The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) — Part VI

Britain, Illiberalism and the Politics of Complacency

Photo by Sander Crombach on Unsplash

Britain likes to tell itself a comforting story.

Illiberalism, in this telling, is something that happens elsewhere. It happens in Russia, where Vladimir Putin dismantled democracy through prisons, patronage, and poison. It happens in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán hollowed institutions while preserving the outward rituals of electoral legitimacy. It happens in Israel, where permanent emergency is used to justify permanent inequality. It happened in the United States under Donald Trump, a noisy and chaotic aberration that could be dismissed as excess rather than system.

Britain, by contrast, imagines itself as fundamentally stable. A country of conventions rather than ideologies. A polity in which excess is absorbed, norms reassert themselves, and extremes are neutralised by moderation, competence, and tradition. The phrase “it couldn’t happen here” is rarely stated outright. It is simply assumed.

That assumption is not credible.

Illiberalism has not arrived in Britain through tanks, coups, or cancelled elections. It has arrived through pressure, accommodation, and asymmetric risk. The UK has not been seized by illiberal actors. It has been reshaped by them, slowly and selectively, with decisive assistance from a political centre convinced it could absorb the shift without being transformed by it.

The water warmed gradually. That is why the frog did not jump.

This matters because illiberalism does not require a moment of rupture. It requires habituation. It requires institutions to learn, over time, which pressures must be taken seriously and which can be safely ignored. That learning process did not happen by accident. It was taught.

Illiberalism in Britain does not operate through a single party, leader, or ideology. It is sustained through an ecosystem: a dense, mutually reinforcing network of media outlets, donors, think tanks, political factions, and transnational allies that shape what is sayable, punish deviation, and normalise rule-bending in one political direction. This ecosystem does not require central coordination. It works through alignment. Incentives point the same way. Pressure flows unevenly. Institutions adapt.

At the domestic level, this ecosystem is anchored by a powerful right-wing media bloc. The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Express, and The Spectator do more than report politics from a conservative point of view. They define the parameters within which politics is conducted. Their front pages determine what counts as scandal, what can be ignored, and what is treated as common sense. Digital platforms intensify this effect. Twitter/X, Breitbart-adjacent networks, ConservativeHome, BrexitCentral, and allied online spaces function as rapid-response amplifiers, converting minor issues into evidence of extreme bias, and procedural neutrality into ideological hostility

The effect is disciplinary. Journalists, editors, civil servants, regulators, and trustees learn quickly which lines generate pile-ons and which pass unnoticed.

Between media outrage and parliamentary action sits a set of well-funded think tanks and policy institutes. Organisations such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange, and Legatum do not merely generate ideas. They translate donor priorities into policy seriousness, launder culture-war rhetoric into governance language, and recode exclusionary or deregulatory outcomes as technical necessity. They provide ministers and institutions with a vocabulary that allows illiberal goals to enter the bloodstream of the state without appearing ideological.

Within formal politics, this ecosystem finds its vectors. Nigel Farage functions as a boundary-pusher, testing ideas before they are safe. The European Research Group and its successors act as internal enforcement mechanisms, ensuring that the Conservative Party never drifts too far back toward multilateralism or institutional restraint. The Common Sense Group and related parliamentary formations test how far culture-war language can be normalised inside Westminster itself, often laundering antisemitic tropes into the socially permitted vocabulary of national grievance.

Crucially, this alignment is not national.

British illiberalism is embedded in a transnational network that links domestic actors to ideological allies in the United States, Israel, Hungary, and beyond. American donors who fund Trumpism also fund British think tanks and lobby groups. Media ownership overlaps directly, most obviously in the Murdoch empire, where editorial lines travel seamlessly across borders. Pro-Israel advocacy networks intersect with the same funding and media infrastructure, aggressively policing criticism of Israeli policy while normalising ethnocratic governance and the violation of international law.

One unusually explicit site of this convergence is the National Conservatism Conference, founded in 2019 by Yoram Hazony, a pro-Israel nationalist intellectual and president of the Edmund Burke Foundation. National Conservatism was conceived from the outset as a transnational project, not a domestic faction. It is a forum designed to bring together American Trumpism, Israeli ethnonationalism, and European illiberalism around a shared rejection of liberal universalism, multilateral constraint, and rights-based constitutionalism.

