Michael Rainsborough
Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory, Centre of Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.
In an earlier appearance in the pages of the Daily Sceptic, I suggested that Britain and much of Western Europe were adopting the pathologies of late-stage East European communism: systems drained of ideological vitality and surviving chiefly through performative pieties, bureaucratic coercion and the policing of thought. Not the brutalities of Stalinism, but a post-totalitarian order in which censorship is outsourced to HR departments and social exclusion takes the place of secret police. Somewhat uncharitably, I even suggested European leaders – Keir Starmer in Britain, Friedrich Merz in Germany – were beginning to acquire the physiognomy of those grey party functionaries once photographed beside malfunctioning hydroelectric dams.
The only reason I reached for the East European analogy was that dissent as an act of mental resistance has long been an intellectual preoccupation of mine. It drew me to the work of those like the Czech playwright Václav Havel whose essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) presented a remarkable evocation of a society exhausted by its own untruths, which struck me as increasingly resonant with our own times. Without that prior interest, the parallel would never have occurred to me.
When commentators (myself included) attempt to make sense of the present we reach instinctively for such analogies, not necessarily because they are accurate, but because they are comforting and familiar. They are the intellectual equivalent of carbohydrates: immediately gratifying but often lacking nutritional value. Analogical thinking is a phenomenon well-known to social scientists. It is a condition that often misleads policymakers into momentous mistakes, as studies like Irving Janis’s Victims of Groupthink (1973) and Khong Yuen Foong’s Analogies at War (1992) relay.
Yet analogies persist for a reason. They help us recognise patterns; they reveal the architecture of our own assumptions; and occasionally they illuminate something genuinely worth knowing. They show us not only how we think, but how we misthink. And it is in that spirit, conscious of both their hazards and their uses, that I want to explore the analogies that are presented as precursors to Britain’s future.
The World War That Never Ends
The most stubborn analogy in British political life is the second world war – that great moral laundromat into which we cram every modern dilemma in the hope it will emerge sanitised, clarified and neatly pressed.
Two variants dominate. The first is the eternal return of Munich: everything is 1938, everyone is Chamberlain, and every negotiation – whether with Brussels, Beijing, Moscow, or a barista correcting your oat-milk order – is appeasement. Entire foreign adventures have been undertaken because someone, somewhere, insisted that history was repeating itself for the thousandth, theatrically convenient, time (Suez, Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq, to name a few).
Once such an analogy has settled in someone’s mind, all hope of historical accuracy evaporates. Appealing to nuance is like appealing to a drunk’s sense of balance. One may point out with archival footnotes that ‘appeasement’ was in fact a rational response to Britain’s geopolitical circumstances, and in some respects, a far-sighted attempt to buy precious months, even years, for Britain to ready itself for a long war that senior planners already foresaw. None of it registers. The fantasy is that Britain ought to have leapt into war in 1933 or 1936, or something. To introduce proportion lowers the temperature of the melodrama, and nothing is more resented than context intruding upon catharsis.
The second myth is its inseparable twin: the conviction that Hitler lurks everywhere, in everyone, and in anyone who expresses even the faintest flicker of loyalty to the country they live in. The mildest patriotic sentiment is instantly placed on a well-greased escalator bound for Nuremberg. For decades this manoeuvre performed its intended role, relieving its practitioners of the burden of addressing public concerns about borders, migration, security or social cohesion. This terminological abuse drove serious scholars of fascism like A James Gregor up the wall.
But the potency of analogy only works when the audience consents to the rules and most people have stopped playing. Contemporary Britain looks nothing like 1930s Europe, and the public has begun reacting to these ritual denunciations not with fear but mockery, as the list of supposed Nazis/fascists/extremists/bigots now includes everyone from Nigel Farage to Kemi Badenoch to Rylan Clark, whose crime was to mildly notice that the country appears to be changing rather quickly. At this rate, the only people spared accusations of fascism will be those who have never ventured an opinion at all.
When Numbers Become Politics
Indeed, Rylan Clark’s fascistic crime of noticing what is going on dovetails with modelling that suggests on current trends arising from unconstrained migration Britain will be approaching a demographic threshold in which the majority white population ceases to be a majority at all. Projections differ on the date – some say 2063 if not sooner – but the direction is clear. This reshaping is occurring not in a tranquil, well-integrated polity but in a society already strained by cultural fragmentation, declining trust, economic insecurity and a political class that finds the whole matter rather awkward and would prefer to discuss growth opportunities in biotech or free school meals for trans kids.
