted by his argument. Five years ago, I described myself as a “free speech absolutist”. At least in principle, I was willing to defend to the death a person’s right to speak their mind in the public square.

In the defence of this principle I — like many other free speech activists — risked my place at university, lost friends, faced abuse and shut myself out of gainful employment. Today, however, I struggle to see myself even as a “free speech supporter”.

Seeing, as I have, the consequences of sharing my freedom with people who do not value it or see the inherent dignity in it, or see the inherent dignity in me, people who would use their free speech to rob me of my free speech and organise a campaign of revenge against my way of life, I no longer find the virtue of free speech self-evident. Put more succinctly, I did not realise that I was defending to the death the right of cultural outsiders to demand an end to my civilisation.

“A common political community cannot, in the long term, exist between British people and people who hate them,” Jones writes. But despite conceding this, he seems reticent about suggesting that free speech itself has played a hand in Britain’s civilisational downfall.

Here is the sad truth: Some people abuse this freedom. It is an inheritance too valuable to entrust to wilful vandals who intend to use it to destroy the freedom of others. There are a mounting number of people now living in Britain “who do not have or want a distinctive English, Christian tradition of liberty and freedom of speech cannot possibly be expected to replicate it”.

To expect these traditions to be replicated when white British people become a minority in their own homeland — as they are expected to in 2060 — is, as Jones puts it, “delusion”.

I do not think it hypocritical to suggest that outsiders should not automatically be privileged with the same free speech rights of citizens — and I believe Jones intimates the same. His prescription for Britain’s sickness is that “legislation used to punish dissenters must be repealed” and “the blasphemy prosecutions must cease”.

The state must be willing to “endure sustained, widespread and severe displeasure from within Muslim communities in the name of defending free speech” with “all accommodation and equivocation” towards sectarian interest “burned out of the British state”. He is proposing radical freedom within the strict confines of the game. Play nice or go home.

To call Island of Strangers “unflinching” is to understate its tenacity and courage. It is forthright — territorial — yet it maintains a distinctive English politeness that will force its critics to address its argument: this is no polemic, but it is an unmistakable act of defiance.

Jones calls Britain’s “grooming gangs” what they are: rape gangs. He does not capitalise the “B” in “black people”. He does not make handwringing — and, dare I say, pointless — distinctions between “Islam” and “Radical Islam”. He seems to reject the politicised language that has been instrumental in suppressing criticism of minority groups and coercing acceptance of “diversity”.

Jones knows who the principal audience will be for his book. It will be readers of The Critic and supporters of the Free Speech Union. It will be Reform voters and Restore Britain campaigners. It will be people who need no further convincing that immigration is out of control, and that the cultures being imported and supported by the British government are a threat to the beloved way of life that has been forged across these small but mighty isles.

That said, the wisdom contained within this book should transcend the present political moment and serve people from a host of political and cultural backgrounds.

When the Establishment begins to doubt itself — as sooner or later it must; when the journalists and the artists begin to shake; when the Labour Party quakes at the rage of the working class; when the Conservatives acknowledge their ongoing ostracism from the shires; when Reform blanches at chants of “It’s not enough”; and when countries around the world — and our own ancestors — look at the remains of the Britain-that-was and ask, “When the English began to hate?” Then they will have their answer.

Ben Jones’s urgent and insistent Island of Strangers will serve as either as a diagnostic manual or as a burial register.