December 11, 2024 - 7:00am
A new report authored by Dame Sara Khan, a former counter-extremism commissioner for the UK Government, has revealed the concerning scale of anti-establishment sentiment in modern Britain.
The study highlights the degree of disillusionment with the UK’s multi-party parliamentary system, especially with the mainstream parties. The research found that 45% of people almost never trusted the Government to put the nation’s interests first, regardless of the party in power. This has doubled from the figure of 23% recorded back in 2020. It flags declining levels of trust not only in Westminster, but also the Civil Service and the criminal justice system.
Khan’s report correctly positions the growth of institutional distrust and political disaffection among the British public in the context of economic and social decline, especially with the country being wedded to a high-immigration, low-growth, poor-productivity model. It also paints the picture of modern Britain being a land of failing systems, but does not engage with some of the most glaring weaknesses of institutions.
The report’s emphasis on security is largely centred on the threat posed by the “growing interference” of hostile foreign regimes. But it doesn’t truly acknowledge the longstanding failures of relevant domestic institutions to prioritise public safety and how this in turn feeds into forms of institutional distrust and public anger over matters of immigration, integration, and identity. Another weakness of the Khan report is that it doesn’t say much about the sometimes disparate utilisation of public resources. If some feel that the welfare of British citizens is secondary to newcomers, this has the potential to exacerbate feelings that Britain is under “post-national governance”.
A Policy Exchange report from July last year warned of the mounting costs of the Channel small-boats emergency. It also suggested there was a risk of the crisis fuelling public resentment, especially in post-industrial areas and left-behind coastal towns. The mid-estimate of hotel accommodation alone — at £2.2 billion for one year — exceeded the entirety of the funding allocated for Round 2 of the Levelling Up Fund (£2.1 billion) by the previous Conservative government. It is also three and a half times the £630-million Government investment to tackle homelessness.
Crest Advisory may be reluctant to truly grasp why nearly half of British people believe that the Government rarely, if ever, puts the nation’s interests first. Yet while Khan has appeared to indirectly criticise the likes of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for using “inflammatory and divisive language”, he is one of the few prominent British politicians who has a proven track record of treating declining public trust in democracy as a serious national issue in its own right. While teething problems have come to the fore within the party, its leadership is at least engaging with legitimate concerns over “two-tier governance”. These concerns have accordingly been dismissed by many in the mainstream press and in Government as unevidenced theories pushed by online “far-Right activists”.
Increasing disillusionment with underperforming institutions, combined with a perception that mainstream parties are undermining the democratic nation-state, is a gift for a fledgling “anti-uniparty” outfit. There is a long time until the next general election, but there is a palpable sense that Britons are growing increasingly frustrated with the “post-national” mindset of the country’s political establishment. This suits Reform UK far more than it does Labour or the Tories.
Dr Rakib Ehsan is a researcher specialising in British ethnic minority socio-political attitudes, with a particular focus on the effects of social integration and intergroup relations.
rakibehsan
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SubscribeI think by the next general election it will be obvious that Reform will win a majority- probably as the senior partner in a coalition with the Tories. I suspect we will see Reform lead in the polls before summer and maintain their lead to 2029. Kemi’s Conservatives will be in second place and will increasingly make eyes at Nigel. Between them they will be on 60%+. Exciting times ahead! And there I was worried we were missing out on the MAGA revolution.
Mary Harrington recently described Reform UK as a pantomime. If so, more Judy than Punch.
… conspiracy theories, including the “Great Reset”?! In one sentence you illustrate the reasons for the anti-establishment feeling: double speak, gaslighting, insisting immutable facts are false.
The Great Reset was the name chosen by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for a plan it launched in 2020. The launch came with a personal introduction by the UK’s King Charles. Western leaders including Boris Johnson lined up and all pledged their commitment. WEF CEO Klaus Schwab stood up and announced the core components of the Great Reset.
– A “stakeholder economy” to control populist urges aka diluting democracy and promoting corporatism over capitalism.
– Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, the impoverishment and toxicity of which we are all now familiar. I didn’t imagine MI5 banning white interns and the Ministry of Defence prioritising environmental protection above military competence.
– Harnessing the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technocrat’s wet dream.. Mass surveillance and AI decision making replacing governmrnts.
So why, how is the Great Reset categorised as a conspiracy theory? I’m sure the author of the article knows it isn’t but still used quotation marks. I’m sure the report’s authors know it isn’t but instinctively said a was. Another truth denied.
Thank you for this post. My jaw hit the floor when I reached that line in the piece. I hope the author reads the comments.
Mine hit the floor when I read “there was a risk of the crisis fuelling public resentment”. It’s not a risk – it’s a completely verifiable fact.
Possibly the author is confusing “Great Reset” with “Great Replacement”
I think so.
Which is also not a conspiracy theory as evidenced by 1M net immigrants in 2023
Perhaps the conspiracy lies in the belief that it was by design, rather than the result of political negligence.
A fair point, but Sir Keir Starmer says it was deliberate policy; is he a conspiracy theorist?