Across its conferences in the United States and Europe, including one held in London, speakers and attendees have included Viktor Orbán and his senior allies, leading Trump backers such as Peter Thiel and Ted Cruz, prominent Israeli nationalists closely associated with the Netanyahu right, and British Conservative figures including Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Michael Gove. Israel is consistently held up within this milieu as a model of permanent security exception, Hungary as proof that liberal institutions can be hollowed while retaining electoral form, and Trumpism as an unfairly maligned assertion of national sovereignty.

What matters is not any single speech or venue, but the normalisation of ideological alignment: British political actors participating openly in an international illiberal network that treats liberal constraint itself as the problem to be solved.

Brexit as democratised exemption

Brexit was the moment illiberal logic became democratised. For decades before the referendum, large sections of the British press framed the European Union not as a multilateral political project but as an alien imposition. Sovereignty was presented as something stolen rather than pooled. Regulation was caricatured as foreign meddling. Integration was treated as colonisation. Boris Johnson’s early career was built on fabrications about EU bureaucracy, bendy bananas, prawn cocktail crisps, condom sizes. These stories were not merely false. They were pedagogical. They trained readers to associate Europe with absurdity, intrusion, and illegitimacy.

Over time, the tone hardened. What began as mockery escalated into alarmism. British sovereignty was said to be under existential threat. Fifty million Turks were supposedly on the verge of arriving in London. British boys would soon be drafted into a looming European super-state’s army. These claims were not marginal. They circulated daily through the Conservative press ecosystem and were consumed disproportionately by Conservative members and voters. That radicalisation had consequences.

As UKIP surged under Nigel Farage, denouncing the EU in more explicit and ethnonationalist terms, Conservative politicians faced a choice. Some believed they could neutralise Farage by absorbing his platform. Just as Farage later claimed he had “defeated” the BNP by laundering its ideas into a more respectable register, Conservative strategists convinced themselves they could defeat UKIP by adopting its core premises. Hostility to immigration, disdain for multilateral constraint, and the framing of Europe as enemy rather than partner were no longer fringe positions. They became instruments of party management.

By the time David Cameron called the Brexit referendum, illiberal actors had been campaigning for decades. The Overton window had already shifted. Multilateralism and international law were no longer understood as constitutive of British sovereignty. They were increasingly framed as violations of it. Immigration was no longer treated as a matter of planning, labour markets, or resources, but as an existential threat. A Britain “freed” from EU regulation was widely assumed to be a Britain unshackled.

Brexit made sense. But only if you had been reading the right newspapers.

During the referendum campaign, the dominant right-wing donor and press ecosystem backed Leave. After Cameron resigned, those same networks shifted their weight behind Leave-supporting Conservative leadership candidates, seeking a prime minister who would deliver Brexit in its hardest form. Over time, they got what they wanted. First Boris Johnson, then Liz Truss. Both were ideologically congenial to a donor, think-tank, and media system that treated the EU primarily as an obstacle to deregulation, the dismantling of labour protections, and the weakening of environmental standards.

Later, as the Conservative Party fractured under the weight of its own contradictions, that ecosystem began to pivot more decisively toward Farage himself. This was gradual at first, then accelerated once Rishi Sunak lost to Keir Starmer and the incentives changed. The press, donors, and aligned networks did not abandon the Conservatives overnight. They simply stopped investing in them as a viable delivery mechanism.

Brexit did more than alter Britain’s trading arrangements. It rewired political common sense.

It normalised the idea that rules are optional, constraints negotiable, and law legitimate only when it aligns with sovereignty as defined by those in power. The infamous claim that breaking international law would be “limited and specific” was not a gaffe. It was illiberal doctrine articulated plainly.

The sequence ran like a script.

We did not really break the law.
If we did, it was necessary.
If that is unacceptable, then the law itself must yield.

Once a country accepts that logic, it becomes available everywhere. Not only in treaty obligations, but in domestic rights, institutional checks, and the meaning of citizenship itself.

Brexit matters here not simply as policy failure, but as rehearsal. It was the moment when exemption from rules was made popular, moralised, and defensible. It was also the moment when the pressure that would later be applied to Britain’s institutions was first democratised.

The BBC: conditioning, capture, and asymmetric risk

The BBC occupies a peculiar position in British political life.

It is not a private broadcaster that can be purchased by a billionaire and converted overnight into a partisan weapon. But nor is it independent in the way Britain often tells itself. The BBC is a public institution created by Royal Charter, funded through the licence fee, and structurally entangled with government through appointments, charter renewals, regulation, and political pressure.

