Britain's Real Threat Isn't Ethnic Conflict — It's the Politics of Fear

Britain's right-wing fuels racial panic to distract from economic failure and justify authoritarian, anti-immigrant policies.

- TDG NETWORK

June 2025 offered a stark, troubling window into the ongoing radicalisation of Britain's right-wing press, a media ecosystem now increasingly driven by narratives of racialised national decline, in which immigration is not merely a policy challenge but a civilisational threat, demographic change is recast as demographic collapse, and the spectre of ethnic conflict is elevated to the level of inevitability-a disaster that, so the argument goes, can only be averted by radical, even violent political action.

What began as a set of columns about population forecasts specifically a data point circulated by populist political scientist Matt Goodwin suggesting that white Britons may become a minority within the next four decades quickly snowballed into a coordinated moral panic.

That first week of June saw the Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Sun all platform voices warning not only of population shifts but of existential decline, with commentators moving seamlessly from concerns about low-skilled immigration and welfare dependency to apocalyptic visions of civil unrest, economic implosion, and social collapse, all of which were blamed on the failure to contain- or even reversemulticulturalism in the UK.

As the days wore on, the tone darkened. On June 13th, former Tory MP Douglas Carswell wrote a particularly incendiary piece demanding a "detailed plan" to remove foreign nationals from the benefits system and from the country altogether, framing immigrants from non-Western nations as both an economic burden and a civilisational threat. A day later, the Sun ran with a poll claiming that most Britons feared Britain was "in decline" and headed for unrest, followed by yet another Telegraph warning of a "coming revolution" provoked by state failure and immigration. What might once have been fringe sentiment now appeared as centre-stage ideology not challenged but echoed across platforms.

ANXIETY AND SCAPEGOATING