For years observers have warned that the United States may soon enter a “second civil war.” But after a week of ethnic riots across the United Kingdom, a different country is being described as standing on the brink of conflict. Elon Musk looked at the violence and posted on X that “civil war is inevitable.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer hit back, insisting the unrest in British cities is simple “far-right thuggery.” The country’s justice minister now hints that Musk’s social-media company could be sanctioned.
On the simple question of civil war, Starmer is right and Musk is wrong—if only for the reason that a country cannot stage a civil war when all the elites are on the same side. Few voices have suggested the riots point to something more than racism. Those that have—such as Nigel Farage, who sees “deeper long-term problems” that are the products of “mass, uncontrolled immigration”—prove their marginality by opening their mouths at all. When the police, the military, the judiciary, the media, the government, and all the leading political parties are in agreement, you have none of the ingredients for a civil war. At most, you have a peasant uprising. At the least, wanton violence.
Wanton violence is hardly new in Britain, of course. The country experienced a wave of it in 2011. Today’s riots, however, are different in two important respects. First, they are carried out by members of the majority ethnic group. Second, they are directed less against the government than against minority ethnic groups, which in one case have themselves responded with violence. Thus, unlike in 2011, these latest incidents raise the specter of broader “sectarian” or “communal” violence.
The possibility of communal violence depends, of course, on the coexistence of distinct communities. In the 21st-century United Kingdom outside Northern Ireland, this condition is a product of the country’s post-1997 mass immigration. Before Tony Blair became prime minister, annual legal immigration routinely ran about 300,000. That number doubled by the time Blair left office in 2007 and reached 800,000 under the Conservatives before Brexit. Over the past two years, legal immigration into Britain—nearly all of which settled in England—surpassed 1.2 million annually, more than 80 percent from non-European countries. The necessary outcome has been significant ethnic change. In 2001, Britain was 88 percent white British. In 20 years, the figure has fallen to 75 percent. In light of the past two years, that number is lower still today.
Other countries in the Anglosphere—those sharing not only Britain’s language, but a similar liberal polity, economy, culture, and civic national identity—have undergone similarly dramatic racial and ethnic transformations. Australia hasn’t collected such data since the 1970s, but its native English-speaking population dropped to 72 percent in 2021, down from 85 percent in 1991. From 1991 to 2021, the white share of the Canadian population fell to 74 percent, down from 91 percent. In New Zealand, those with European ethnicity made up 68 percent of the population last year, down from 83 percent in 1991. In the United States, the most diverse of all the Anglosphere countries undergoing the most rapid racial and ethnic transformation, the non-Hispanic white share of the population dropped to 58 percent in 2020, down from 76 percent three decades earlier.
Yet none of these other countries is witnessing communal conflict like Britain’s. Why not? While there are many reasons for this difference, two stand out.
The first is that the British are more rooted to place. Compared to high-mobility North America and Australasia, they change addresses less frequently than their Anglosphere cousins. When they do so, they traverse shorter distances. Another sign of rootedness is language. Britain has more regional accents and dialects than the United States, despite being only 20 percent the latter’s size by population and just 3 percent by land area. And notwithstanding the attempts of British multiculturalists to define their country as a “nation of immigrants,” the obvious fact is that, unlike the other four Anglosphere countries, Britain isn’t a settler society. Nearly all of its native white population can trace a British lineage back at least 1,500 years and, in some cases, 15,000 years. Mass immigration is new to Britain, whereas it was the basis of the founding and growth of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
“Without London, the United Kingdom boasts a smaller GDP per capita than Mississippi.”
A second reason is that much of Britain is poor. The country ranks above only New Zealand on both GDP per capita and disposable household income per capita. The average square footage of a British home is less than half the square footage of one in Canada and about one-third the size in Australia. Britain is also highly unequal geographically. In fact, by some measures it is the most regionally unequal developed country in the world. As the Financial Times observed last year, without London, the United Kingdom boasts a smaller GDP per capita than Mississippi. Taking the north of England alone, the comparison is closer to Puerto Rico.
It should be no surprise, then, that the clear majority of anti-immigrant riots have been in the north and the Midlands. Competition with ethnically distinct newcomers for housing and employment has been laid atop long simmering grievances against the state and long-standing attachments to place. Bringing 2.5 million immigrants, mostly from poor countries, into such a social landscape in just two years was a recipe for conflict. Even though immigrants in Britain (as in the rest of the Anglosphere) have lower incarceration rates than the native-born population, shocking crimes can act as a spark, setting off the dry tinder that has been amassing for years.
As with their American counterparts, British elites are much more comfortable promising to tackle the “root causes” of mass immigration in a way that is supposed to stem it over decades (if ever) than they are impeding it directly in a matter of days. They have not shown a similar eagerness to discuss the root causes of ethnic rioting, however, but prefer to condemn online disinformation and create a “standing army” of specialized police units instead.
The rest of the Anglosphere shows that mass immigration and rapid ethnic change needn’t lead to communal violence. But if Britain is to follow North America and Australasia, it needs much more spatial equality, much more spatial mobility, and much less attachment to place. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also accomplish ethnic peace by limiting their immigrant profiles to skilled workers likely to join the middle and professional-managerial classes. The United States uses the stern sanctions of the market to force immigrants to prove their worth through work.
Above all, Britain needs economic growth. Getting rich may not salve all wounds, but it heals many of them. Real GDP per capita in Britain fell every quarter in 2022 and 2023, and the annualized level of 2023 was lower than in 2019. Without growth, the country’s current open-borders approach will contribute to a compounding social disaster. British conservatives will then be proved correct in their predictions that this summer’s riots are merely the beginning of something worse to come.