That combination makes it uniquely valuable, and uniquely vulnerable.

Illiberal actors did not need to nationalise the BBC. They did not need to abolish editorial independence or issue overt instructions. As with Brexit, they needed only to change the internal calculus of risk. To make certain kinds of journalism professionally dangerous, and certain kinds of complaint institutionally urgent.

That lesson was learned early, and applied patiently.

One of the most consequential figures in this process is Sir Robbie Gibb. Gibb is not an outsider imposed on the BBC from without. His career has moved repeatedly and seamlessly between the corporation and Conservative politics. He began at the BBC as a political researcher before leaving to work as chief of staff to Conservative MP Francis Maude, later supporting Michael Portillo’s leadership campaign. He returned to the BBC in senior editorial roles, including Newsnight and other flagship political programming, before re-entering politics as Theresa May’s Director of Communications in Downing Street.

After May’s resignation, Gibb was knighted for political and public service. He then became a senior adviser at a global strategic communications consultancy, worked as an editorial adviser to GB News ahead of its launch, and advised the government on the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report.

In 2020, Gibb led a consortium that bought The Jewish Chronicle. He refused to disclose who funded the purchase. What followed was a marked shift in editorial direction, widely described by former staff as moving well to the right of the Conservative Party. Journalists resigned over deteriorating standards. Fabricated stories were later withdrawn. The paper apologised and paid damages for false accusations, including allegations linking individuals to terrorism. Multiple journalists described an environment in which political alignment increasingly mattered more than accuracy.

This matters because it establishes pattern and allegiance, not motive.

In May 2021, Gibb was appointed to the BBC Board by Boris Johnson as Member for England. His appointment had been pressed for months by Conservative political advisers. It placed a Thatcherite Conservative, with deep ties to the Tory press ecosystem and a recent record of editorial intervention elsewhere, inside the BBC’s governance structure.

Once there, his influence was not subtle.

According to multiple reports, Gibb attempted to block the appointment of Jess Brammar to a senior editorial role, warning that it would damage the government’s “fragile trust” in the BBC. Labour’s deputy leader described this as Tory cronyism at the heart of the corporation. Gibb denied sending the message. The wider signal, however, landed.

Appointments like this do not operate in isolation. They set tone. They redistribute risk. They shape who is promoted, who is protected, and who learns to self-censor. They create the conditions under which further aligned figures can be installed, and in which staff internalise which kinds of journalism attract backlash and which do not.

The Hostile Environment

Emily Maitlis’s experience is illustrative. Over several years, she was repeatedly censured for partiality in ways that reveal the asymmetry at the heart of the BBC’s impartiality regime. She was criticised for challenging Brexit advocates aggressively, for stating that Dominic Cummings had broken the rules during lockdown, and for sharing content critical of the government. In each case, the issue was not factual accuracy so much as tone, framing, and perceived alignment.

The pattern was consistent. Where scrutiny ran against Conservative power, it was treated as risk. Where scrutiny ran elsewhere, it was tolerated.

In her 2022 MacTaggart Lecture, Maitlis named the problem directly. She stated that an “active agent of the Conservative Party” was shaping BBC news output, and identified Robbie Gibb as acting as an arbiter of impartiality and exerting political influence over editorial decisions.

That allegation was never retracted. It was never substantially rebutted. It was simply absorbed. Maitlis left the BBC shortly afterwards, citing years of accumulated pressure rather than any single incident.

Lewis Goodall left around the same period. His departure was linked to what he described as the broader impartiality drive. He spoke of a newsroom culture in which journalists were warned to “be careful” because “Robbie” was watching, and where political backlash rather than editorial judgement increasingly governed decisions.

These exits were not reactions to scandal. They were responses to a hostile environment.

Michael Prescott’s Memo

Michael Prescott entered this environment as an adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee. In November 2025, Prescott wrote a memo to BBC board members alleging systemic editorial bias. His memo was leaked to The Daily Telegraph, then published more widely after being submitted to Parliament as part of the BBC Chair’s response to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

It is important to note that Prescott was not a whistleblower from outside the institution. He was a participant within its governance machinery. He was also personally connected to Gibb, a relationship he later acknowledged.