Indeed.
I am not sure how something publicly advertised and discussed in the open is a conspiracy.
It might be arguable if it will ever actually happen, but even that is semantics because the whole thing was a basket of other policies that are mostly being pursued with gusto by western governments.
Good to know King Charles when he wasn’t a king had so much power. We’re clearly in a good place
The report itself demonstrates why levels of trust are falling. It’s delusional, and incredibly weak in its analytical content.
It makes no attempt critically to examine the “conspiracy theories” or offer evidence against them, simply assuming that readers will share the author’s blithe unthinking assumption that all the nice rich and powerful people in the world would never do something as nasty and self-serving as to collude with each other to shape outcomes that they perceive to be in their self-interest, perhaps all the while persisting in the self-deception that it’s all for the greater good. It’s not like anything like that has happened previously in human history, is it?
On the off chance that the other-worldly author of that report would stoop to reading comments on a platform that has itself been attacked by government-sponsored anti-disinformation agents simply for the content of its journalism, and which may have been authored by people capable of thinking for themselves and not simply swallowing the government / Guardian line without a second thought, I would invite her to reflect on two questions.
First, did the government’s actions during what she refers to as the pandemic constitute extremism, that is actions taken on the basis of an intolerant ideology that sought to undermine fundamental rights and / or seed hatred and division? Remember the “go outside and people will die”. Remember the vicious online attacks by the British army’s 77th Brigade on ordinary people (look it up, Dame Sara). Remember the fact that only a few thousand died with Covid-19 as the single cause of death and that it had an infection fatality rate comparable to a seasonal flu – despite the deliberate lies spread by the communist in charge of that discredited, captured corporation known as the WHO. Remember the mask-madness, the fear-mongering, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, shop your neighbour for going outside, the miltary-grade full-spectrum psychological warfare designed deliberately to increased the perception of personal threat, the elderly relatives dying lonely, confused, and alone, no singing in church (and then no church), the suspension of Parliament, the “rules” about who could come round for Christmas dinner, government advisors spreading fear about “poisoned air” in schools, the closed outdoor children’s playgrounds for a virus that doesn’t spread outside, the withdrawal of care, the persistence with interventions proven not to work, the massive, deadly waste of public money in the pursuit of ideologically pure “zero-Covid”, the othering, the presentation of models as reality, the hatred and division that the government inculcated against people who simply took a different view, asked difficult questions, or exercised their fundamental liberal democratic right to bodily autonomy. Is that not “extremism”, Dame Sara?
Second, if the price of liberal democracy is eternal vigilance, how would the people of this country and others like it ever identify and deal with collaborative corruption at the highest levels and attempted power grabs if to even question things is labelled as “extremist”? Have not some “conspiracy theories” turned out to be bang on the money? Tuskagee, Horizon, infused blood scandals, VW emissions fiddling, Jimmy Saville kiddy fiddling etc etc etc. Has she paused to consider whether in fact she is a threat to a pluralistic and vibrant liberal democracy, advocating in effect the silencing and shutting down of “dangerous” narratives that challenge the narrow monoline preferred by the rich, the powerful, the corrupt, the fearful, and the indifferent?
This is why people are angry and mistrusting, Dame Sara. Get out of your bubble, open your eyes, and for goodness sake find the humility to admit that you might just have got some important things very badly wrong.
Why is it a concern that we don’t trust the establishment? We shouldn’t trust them.
“[a new report] … has revealed the concerning scale of anti-establishment sentiment in modern Britain.”
And this is a problem because ? Why is healthy scepticism “concerning” ? Why is it troubling that people are noticing things going wrong and demanding improvements ? How dare they !
This is just so typical. Blaming the symptoms rather than the actual causes.
Another utterly useless – in fact worse than useless (this will just continue to make things worse) – report from another quango state do-gooder. And we’re paying for this garbage.
Still, in some ways this is rather encouraging. “Dame” Sara Khan (let’s just scrap the honours system) and her ilk will clearly remain in denial for many more years and ignore the incoming tide. I’d rather have them all flushed away than cling on pretending to reform.
Third Sector NGO/Think.Tank/Quango upset at public opinion, thinks that democracy is under threat from the electorate itself.
If only the government would stop funding these self serving bodies that have eaten away at public trust and have debased democracy.
Quelle surprise – voters would like the politicians they elect to prioritise their security over the needs of criminals, freeloading NGOs and illegal immigrants. How presumptuous of them. Time to replace the fractious electorate with one that’s more compliant, I think.
One must be careful and exact when one talks about ‘The Establishment’ in this Kingdom. The term is a relatively recent one and possesses a somewhat circumscribed meaning.
The Establishment, as it has been understood in Britain, refers to the Church, Crown, Armed Forces, Gentry, Aristocracy and the auxillary professions which were historically sustained and dignified by association with those groups.
These do not appear to be the focus of popular discontent, in and of themselves. Rather it is the Liberal Progressive Managerial Freemasonry which has insiniuated itself into the body politic more generally.