Yet even the most euphemistically inclined now sense that something is changing. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s mantra that “diversity is our strength” sounds exactly like a state-endorsed slogan one finds in post-totalitarian regimes though in his case diversity is certainly his strength, since distinct demographic voting blocs keep him in power, regardless of how useless he is.
As anxiety spreads, commentators reach for new analogies: Balkanisation, Lebanonisation, Brazilianisation, South-Africanisation. The British, once immune to exotic diagnoses, now wake each day to discover which troubled region they may be becoming by teatime. It would be funny if it were not so vividly reminiscent of failing regimes everywhere: the moment when people realise they are living in the footnotes of someone else’s anthropological case study.
Ulsterisation: Britain’s Most Ominous Analogy
In Britain, the analogy that carries the most weight is Ulsterisation, which is now regularly invoked as a precursor to possibilities for wider civil conflict in the United Kingdom. Strictly speaking, the term referred to the localisation of security forces in Northern Ireland after 1975, but it has since taken on a wider meaning: the entrenchment of cultural and communal divisions into a permanent political condition.
What makes this analogy potent is that its warning signs were visible not in some far-flung corner of the world but on Britain’s own doorstep, and within living memory. It is remarkable that the architects of modern British multiculturalism never paused to reflect on what Northern Ireland revealed about where cultural conflict can lead.
My own early academic work introduced me to that environment. Studying the ideological and strategic evolution of the Irish Republican movement exposed me to the ways political disputes become cultural battles, and how cultural battles become something darker. Revolutionary rhetoric is not merely heated language: it is a method of dividing the world, assigning loyalties and making confrontation feel obligatory.
Anyone who lived or worked in the province will tell you the same thing: the conflict left its mark on people. You did not have to be directly involved to feel its weight – simply passing through its rhythms was enough. There was a tension in the air that never fully disappeared... a sense that normal life continued, but never entirely securely.
Moments from that period remain fixed in my mind. The distant sound of explosions. Night-time checkpoints. Streets that shifted mood after political funerals. And one memory in particular: walking along Enniskillen’s high street in October 1987, speaking briefly with a passerby whose face I did not think twice about. Only after the Remembrance Sunday bombing did I recognise him, from the photographs of the dead, as John Megaw. Encounters like that do not fade. They strip away any lingering naïvety about how swiftly cultural division can descend into murder and atrocity.
It is a little-remarked fact that many of the voices warning about Britain’s present direction are people who have either lived in, or devoted serious study to, Northern Ireland. Lionel Shriver, with first-hand experience of life in the province, writes with a clarity shaped by having seen what communal tension actually looks like. Eric Kaufmann, whose early scholarship examined the Orange Order, grasped how demographic change collides with identity politics. Jenny Holland, author of the Saving Culture from Itself Substack, writes from within the province with a grounded awareness of how cultural fragmentation plays out in daily life. Aris Roussinos, reporting for UnHerd, brings to questions of geopolitics the outlook of someone familiar with the early signals of societal strain. And Douglas Murray, before The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds, produced an underappreciated but morally serious study of the Troubles: Bloody Sunday: Truth, Lies and the Saville Inquiry.
What unites these writers is the recognition, gained from proximity, that once a society solidifies along sectarian lines, the process acquires a momentum of its own. Their warnings are not abstract. They come from having seen, firsthand, what happens when cultural fractures become the organising principle of public life – and from watching, with growing alarm, a Britain sleepwalking into similar terrain while assuring itself that the familiar rules of civic peace will somehow continue to apply.
Singaporeanisation: The Managed Future
If Ulster gives one kind of lesson, Singapore suggests another. It is the next analogy that springs to my mind, largely because – after Northern Ireland – it is the place where I lived long enough to see how a society handles deep pluralism when it refuses to leave anything to chance. I spent nearly a decade in Singapore, long enough to understand that its apparent smoothness was neither accidental nor effortless.