The memo alleged bias in three areas: coverage of Donald Trump, coverage of the Gaza war, and reporting on transgender issues. Its centrepiece was a Panorama episode broadcast in October 2024 that edited footage of Trump’s January 6th speech without using the standard visual cue indicating splicing.

That omission mattered technically. BBC standards require a visual indicator when footage is spliced. Had the cue been included, the programme would have met editorial requirements. The BBC acknowledged this as an error and apologised. The episode was withdrawn from rebroadcast. That should have been the end of the matter. It was not.

Prescott’s memo framed the error as evidence of systemic bias. Conservative politicians, right-wing media outlets, and Donald Trump himself escalated the claim into an allegation of electoral interference and institutional bias. Trump threatened legal action. Senior Tories publicly demanded resignations. Illiberal columnists demanded blood.

Within days, Director-General Tim Davie and Head of News Deborah Turness resigned. Parliamentary hearings followed. The issue metastasised into a crisis not because the evidence was overwhelming, but because the pressure was.

Other members of the standards committee disputed Prescott’s interpretation. BBC journalists pushed back. The corporation defended its broader editorial record.None of that altered the outcome. The lesson transmitted internally was not about accuracy. It was about hierarchy of risk.

Learning the hierarchy of risk

The same logic was visible in the BBC’s handling of Gaza coverage.

In 2025, the BBC pulled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone after complaints emerged that a child narrator’s father worked for Gaza’s Health Ministry, an institution operating under Hamas governance. No allegation was made that the programme promoted Hamas. No evidence was presented that the narration itself was politicised.

Had the BBC included a disclaimer identifying the father’s role, the programme would have met editorial standards. Instead, it was withdrawn entirely.

To the public, this appeared relatively minor. Internally, it was treated as existential risk precisely because it upset the illiberal ecosytem. Palestinian proximity itself had become a reputational hazard.

This reaction stood in stark contrast to years of meticulous, evidence-based analysis by organisations such as the Centre for Media Monitoring, which documented systematic patterns in the BBC’s treatment of Muslims and its framing of Palestinian suffering. Those findings were methodologically transparent and empirically grounded. They were reinforced by reporting from Owen Jones, who interviewed BBC journalists and editors describing internal pressure, self-censorship, and fear of backlash when covering Gaza and Israel.

Those reports were ignored.

Prescott’s memo, by contrast, triggered resignations, apologies, and structural upheaval.

That asymmetry is the point.

Asymmetric risk, internalised discipline, and who is allowed to stay

What ultimately matters is not any single controversy, but the pattern they form when taken together.

The BBC’s problem is not that it enforces impartiality rules. It is that those rules are enforced asymmetrically, and that asymmetry is now widely understood inside the organisation. Over time, this produces a predictable outcome. Some people internalise the rules and self-censor or leave, while others are effectively exempt.

In 2017, James O’Brien resigned from presenting Newsnight. Asked on social media why he stepped down, he explained that his publicly expressed views, that Brexit would be bad for Britain and that Donald Trump was a racist sex offender, had begun to attract so much attention that he felt compelled to choose between winding his neck in on those issues or no longer presenting BBC political programmes.

He chose to leave. No complaint had been upheld against him. No breach of standards was alleged. O’Brien complied with what he understood the rules to require.

What irked many was not the existence of impartiality rules, or O’Brien’s resignation, but their selective application.

O’Brien’s case contrasted sharply with that of Andrew Neil. Neil worked as the BBC’s flagship political interviewer while openly expressing strong ideological positions on Brexit, economics, climate change, and the left. He edited The Spectator, delivered speeches praising Friedrich Hayek and radical free-market reform, wore Adam Smith Institute branding while presenting BBC programmes, and used his BBC-amplified platform to promote right-wing causes.

None of this triggered equivalent sanction. The issue, then, was not that O’Brien broke the rules. It was that he obeyed them, while others did not need to.

That pattern reproduced itself throughout the organisation.

In 2023, Oscar Bentley, a 25-year-old member of the BBC’s Political Research Unit, explained on air that Rishi Sunak’s claim of a 50 per cent fall in crime relied on selective use of statistics. This was routine fact-checking, based on the unit’s published methodology.

The following day, The Daily Mail accused the BBC of bias. Not by disputing the analysis, but by revealing that Bentley had campaigned for Labour while at university and once posted a photo captioned “dogs for Corbyn” on social media. The Daily Express, TalkTV, and The Daily Telegraph followed.

