Britain’s Labour government is in trouble: Its program of massive third-world immigration from places like Pakistan and Somalia is wildly, overwhelmingly unpopular.

But that’s not the real problem. 

The real problem is that despite the best efforts of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his leftist captive media, Britons themselves have discovered just how unpopular it is.

You might think that’s absurd — if mass immigration is unpopular, how can everyone not know it?

Everyone doesn’t know it because the government has been policing speech about immigration. 

Any criticism of open borders, lax enforcement or — worst of all — immigrant crime has been punished as “racist” and “hate speech” by the Starmer regime. 

The point of this isn’t to reduce racism or hate (heck, the censorship likely make that worse), but to make it harder for people to realize just how many of their fellow citizens feel the same way they do. 

For years, Britain has stifled reports of immigrant rape gangs in places like Rotherham and has persecuted those who have called attention to them, even jailing some. 

And as the government gives light sentences to child rapists, it’s imprisoning moms for tweets on grounds of “inciting race hatred.”

It’s all to construct and maintain something known as “preference falsification,” a move usually practiced by authoritarian regimes. 

The trick is, you make citizens pretend that they believe what the government says, and fake their approval of what it does.

You promote marches and demonstrations and speech in favor of the government’s preferred positions, and you severely punish marches and demonstrations and speech that oppose the government’s favored positions. 

You give excuses, like “stopping counterrevolutionary activity” or “fighting hate speech,” for shutting down any opposition. 

You may even have informers to ferret out wrongthink and report it to the authorities, or to employers, or to third parties who will engage in extralegal (but government-supported) harassment.

If you do it right, you can have upward of 90% of your population hating you and your policies, but doing and saying nothing about them — because everyone in that 90% thinks they’re part of a tiny minority. 

Resistance will seem to be futile.

This works. 

Until it doesn’t.

The problem with preference falsification is that sooner or later some event or development can make people realize that what they’ve been told is popular is, in fact, very unpopular. 

When this happens, as Duke University scholar Timur Kuran writes in his book “Private Truths, Public Lies,” the result is a “preference cascade.”

When large swaths of the population realize their dissident views are in fact widely held, they become less afraid of the government — and less hesitant about sharing their true sentiments. 

And that’s what’s happening now in Britain, after a string of cases in which migrants sexually assaulted local girls and women.

Across the United Kingdom, people — including large numbers of middle-aged and middle-class women, not the “far-right” skinheads that Starmer and his ilk claim stoke all anti-immigrant sentiment — are protesting outside the hotels where the government is housing illegal migrants, shouting “Send them home!” and “Protect our girls!”

The demonstrations in the last two weeks — featuring thousands of people carrying St. George flags, the traditional symbol of England — are too big to hide, and they’re cropping up in every corner of the nation, organized largely on Facebook and other social media.

Starmer has gotten the government-controlled media to present its spin and to black out or soft-pedal most bad news. 

But news gets out in other ways. 

In particular, Elon Musk’s maintenance of X as a free-speech zone has made it much harder for the ruling elites to keep people in the dark.

Now the government is scared, alternating between overweening demands and ignominious retreats.

After London police tried to ban protests outside migrant hotels, authorities walked it back with a “clarification” that the ban applied only to specific protesters.

Questionable groups of masked, thuggish “counterprotesters” have been allegedly delivered to marches in police buses — only to find themselves outnumbered and pushed back by the throng.

Sometimes preference cascades presage major political changes; other times, as in the famous case of Nicolas Ceausescu’s communist Romania, they produce violent revolution.

(One thing about preference falsification is that it often keeps the government in the dark, too — Ceausescu genuinely believed his people loved him, until shortly before he was hauled out and shot.)

The British establishment would have been better served to let its citizens debate the immigration question openly and fairly. It didn’t do so because it knew it would lose such a debate. 

Instead, it foisted open borders on a nation that didn’t want them, then tried to silence opposition. 

Now we’re watching as the regime’s strategy collapses.

Will it end in Starmer’s ouster — or worse, in violence? 

Either way, the aftermath will be ugly.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.