Singapore is often described, by those who know very little about it, as a model of multicultural success. That description badly misses the point. Singapore is not multicultural in the British sense – a cheerful improvisation in which the state declares diversity to be a self-regulating good. It is plural, certainly, but pluralism there is gardened, trimmed, pruned and kept within a deliberate political framework. After the racial riots of the 1950s and ’60s, the city-state’s leaders grasped a truth that Britain has spent 60 years avoiding: diversity must sit within a cohesive national identity if it is not to decay into rival communal projects.
The settlement they built was not ornamental. It was a system: housing quotas to prevent ethnic clustering; electoral boundaries to ensure mixed representation; constitutional safeguards; and, above all, a civic culture that insisted on a shared national story. Identity was acknowledged but never allowed to become the organising principle of political power. My colleague whom I met first while also a lecturer at the National University of Singapore, David Martin Jones, coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’ to describe how the city-state enforces what it values. Community does not emerge spontaneously: it is protected, sustained and, when necessary, imposed.
Britain took a very different path. Where Singapore sharpened the tools of cohesion, Britain assumed that its cultural inheritance – civility, restraint, habits of compromise – would renew itself indefinitely. We imagined that these things were natural features of the national landscape rather than the product of a historically particular society. We placed our faith in what might be called the alchemy of good intentions.
The result is that Britain now has the diversity of Singapore without any of its architecture. We have imported pluralism but not the structures that sustain it. We have the freedoms of a liberal society without the shared norms that make those freedoms stable. It is, in effect, multiculturalism on the honour system, and the honour system is beginning to creak.
Singapore, then, offers one possible, if unlikely, future for Britain: a firm, post-liberal state that does not wait for cohesion to appear from below but supplies it from above. It would be disciplined, administratively competent and quietly authoritarian in the bureaucratic sense: Singapore with drizzle and fewer functioning transport systems.
But this analogy has limits. Singapore’s model demands a political class willing to act decisively in the national interest. Britain’s political class, by contrast, struggles to locate the national interest even when issued with a map, a torch and a small team of Sherpas trained to point at it. Even if the will existed, the capacity does not.
And so, Singapore serves not as a forecast but as a contrast: a reminder that diversity can be managed, but only by states that take the responsibility seriously. Britain is not one of them.
Malaysianisation: The Arithmetic of Anxiety
If Singapore shows how a plural society can be held together by design, Malaysia shows what happens when pluralism settles into something more invidious. During my years in Southeast Asia, I crossed the Causeway often enough to see how sharply the atmosphere changed the moment one stepped into Johor Bahru. The political psychology of Malaysia was different and far more contested, more openly shaped by racial arithmetic. That contrast forms the next analogy that comes to mind when considering Britain’s future.
Malaysia’s post-independence history is defined by a delicate ethnic balance: a Malay majority concerned about its cultural and economic standing, and a Chinese minority dominant in commerce and urban life. When that tension erupted into violence in 1969, the state responded with the New Economic Policy and the Bumiputera (‘sons of the soil’) system in 1971 – a far-reaching framework of ethnic preferences designed to secure Malay political primacy and prevent the Chinese community from becoming a rival centre of power.
It was not a model that invites easy admiration. It formalised division, institutionalised resentment and wrapped discrimination in the reassuring language of ‘indigenous rights’. Yet it also stabilised Malaysia, ensuring it did not follow the path of Lebanon or Bosnia. In practice, it created a durable, if illiberal, structure of ethnic bargaining: imperfect, often unjust, but functional in its own logic.
And this is where the analogy cuts close. Malaysia is not an exotic exception: it is a case study in the universal political reflex of a majority that fears becoming downgraded – culturally, economically or electorally. When such fear takes hold, liberal norms bend, then buckle, giving way to doctrines of protection, priority and entitlement. These doctrines rarely announce themselves explicitly. They emerge through rhetoric about ‘stability’, ‘balance’, ‘community rights’ or ‘fairness’. But their core is unmistakable: majority anxiety turning into political architecture.
Britain is not Malaysia. But the demographic trajectory is not imaginary. As the white British population moves towards minority status the psychological landscape will inevitably shift. A population accustomed to being the cultural centre of gravity does not glide serenely into political marginalisation simply because columnists at the Guardian assure them it is virtuous.
When this unease is met with sermons, accusations or moral contempt – as it routinely is – the dynamic worsens. One cannot bludgeon people out of their own demographic perceptions. Where political fear sharpens, illiberal politics follows. This is the heart of the Bumiputera analogy: not the legal details of Malaysian policy, but the emotional architecture that made it possible.