The message was unmistakable. Accuracy offered no protection. Youth offered no protection. Institutional role offered no protection. Fact-checking Conservative claims carried personal risk.

Meanwhile, no comparable scrutiny attached to right-wing editorial figures whose public political commitments were extensive, continuous, and institutionally protected.

The same logic governed how the BBC responded to complaints about those working in Sports and Entertainment.

Gary Lineker was first suspended and later forced out after expressing political views critical of government asylum policy, despite working primarily in sports rather than news. The BBC treated his comments as incompatible with impartiality.

Alan Sugar, by contrast, repeatedly expressed partisan views aligned with Conservative positions, including direct attacks on Labour politicians and support for Brexit. He faced no comparable sanction.

BBC journalists have been taught a simple lesson. If you upset the illiberal ecosystem, Conservative politicians, right-wing newspapers, donor-backed pressure groups, and aligned lobby organisations, the consequences will be swift, definitive and possibly career ending. If you upset critics on the left, complaints will be logged, filed and ultimately ignored. You can stay at the BBC if you do not provoke the illiberals. If you do provoke them, you should either learn to be silent or prepare to leave.

That is how conditioning works. Not through overt censorship, but through the redistribution of risk.

Why the National Trust was different, and why it was targeted anyway

The National Trust posed a different problem for illiberal actors. Unlike the BBC, it could not be conditioned through appointments in the same way. It is not governed by ministers. Its leadership is not appointed by government. Its funding does not depend on annual political renewal. It is a membership organisation, structured as a charity, with trustees elected by its members and a constitutional obligation to preserve historic sites and material in line with best professional practice.

In institutional terms, it was insulated.

When the Trust published its 2020 report examining historic links between its properties and slavery and empire, it did not call for reparations, removals, or reinterpretation in activist terms. It did not propose policy change. It presented archival evidence and historical context. It did what historians are trained to do.

The backlash was immediate, and revealing.

Restore Trust emerged shortly afterwards, presenting itself as a grassroots movement defending heritage from politicisation. Its language closely mirrored the culture-war playbook already visible in attacks on universities, museums, and broadcasters. Professional historians were recast as Cultural Marxists. Academic method was reframed as activism. Proving context became revisionism. The past itself was turned into a battlefield.

This was not spontaneous. Restore Trust figures were closely linked to the same donor, think-tank, and media ecosystem that had driven Brexit and later conditioned the BBC. Policy Exchange affiliates, Tufton Street networks, and sympathetic columnists amplified the campaign. Nigel Farage accused the Trust of rewriting history. Boris Johnson denounced woke revisionism. Conservative MPs framed the episode as evidence of cultural subversion.

What mattered was not whether Restore Trust’s claims were accurate. They were not. What mattered was that they created pressure. Unlike the BBC, the National Trust could not be disciplined from within. So the strategy shifted.

Instead of capture, the aim was intimidation and acquisition Restore Trust repeatedly attempted to seize control through trustee elections. Each attempt failed. The Trust continued its research programme. The report was not withdrawn. No institutional reversal occurred.

But the campaign worked anyway. Each election attempt forced the Trust to defend its legitimacy. Each media cycle raised the political cost of doing ordinary historical work. Each intervention sent a signal not just to the Trust, but to every other cultural institution watching.

The lesson was not “you must stop”.

The lesson was “you will pay a price if you continue”.

This is how civil society is disciplined without law.

Illiberalism does not always require permanent capture. It requires sustained intimidation. It relies on repetition, exhaustion, reputational risk, and the knowledge that powerful actors are willing to mobilise outrage even when they lose.

The difference between the BBC and the National Trust is instructive. The BBC could be conditioned from within because its governance allowed it. The National Trust could not, so it was attacked from without. Different tactics. Same objective.

And the signal was the same in both cases.

Palestine Solidarity: From conditioning to criminalisation

Long before Palestine Action was proscribed in 2025, Britain’s political institutions had already internalised the boundaries of acceptable dissent when it came to Israel and Palestine. The disciplining of Palestine solidarity did not begin with chants, sit-ins, or direct action. It began with definitions, complaints, and the quiet recalibration of institutional risk.

A revealing early episode came in 2021, when Pearson, the education publisher, withdrew and rewrote sections of its GCSE history textbook The Middle East: Conflict, Crisis and Change 1917–2012. The decision followed complaints from the Board of Deputies and UK Lawyers for Israel, who alleged that the text was biased against Israel. Pearson suspended the title and revised it in response to the complaint. A later review found the original content accurate and well within mainstream historical scholarship.