Disraeli pointed out a long time ago that the English/British commons has always had a very good nose for imbalances in the constitution and an unerring ability to direct their contempt and distrust with great precision and accuracy wherever inordinate power has lain, down the ages.
Whether it were overmighty Barons, a haughty Church, an Absolute Crown, an unchecked Parliament, A CABAL, a closed Cabinet, an unanswerable Ministry or unaccountable Trade Unions, they have all, in one era or another, been dead-accurately intuited and identified by the common man as being the repository of corrupt and overwheening power in the land and dealt with accordingly.
The writer is bang on the nose when he talks of distrust of ‘domestic institutions’ having been sniffed out as the ‘Rude Hand‘ laid currently on ‘English Ways‘ in our own time. And the Reeds of Runnymede are shaking once again. But this is not quite about ‘The Establishment’, at all.
What we are seeing expressed is one of the more exquisite and precious of our unwritten and ancient constitutional mechanisms – that is the trope of the ‘Wicked Advisors‘. Where legitimate popular discontent is directed at illegitmate and expendable accretions to the ‘True’ Establishment and the polity and constituion can cleanse itself without dissolving itself.
In the end, politics is always about class. In the nineties a new class of suburban graduates took power in the form of New Labour and proceeded to milk the state – via artificially inflated house prices, rent-seeking NGOs, new bureaucracies, the education system and mass immigration – until the barrel was pretty well empty, options for borrowing were exhausted and they were forced to fall back on trying to squeeze a few more pennies from pensioners and farmers and the like.
Something similar has happened everywhere in the West. Now the crunch has finally arrived, first in the US, then in Italy, France and Germany, and eventually in Britain. Starmer’s feeble government is the dying gasp of a failed regime.
You are of course right that Class plays its part, expecially in Britain. But while the initial tendency of Whiggery (which is the tradition in which the ‘Uniparty’ exists) might begin as clerisy it inevitably hardens and coarsens into a crude and narrow oligarchy.
Which is where we begin to find ourselves now, when more than two dozen ministers including Rachel Reeves, Pat McFadden and Wes Streeting all have spouses or relatives actually employed and salaried directly by the taxpayer or the Labour Party.
Disraeli wrote and spoke incisively about this in his own day. It is the Whig Arc in British political history and its best countermeasure is a reassertion of the prerogative of the Crown-in-Parliament. I suspect this will be the battle to come in the next electoral cycle.
We can only hope ‘King’ WIlliam V is the man for the hour
When the younger suburban graduates find the system has no place for many of them too, the potential for rebellion gets stronger.
Their discontent is somewhat mitigated by the fact that they will be the youngest generation ever to inherit. Thanks to the efficiency with which their already elderly parents hoarded the country’s wealth, most won’t have to work beyond fifty.
1) ‘record high’? By what metric over what time frame? I hate the lazy use of hyperbolic terminology. ‘a serious national issue’ created by the man himself in my opinion to undermine the hard graft of government for his own benefit. Have your heard him come up with a solution to anything? Anyway you have enough voices within government be they SPADS, civil servants, commissions or MPs telling you government doesn’t look after your or the country’s interests backed up by a press that loves this stuff, of course a poll asking if you’re dissatisfied is going to result in a resounding yes.
This sounds like a hopeless report. Do they not realise the damage that was done by the Covid response? Many, many ‘establishment-leaning’ citizens were woken up by the utterly unnecessary lockdowns, the enforced vaccinations, the lies, manipulations and bullying that went on in that period which turned a lot of people against government, media and academia here and in other countries.
Of course anyone sensible is questioning authority…look at what it is doing. Frankly this study is another example of the establishment trying to gaslight the public by pointing the finger at supposed foreign manipulation and supposed ‘far-right’ activity. It should look at the failures of the state, of the media (of which I am a member), of academia and of the civil service if it wants to come up with some sort of a solution.
Had the Tories and the increasingly Stalinist Labour Party set out to commit joint suicide they couldn’t have done a better jpb. Reform clearly is the future.
I remember in the 1960s my old man used to complain constantly about the governments, politicians, media and changes taking place, he read newspapers. Today it’s unherd and the so-called msm and whatever. Not much has changed since then, kinda funny. No one ever liked establishment types.
Amusing that, just because someone has a title like Doctor or Professor – who does ‘Research’, we’re supposed to sit up and pay attention. We click and read in the vain hope of seeing a solution. Instead we are told what we already know couched in haughty terms.
Cynical suspicion of our rulers is not new. Anybody who’s spent time in the Forces or any institution knows that. The staff noticeboard mostly contains admonition, warnings, penalties for non observance, rarely good cheer. Even holiday announcements greeted as stingy or inconvenient.
What the Top Brass fail to do is not interfere. Stop tapping us on the shoulder, whispering in our ear. On a bus I don’t want a running commentary or advice from the driver any more than he wants route or manoeuvring advice.
Our political bus drivers miss stops, or wait too long to move off, break down, run out of fuel or fail to reach their destination. It takes years to fire them and we have little choice in their replacements who lied on their CV.