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The United Kingdom is not about to collapse into absolute chaos or, as Elon Musk has suggested, a 21st-century successor to England’s 17th-century civil war. Nevertheless, tensions over immigration policy snap into emotive public protests, increasing civil discord.

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The issue of immigration has placed U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s ruling Labour Party under heavy pressure. Three years ago, just 24% of U.K. adults said immigration was one of their top three concerns. Today, that figure has more than doubled to 56%, according to a YouGov tracker. The economy is the second key concern at 52%, followed by housing, crime, and taxes.

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But there’s no doubt that illegal immigration is their top concern.

The general sense is that migrants are being allowed to enter the U.K. illegally and then stay there without facing any serious border security or expulsion orders. Most of this illegal immigration occurs via small boats that cross the short channel separating the U.K. and France. Although Starmer has increased border security efforts with France, illegal transit continues. Nearly 30,000 migrants have crossed the channel since the start of the year, reflecting a clear increase in crossings.

As in the United States, these migrants have to be fed and cared for, and many apply for asylum. Resolving these applications is time-consuming. In the interim, migrants are provided shelter in public housing projects or hotels that the government has rented. This housing strategy causes resentment in local areas because many U.K. citizens sit on long waiting lists to access similar services.

True, this resentment fails to recognize that the central cause of the country’s economic and social malaise is not immigration but high taxes that discourage risk, effort, and investment, alongside overly generous welfare budgets that reward slothfulness. Still, the perception that Britons come last is increasingly widely felt. Adding to this frustration is antisocial behavior by some migrants, sometimes sexual in nature, against local residents. This has sparked protests outside of migrant hosting hotels, with emotions further fueled against the backdrop of a decadeslong cover-up of child sexual abuse involving vulnerable white girls targeted by British-Pakistani gangs in northern England. Many offenders here were able to escape justice because of political fears over appearing to be racist.

Put simply, the reality and effects of uncontrolled illegal immigration have led many Britons to feel that the state is far more interested in political correctness than in being a fair arbiter of justice.

The case study of Lucy Connolly is instructive in this regard. Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison last year for an X post in which she aggressively criticized asylum-seekers by stating, “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them.” The sentence was seen, credibly in this writer’s opinion, as an effort by the political establishment to tamp down on popular resistance to government policy.

As the Washington Examiner first reported, the same judge in Connolly’s case previously allowed a pedophile to avoid prison time even though he possessed “1,000 images and videos of child pornography that he had accrued over a 10-year period. More than 200 of these images were what English law defines as Category A images, or images involving children, which include ‘penetrative sexual activity, sexual activity with an animal or sadism.'”

Another example of the U.K.’s increasingly hostile tendency toward free speech came last week when Graham Linehan, a TV comedy writer, was arrested after arriving in London on a flight from Arizona. Linehan’s offense? An X post stating, “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Another example, it seems, of when cheeky comedy gives way to custodial coercion.

Some senior police officers and politicians are now calling for changes to the law to provide for freedom of speech. But others insist that Britons restrict their politically charged speech in relation to controversial issues or continue to face legal consequences. This deterrence rhetoric is deeply unhelpful, fostering the belief that free speech rights are being sacrificed at the altar of political correctness (incidentally, the U.K.’s speech malaise and similar situations across Europe underline the misguided nature of President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional executive action against flag burning).

But the U.K.’s immigration crisis isn’t simply rooted in housing and crime considerations.

It also bears heavily on the U.K.’s free-at-point-of-use public services system. One popular frustration is that immigrants are placing increasing demands on the greatly overstretched National Health Service and that this is worsening serious backlogs in terms of access to and quality of treatments. Although demands on health services by migrants contribute to only a small part of the supply problem, the NHS is in big trouble. The British Medical Association notes that as of June 2025, 6.23 million patients referred by their primary care doctors for further treatment had yet to receive it. This constitutes 11% of the total U.K. population, the equivalent of 37.4 million Americans waiting for referred treatment.

Waiting times for cancer treatment best encapsulate the problem. The BMA observes that “the percentage of patients receiving their first cancer treatment within two months (62 days) of an urgent referral decreased from 67.8% in May 2025 to 67.1% in June 2025. This is significantly below the operational standard of 85%. … The poor performance against these key operational standards illustrates the level of pressure the system is under, and is a clear sign that significant investment in capacity is needed.”

The political ramifications of all this cannot be underestimated.

Starmer may have a 148-seat majority in the House of Commons, the legislative chamber of the U.K. Parliament, but if public disenchantment keeps rising, he may be forced to call an election before the mandatory election date of Aug. 15, 2029. The prime minister found his credibility further undercut last week when Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner resigned following a scandal over her tax payments. Starmer’s rivals smell intoxicating blood in the political water.

Nigel Farage’s populist-right Reform UK party, only 7 years old, is already leading Labour by approximately 10 points. If an election were held today, Farage would likely become prime minister as head of a Reform-led coalition government with the Conservative Party. Again, however, the immigration issue sits at the center of the political maelstrom. The failure of the Conservative Party, which held power from 2010 to 2024, to capitalize on disenchantment with Starmer has led to increasing pressure on current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Her former Conservative leadership contender, Robert Jenrick, is staking out a more populist anti-immigration stance on social media.

But there’s no question that Farage’s anti-immigration message is resonating with voters across the political Right and in the populist center. Farage has promised to remove 600,000 illegal immigrants from the U.K. if he becomes prime minister. While the practicalities of this promise are far from apparent, the message is selling. Similarly, while the Reform party’s broader policy agenda is heavy on simplistic claims such as cutting “office waste” to improve spending on healthcare, public disenchantment with the political establishment lends Farage political space to make an impression.

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Starmer’s critical challenge is that he appears to be caught between popular sentiment and his political ideology. Loath to withdraw the U.K. from the European Convention on Human Rights, Starmer likely lacks even the means of enforcing a major reduction in illegal immigration. But as popular disenchantment grows, Farage and the Conservatives will move aggressively to take political advantage of it.

Whether the prime minister can survive another four years in office is far from certain.