But the lesson was simple. Historical accuracy was no longer sufficient protection. When it came to Israel, alignment mattered more.

This pattern spread across institutions. Universities came under pressure over pro-Palestine speakers. Arts organisations were attacked for programming deemed insufficiently sympathetic to Israel. Trustees, editors, and civil society leaders learned which issues triggered relentless escalation and which quietly dissipated. What emerged was not overt censorship, but anticipatory compliance, a learned reflex to retreat before controversy could begin.

That reflex was formalised through the widespread adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real, persistent, and dangerous, and it demands robust response. But the IHRA definition blurred vital distinctions by embedding examples that framed certain criticisms of Israel as inherently antisemitic. Legal scholars, Jewish academics, and civil liberties groups warned that it would chill legitimate political speech. They were ignored or painted as antisemites.

The definition was widely adopted and the effect was substantial. Events were cancelled. Complaints escalated. Disciplinary processes were triggered not for incitement or hatred, but for crossing an ideological boundary. ‘Too much’ criticism of Israel was evidence of bigotry. Accuracy was no longer the benchmark. Allegiance was.

These were not the only tools used to narrow the parameters of political discussion. Peaceful tactics used by Palestinian solidarity campaigns were reframed as extremist. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, long grounded in non-violence and international law, was recast as uniquely subversive. In 2023, the government introduced the Economic Activity of Public Bodies Bill to prohibit public institutions from participating in boycotts of Israel. United Nations experts warned that the legislation posed a direct threat to political freedom. And yet, the Labour Party refused to oppose it in principle.

The chilling effect rippled outward. Opposition to Israeli policy was no longer merely contentious. It was untouchable.

This shift did not operate evenly. Figures perceived as hostile to Israel were pursued relentlessly. Jeremy Corbyn was targeted relentlessly for alleged episodes of antisemitism such as describing Israel as an apartheid state. That description had been independently reached by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem.

Meanwhile, politicians who echoed antisemitic tropes while aligning with Israeli state interests faced no comparable scrutiny. Suella Braverman invoked the far-right and antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theorists. Nigel Farage spoke regularly about globalists, Soros and the Jewish lobby. Neither was challenged to the same extent as Corbyn by the organisations that had made policing left-wing critics of Israel their core mission.

The rule was not prejudice. It was positionality.

This produced a selective moral economy. Antisemitism was punished most aggressively when the accused was anti-occupation. Islamophobia was normalised. Muslim protest was securitised. Palestinian grief was treated as threat. Jewish dissent, organised through groups such as Jewish Voice for Labour, was marginalised or erased. In its place, the Board of Deputies, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the Jewish Leadership Council, all unambiguously pro-Israel, were elevated as the singular, legitimate voice of British Jews.

By 2024, this political logic had hardened. Criticism of Israel was treated as reputational hazard. Advocacy for Palestinian rights was recoded as extremism. International law, so often invoked in British foreign policy rhetoric, was treated as discretionary when it conflicted with Israeli or arms industry interests.

It was in this conditioned terrain that Palestine Action emerged. Founded in 2020, the group pursued direct action campaigns against Elbit Systems, the Israeli weapons manufacturer operating multiple sites in the UK. Their actions were disruptive but non-violent. Property, not people, was the target.

Courts recognised this distinction. In several cases, juries acquitted Palestine Action activists on the basis that their actions were proportionate responses to greater harm. In 2022, sustained protest forced Elbit to close its Oldham site. Contracts collapsed. Public awareness surged. That effectiveness made the group intolerable.

As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified in late 2023 and early 2024, mass pro-ceasefire protests filled British streets. The right-wing press responded with orchestrated panic. GB News, The Times, and The Daily Mail cast peaceful demonstrators as dangerous mobs. Suella Braverman invoked the language of national disloyalty. Palestine Action, once treated as fringe, was reclassified as a security threat.

This was not evidence-led escalation. MI5’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre repeatedly concluded that the group did not meet the terrorism threshold. The Home Office acknowledged that proscription would be legally vulnerable. The Foreign Office warned it would damage Britain’s international credibility. United Nations human rights officials cautioned that it would violate international norms.

None of this altered the outcome.