A society in which the historic majority fears dispossession will not remain liberal indefinitely. It will search for mechanisms of reassurance, formal or informal, spoken or unspoken, and it will find them. And once that search begins, the political transformation becomes very hard to reverse.
Towards Post-Liberal Britain
Post-totalitarianism arises when a system loses confidence in its own principles. It compensates not with overt tyranny but with coercive sentimentality: policing speech, narrowing debate and enforcing ritualised gestures of virtue in place of persuasion. It is a soft authoritarianism that no longer trusts its citizens and no longer quite trusts itself.
Britain is edging in precisely this direction: towards a suffocating managerialism that treats dissent as contamination and ordinary concerns as moral offences. Public scepticism is repackaged as extremism; identity is treated as a bureaucratic inconvenience. The result is a political culture somehow both brittle and sanctimonious (an impressive act of institutional multitasking).
This would be troubling enough in a stable society. It is far more dangerous in one undergoing rapid demographic change. As Britain becomes more diffuse, its ruling class becomes more censorious. Instead of meeting complexity with honesty and seriousness, the state tightens its grip. Instead of building trust, it demands compliance. Instead of encouraging debate, it issues slogans. It’s the political equivalent of giving a thirsty man a brochure about hydration. In such a climate, grievances don’t disappear: they gather force.
And this is where Britain’s situation shades into a universal pattern. When people feel threatened, culturally or politically, they rally to their group. Whether one likes it or not, the impulse is remarkably consistent. In deeply divided societies – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Fiji, Northern Ireland – demographic changes and sectarian fault lines reliably generate demands for group protection. Sometimes the results are catastrophic; sometimes merely corrosive. But they are almost never liberal.
If Britain continues on its present arc of high immigration, eroding cohesion, rising communal tension, declining trust and a political class incapable of articulating any stable sense of the national ‘we’, the question is not whether identity politics will dominate British life, but whose identity politics will.
The British are slow to anger but quick to organise once the mood turns. They tolerate a great deal until they don’t. And nothing changes a nation’s politics quite so abruptly as the dawning realisation that the future is no longer imagined with them in it.
The Cartography of Britain’s Future
Analogies, then, can illuminate some of the paths before us. One is a soft, bureaucratic post-totalitarianism: censorship by algorithm, governance by managerial decree, politics reduced to moral instruction: the East European model, minus the ideological conviction but retaining all the paperwork.
A second, and darker, possibility is Ulsterisation. This is not merely the crystallisation of identity based rifts – Britain is already well along that road – but the possibility that such division, left unchecked and denied for long enough, hardens into open conflict. Ulster remains the closest and most sobering reminder within the British tradition of how cultural antagonism can tip into sporadic violence, political intimidation and a low-level civil war that endures for decades not because anyone wants it, but because once the spiral begins, no one can stop it.
A third is a Singaporean turn: enforced cohesion, a firmer national identity and a political class that actually governs. This remains theoretically possible, although no more likely than my successfully assembling flat-pack furniture without recourse to profanity.
The fourth is a Malaysian settlement: a politics of group entitlement, indigenous anxiety and a creeping architecture of ethno-political preferences designed to manage demographic upheaval that Britain’s leaders spent decades pretending was not occurring.
No one can say which future Britain will choose, or which will choose Britain. But the direction of travel makes some analogies more plausible than others. On present trends, the country appears poised somewhere between Ulsterisation – the worst outcome – and Malaysianisation, the next least-bad.
Is the Future Bumiputera?
In the end, Britain’s fate may turn less on policy than on psychology: how a once-confident majority responds to becoming a minority in its own country. This experience is not unique – many societies have lived it. Some adapt and negotiate new arrangements, usually of an illiberal nature. Others fracture into open conflict, as the examples of Lebanon, the Balkans and Syria grimly demonstrate.
The underlying lesson is simple. When people lose confidence in the future, they retreat into the familiar. And when nations do the same, they begin to reshape their politics around old identities rather than shared ones.
Analogies are not predictions. However, they can function as warnings. They show how easily countries can slide into settlements they never consciously chose, driven not by grand decisions but by accumulated fears. And that is how the future becomes Bumiputera.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
