Incoming UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham gestures after being confirmed as the Labour Party’s new leader in central London, July 17, 2026 (Henry Nicholls/AFP)
The #1 Source of Britain’s Vulnerability? Its Civic Society
The Pogrom in Belfast: We Ignore It At Our Peril
On June 24, the UK outlet The Guardian published two editorials. The first, on Islamophobia, was written in the aftermath of a “terrorist” incident: a man was charged with attempted murder after attacking and injuring five men, two of them as they left a mosque.
The Guardian said, “What is beyond doubt is the real and growing fear experienced by Muslim communities in the UK.” It noted that 45% of religious hate crimes were directed at Muslims in 2025, and cited Baroness Sayeeda Warsi’s warning that Muslims are increasingly treated as “fair game”. The conclusion was blunt: “Condemnation of hate crime is the bare minimum required.” Politicians and the public need to confront the broader current of anti-Muslim sentiment that led to these attacks, not simply offer words of condemnation.
The second editorial, addressed to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s likely successor Andy Burnham, emphasized that “foreign policy cannot be an afterthought”. The Guardian said Starmer had clung too long to the idea that Britain’s “special relationship” with the US could survive Donald Trump. Pursuing closer alignment with Europe, only after Trump’s threats over Greenland and the strikes on Iran has forced Downing Street’s hand, was far too late.
Taking office without a clear sense of priorities was “a recipe for drift and loss of control”. The editors advised Burnham not to repeat that mistake, and warned that deferring Britain’s reckoning with its place in the world would be a strategic blunder.
On the surface, these two editorials address different topics: one domestic, one foreign. However,, they are connected. Both landed only two days after Starmer resigned as Prime Minister, with the Labour Party began searching for a political identity capable of holding together a fractured society while facing down an increasingly organised far right. Read in that light, they are not a coincidence of scheduling but two halves of the same argument about what kind of Britain should come next.
The Guardian is not a neutral observer of that argument. It is, broadly speaking, the editorial voice of parts of the British establishment. What it chooses to say, and when, is rarely accidental. It tells us something about where power is actually moving inside the British state right now.
Within that shift in power, an opportunity presents itself for British Muslims not only to be part of the conversation but to help shape it.
The Fault Line
Broadly speaking, there are two factions operating within Britain’s security, political, and defence establishments. They do not divide along party lines but across different strategic visions, and the tension between them is becoming harder to ignore.
The Atlanticists have a simple premise: Britain’s security is structurally dependent on the US, and that dependency cannot be unwound without catastrophic cost.
For this faction, the culture wars that have gripped British politics for the best part of a decade are the ideological price of the relationship. To break with the rightward drift is to risk signalling to Washington that Britain is an unreliable ally, now in a world where Trump has demonstrated he will punish allies who fail to mirror his politics. That feels like an existential risk to those whose worldview depends on the transatlantic framework holding.
The second faction has reached a different conclusion. America under Trump is not a reliable partner and may never be again, regardless of who follows him. Former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, General Richard Shirreff has warned that the US has become “our enemy’s friend”. Europe may soon have to defend itself without the guarantees established since the Second World War.
However, Britain has to work toward achieving a pivot toward Europe, not just announcing. If the case for realignment rests on UK being a serious, stable partner, then a country running a low-grade culture war against a large part of its own population undercuts that case before it is even made. Community resilience is not simply a rhetorical cause. It is the foundation that makes the entire project credible.
The 2024 riots following the Southport killings, the pogrom in Belfast in early June 2026, and the Islamophobic attack in Edinburgh demonstrate what happens without this resilience. So did the spectacle of Britain lecturing the world on the rules-based international order while providing political cover for a genocide in Gaza: a contradiction that has not gone unnoticed, least of all by British Muslim communities whose support and civic participation this country needs.
Signs of Movement
The contradiction is now playing out inside British politics. Starmer’s resignation has opened a contest that is, at its core, an argument about which version of Britain the party wants to govern. Andy Burnham’s emergence as the only successor matters not for the man himself but for what he represents: his ascent would give the second faction a credible political face.
That transition complicates a story that has felt close to preordained up to now: a far-right Government in Britain was simply a matter of time. If that is no longer the likely outcome, the resulting space is not confined to one party or one leadership contest.
In a recent interview with The Independent, former Prime Minister John Major slammed Reform as a “ragbag” party with nothing positive to offer Britain. He accused it of scapegoating Muslims and migrants. He warned that Reform risked becoming a fully-fledged subsidiary of overseas billionaire money, as he demanded transparency over the £5 million donation which Reform leader Nigel Farage received from a foreign-based cryptocurrency billionaire. And Major was clear that Britain must rejoin the European Union’s Single Market.
A former Conservative Prime Minister saying this in a national newspaper is a marker of where the ground is shifting. None of this is conclusive, but the opening is broader than any single party’s chances of assuming power.
What Is To Be Done?
Whether the shift amounts to anything real depends largely on what British Muslims do with it, and on getting the terms of engagement right.
British Muslims have a median age of just 27, 13 years younger than the national average. Nearly half are under 25. A 2024 report estimated that they generate at least £70 billion per year for the UK economy. This is not a community on the margins but Britain’s future workforce, its next generation of professionals, voters, and leaders. Politicians who still treat Muslims as outsiders are, as LSE Associate Professor Miqdad Asaria put it, “reading from a script that is 20 years out of date”.
The terms of engagement should not be a bet placed on Labour, Andy Burnham, or on a particular party. That approach is fragile, and we have seen how quickly fortunes turn in the world of politics. The more durable approach is issue-led and cross-party, built around the fronts where the factional split is most obvious: national security, foreign policy, and civic resilience treated as national infrastructure rather than a side concern.
These are the arguments genuinely being fought inside British politics right now. They are the arguments British Muslim civic institutions have the standing to shape, for they are grounded in the lived experience of the cohesion the state now needs to demonstrate.
The tired and tested model of palatable interlocutors handpicked by the Government for acceptance has failed every time it has been tried. This moment needs a relationship built from the ground up, with civic institutions whose authority comes from the people they represent, not from access granted by those in power.
British Muslims are better placed than they have been in a generation to shape what comes next. The question is whether we recognize it, and act on it to shape the direction of our country for the good of everyone.