Defence contractors lobbied. Pro-Israel media coordinated consent. Lord Walney, formerly John Woodcock and a former chair of Labour Friends of Israel, was positioned as an independent adviser. He recommended the use of terrorism powers against protest. He had received donations and travel support from pro-Israel lobbyists. Bizarrely, his advice was treated as neutral expertise.

On 11 July 2025, the Home Secretary designated Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. Headlines that morning amplified claims of Iranian ties, claims not supported by intelligence assessments. Within days, support for the group became a criminal offence carrying a maximum sentence of fourteen years. This included placards, slogans, donations, and statements of solidarity.

The consequences were immediate. More than two thousand people were arrested under terrorism legislation. Among them were lawyers, medics, clergy, Jewish activists, and ordinary protestors. Dozens remain imprisoned. Several are on hunger strike. Civil liberties groups described it as the largest wave of political arrests in Britain since the anti-nuclear protests of the 1960s.

This was not a state suddenly turning authoritarian. It was the end point of a slow process of pressure, alignment, and capture. What began with textbook edits and semantic battles ended with terrorism powers deployed against peaceful protests.

And once that architecture exists, it will not remain confined to Palestine. Every movement that threatens elite consensus will be told the same thing.

You’re next.

From isolation to integration: how the political centre accommodated illiberalism

The preceding case studies show how institutions behave once illiberal pressure becomes predictable. They also reveal something more disturbing. Illiberalism in Britain has not advanced solely through insurgency. It has advanced through accommodation by the political centre.

This is the domain of reactionary centrism.

Across the past decade, Conservative governments were radicalised by their media ecosystem and constrained by Nigel Farage’s electoral insurgencies. Farage functioned as both threat and alibi. He pushed boundaries. Others followed, claiming responsibility. What was once framed as concession became posture. What began as rhetoric hardened into policy.

But it is the response of the Labour Party under Keir Starmer that shows how illiberalism travels from pressure to consensus. Starmer’s method has been consistent. Promise not rupture, but competence. Not confrontation, but reassurance. In opposition to Jeremy Corbyn, he pledged to retain the Corbynite stance but restore electability by removing “divisive” politics. In opposition to Sunak, he offered continuity with government policy but with less chaos. The objective was not to challenge the illiberal drift, but to neutralise it as a political risk.

The consequences were structural.

In a 2023 speech describing Britain as an “island of strangers,” Starmer did not merely mimic Nigel Farage. He legitimated xenophobic and racist talking points. Demographic change was framed not as a feature of a plural society to be governed and supported, but as a source of unease to be managed and reversed. No clear rebuttal was offered to far-right framings of immigration or multiculturalism. The speech did not confront xenophobia. It absorbed its premises.

The same logic governed Labour’s response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. In the early stages of the 2023 war, Starmer, an international human rights lawyer, defended Israel’s decision to cut off water, electricity, and aid. Many international legal scholars defined these acts as collective punishment. British Muslim communities reacted with anger and despair. Party headquarters later issued clarifications. But the underlying signal was received.

Labour’s instinct was not to anchor itself in humanitarian law. It was to avoid antagonising pro-Israel donors, lobby organisations, and illiberal ecosystem. Time and time again, Labour’s policy has followed this posture.

On asylum, Labour figures endorsed a “Denmark-style” deterrence model that outsourced responsibility while preserving some liberal language. The Conservative Rwanda scheme was criticised largely for cost, competence, and legal fragility, not for its moral logic. Labour’s objection was managerial, not ethical.

The same approach was visible in the party’s stance toward the European Convention on Human Rights. Publicly, Labour committed to preserving the ECHR. Privately, it explored reforms designed to pre-empt Conservative attacks. The aim was to save the convention by changing it. In practice, this meant conceding the premise that human rights law is an obstacle to border control rather than a safeguard against abuse.

Personnel decisions reinforced the message. Labour selected Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel, as its parliamentary candidate in North Durham. Akehurst had previously promoted conspiracy theories about Palestinian “crisis actors,” claimed the UN Human Rights Council was antisemitic, and depicted Jewish anti-Zionists as a dangerous fringe. While Muslim councillors were expelled for retweeting BDS slogans, Akehurst was rewarded with a safe seat.

This was not oversight. It was alignment.

Labour did not seek to defeat the illiberal ecosystem. It sought to reassure it. Not by echoing its rhetoric wholesale, but by accepting its boundaries. Certain issues became radioactive. Certain communities became expendable. Certain principles became conditional. The effect was that they reinforced the illiberal framing Labour had once contested.

