How do you go bankrupt?’ novelist Ernest Hemingway once asked. ‘Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.’ Nation states fail the same way. First comes a long economic and social decline – and then a terrifying collapse into chaos.
Britain’s disintegration is all around us – and appears to be accelerating.
Last week, former No 10 aide Dominic Cummings revealed in chilling detail how our security services have been compromised by Chinese infiltration.
Reams of highly classified information, including top-secret intelligence, defence data and briefings at the highest level, were stolen from government networks. Worse, the reaction from the political class was not to sort out this catastrophe and seek to prevent its recurrence – but instead to try to cover it up, with bullying officials telling ministers it was ‘illegal’ to speak of it.
Separately, in what is fast growing into one of the most serious political scandals of my lifetime, two British men accused of spying for Beijing will not face prosecution – after what seems to have been grotesquely murky political interference right up to the Prime Minister, who is credibly accused of lying to the House of Commons.
Both cases on their own would speak of a state that was in deep trouble. But the rot at the heart of our body politic goes far deeper.
Again last week, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood frankly admitted that the Government no longer controls who is coming into the country.
‘The failure to bring order to our borders is eroding trust not just in us as political leaders, but in the credibility of the state itself,’ she told her European counterparts. In normal times, such a statement would have forced her resignation.
Britain’s disintegration is all around us – and appears to be accelerating, writes Frank Furedi
The Soviet empire lost its deadly grip in 1989, and then collapsed under the weight of its corruption, internal contradictions and sheer economic insanity
This year alone, more than 36,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats, an increase of about 25 per cent on last year.
And those are only the ones we know about, taking no account of those smuggled into the country in lorries and shipping containers. Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf has calculated that 1.3 million illegal immigrants are at large in Britain – equivalent to a major city. The figure seems reasonable, but the truth is that no one knows.
Legal migration is, of course, also out of control. The last Tory government oversaw the utter collapse of almost any attempt to vet arrivals, with net migration exploding into hundreds of thousands per year – many of whom did not come to work.
Perhaps the most visible symptom of the British state’s disintegration is dizzying demographic change – driven of course by mass uncontrolled migration. In a single generation, Great Britain has been transformed. More than a quarter of under-18s here have a parent born abroad, and that figure is rising sharply: more than a third of all babies born here now have parents who were born abroad.
Under this and many other pressures, our socialist health service is collapsing. More than 6.25 million people (about 10 per cent of the population) are on NHS waiting lists – and for lengthy periods that would horrify our neighbours, such as France. Accident & Emergency units are like battle zones.
Need more evidence? Let me mention policing. Masked youths on electric bikes criss-cross our cities, delivering drugs unchallenged. Shoplifters have effectively free rein to swagger through stores, taking clothes, alcohol, cosmetics or anything else they want. ‘Phone-snatching’ is an epidemic – with rates in London tripling in just the four years to 2024.
A house is burgled in Britain every 189 seconds, according to official data, with just 3.5 per cent resulting in a charge, let alone a conviction. The streets reek of cannabis, which remains illegal, although you’d never know it.
If the state had given up, and we were no longer paying for it, that would be one thing. But on top of all this, the tax and benefits system now acts as a perverse disincentive to work.
Millions, including countless young people, have given up any idea of getting a job.
Incredibly, some 45 per cent of working-age adults in this country live in households that receive more in benefits than they pay in tax, according to the Office for National Statistics.
That is not economically sustainable. Neither is the national debt. We currently owe £2.9 trillion, with the interest payments alone costing you and me £111 billion a year. The tax burden is at a peacetime high – and Rachel Reeves is poised to raid us all for more.
This year alone, more than 36,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats, an increase of about 25 per cent on last year
Most symbolically of all, perhaps, decades of under-investment in the military means that Britain is essentially unable to defend itself. Our entire Army comprises just 70,000 men and women, a number smaller than the capacity crowd at Wembley stadium.
Last year, junior defence minister and former Royal Marine Al Carns warned that Britain could not fight a war of survival for more than six months before its armed forces would be completely wiped out. This litany of failures would condemn any basket-case country in South America or Africa.
It seems almost incomprehensible that I am describing Britain – a country I love and that has given me and my family so much.
So is our final collapse inevitable? Despite everything, I believe it is not.
After all, this is not the first time during my adult life that Britain has faced economic and social disaster. The grim 1970s, an era of strikes and power cuts, also took us to the brink – until, under Margaret Thatcher, we recovered.
But the work ethic was stronger then. Nor had mass immigration yet turned us, as our globalist Prime Minister was once bold enough to put it, into an island of strangers.
And, yes, the lights are still on. Our supermarket shelves are stacked with food, there’s petrol at the pumps, and the police continue to investigate violent street crimes – not least the deadly machete fights that have become a grim feature of some of our more diverse urban areas.
Britain still has brilliant, innovative people determined to avert disaster – even if too many of our brightest and best have sadly packed up and left for overseas. Most decent Britons deplore the rising tide of anti-Semitism – worst by far in Muslim-heavy enclaves such as Birmingham – and the self-indulgent madness of trans ideology, climate hysteria and Gaza fanaticism that has gripped university campuses.
The public is hungry for change: one astonishing poll recently put Labour in fourth place behind the Greens, while another major survey in the Daily Mail predicted a landslide to end all landslides for Nigel Farage’s upstart Reform at the next election.
Most of all, I believe things can still be turned around because I have seen what a failed state looks like. I lived in Communist Hungary – a truly broken society – until my family fled for the freedom of the West when I was nine.
The Soviet empire lost its deadly grip in 1989, and then collapsed under the weight of its corruption, internal contradictions and sheer economic insanity.
Hungary is now re-emerging as a success story, with a stable economy and GDP per capita – the measure that actually matters – soaring by 44 per cent between 2010 and 2023, while in quasi-socialist Britain it was about half as fast. Neighbouring Poland is booming, too – and within a few short years, by some measures, the average Pole could be richer than the average British citizen.
Disaster is not irreversible – nor is it inevitable.
But, right now, the implosion is happening in slow motion all around us.
And unless it is reversed – fast – the devastation that follows could prove impossible to stop.