Illiberalism no longer needed to fight the centre. It had been integrated into it. Under the banner of competence, dissent was reframed as risk. Human rights were treated as negotiable. Protest was reclassified as extremism. Civil liberties and human rights became luxuries for calmer times.

This is not the path of a populist seizure of power. It is the posture of a governing class that believes survival requires accommodating illiberalism. But the danger is not merely imitation. It is legitimation. By adopting illiberal premises while rejecting illiberal aesthetics, the centre made those premises durable. The Overton window did not merely move. It hardened.

Illiberalism no longer needed to knock.

It had been invited inside.

It already happened here

To understand the direction Britain is heading, it helps to remember where it has already been. The idea that “it couldn’t happen here” does not survive contact with British history.

From partition until well into the late twentieth century, Northern Ireland functioned as an illiberal statelet within the United Kingdom. For decades, the Protestant–Unionist–Loyalist regime at Stormont ruled with the tacit approval of Westminster, systematically subordinating the Catholic–Nationalist–Republican population. Voting rights were restricted. Electoral boundaries were gerrymandered. Housing allocation, public employment, and policing were deployed as instruments of sectarian control. Repression was not incidental. It was structural.

Successive British governments, of both major parties, possessed the legal authority to intervene decisively. They did not. Nor did the BBC in Northern Ireland, which operated for decades as a broadcaster embedded within the PUL order. British security forces acted under Westminster command, yet deferred consistently to unionist priorities. Courts in Northern Ireland were formally part of the UK legal system, but failed repeatedly to protect defendants from political policing, internment without trial, or show-trial procedures. Across Britain, much of the national press repeated official narratives uncritically, minimised state violence, and cast the CNR population as the source of instability rather than its victims.

Even when that violence crossed the Irish Sea, British institutions did not protect the innocent. The Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, Maguire Seven, and the persecution of Colin Wallace exposed how easily justice could be overridden once the state had designated enemies. Fabricated evidence, coerced confessions, unlawful detention, and media complicity were not aberrations. They were systemic features of a security state operating with public consent. It took decades of campaigning to secure exonerations. Apologies arrived late, if at all.

The lesson is unambiguous. Britain’s institutions have previously tolerated sustained illiberalism when it was geographically contained, politically convenient, and directed at a marginalised population. There is no serious basis for believing they are inherently immune today.

That legacy has not vanished. It has been retooled.

Since the turn of the millennium, Britain has undergone a slow but consistent expansion of state power at the expense of civil liberty. Surveillance has widened. Protest has been criminalised. Citizenship has become conditional. Judicial constraints on executive action have narrowed. Asylum has been reframed as criminal trespass. Workers’ ability to strike has been hollowed. Boycotts are being outlawed. Dissent itself is increasingly interpreted through a security lens.

The justifications have varied. Terrorism. Extremism. Migration. Disruption. Foreign interference. The function has not.

Parliament passed the Investigatory Powers Act with cross-party backing. Control orders and later TPIMs were normalised. Courts deferred. Media coverage framed protest noise as menace and disruption as threat. After Brexit, emergency language became routine. In the name of pragmatism, legal safeguards were recoded as luxuries.

Britain is still a liberal democracy. Elections are held. Courts still sit. Journalism still exists. But the balance of power has shifted decisively toward a state that lives in fear of the illiberal ecosystem, and away from those who resist it through protest, strike, or boycott.

The United States offers a warning from slightly further along the same path. Surveillance powers introduced under the banner of counterterrorism are now deployed against migrants and liberals. “Domestic terrorism” has become a catch-all for protest. Civil society has not been abolished. It has been demoralised and exhausted.

Britain is not there. But it is further along than it admits. What has been built will not remain dormant. Legal architectures, once normalised, are reused. Powers created for one purpose are redeployed for another. Targets expand. Precedents harden.

Farage, who has repeatedly trafficked in conspiratorial rhetoric while claiming to defend Jews from Muslims, now leads Britain’s most popular party. Elon Musk has addressed Tommy Robinson’s far-right rallies in Britain, promoting great replacement narratives and warning of inevitable violence. The tide is moving against liberal constraint, not toward it.

Britain has spent years softening the ground.

What has been seeded will grow. The question is no longer whether it could happen here. It is happening now. The only remaining question is whether it can be stopped.