There are moments in the life of a nation when everything changes − not with a bang, not even with a conscious decision, but with a quiet, creeping loss of confidence so profound that a people start to forget who they are.
Britain, I believe, is living through such a moment.
For decades, the institutions that once embodied our nation − Parliament, the civil service, the courts, the police, the BBC, universities, schools, corporate executives, the Church, museums − have drifted away from the public they exist to serve.
Our country is now in the grip of a new ruling class which sees itself not as custodians of a living nation but as supervisors of a global humanitarian project that has no borders, no limits and no loyalty to the people whose taxes fund their salaries.
Its defining ideology is ‘suicidal empathy’ – a deeply twisted worldview that is destroying our country in the name of showing empathy to others.
Suicidal empathy is when admirable instincts, such as compassion, are turned to favour outsiders over your own people. It is a belief that moral worth is measured not by defending your country but by demonstrating infinite generosity to the rest of the world, even when this damages your nation and threatens your survival.
The result is a government without control… borders without meaning… public services without capacity… leaders without courage… and a country without confidence.
Within just one generation, Britain will no longer be Britain. The country our ancestors built will be replaced by something else.
But Britain is not being conquered or invaded. Worse: it is being abandoned by the very people who were meant to protect it – a ruling class and their cheerleaders such as Sir Keir Starmer, London mayor Sadiq Khan, Tony Blair, podcasters Emily Maitlis and Alastair Campbell etc.
Britain is not being conquered or invaded. Worse: it is being abandoned by the very people who were meant to protect it – a ruling class and their cheerleaders such as Sir Keir Starmer
What we are witnessing is not just a small adjustment, a temporary shift, or the gentle evolution of a nation. It is something far more dramatic, writes Matt Goodwin
As the historian and philosopher Arnold J. Toynbee said: ‘Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder.’
Across Britain – in cities, towns, villages and suburbs − many people are now experiencing the same private, unspoken sense of shock. You walk down a street you once knew but no longer recognise. You visit the place where you were born yet feel like a stranger. You hear languages that are not your own. You see customs and cultures you do not share.
The country of your childhood seems to exist only in old films, documentaries, fading books and nostalgia reels on social media.
The fact is that a nation is bound by a shared identity, history, culture and way of life. It is a community filled with your relatives, ancestors and neighbours, who you know and trust, and whose graves, stories and memories lay around you.
Yet a survey last year by the pollsters More In Common found that nearly half of Britons feel ‘like a stranger in my own country’.
Significantly, many from minority backgrounds experience this profound sense of loss just as strongly. Yet whenever anyone articulates this creeping sense of dispossession, they are shamed, silenced or mocked by the elites who are imposing these changes on them.
What we are witnessing is not just a small adjustment, a temporary shift, or the gentle evolution of a nation. It is something far more dramatic and potentially permanent.
It is the deliberate and sustained transformation of the country. Indeed, nations do not remain the same if the people who shaped them, built them and embody them collapse into minority status.
According to my analysis, by the year 2100, the share of the population made up of White Britons without immigrant parents (roughly 95 per cent of the country in the 1990s) will collapse to 33 per cent.
The proportion of people who are foreign-born or the immediate descendants of foreign-born parents will rise from 19 per cent to more than 60 per cent.
Muslims will go from representing about one in every 17 people in Britain to one in every four – and one in every three among the young.
This will all happen within the lifetime of a child born today – in the next 74 years. When that person is in their 30s, by 2063, the White British will no longer be a majority in the country.
By then, the hushed debates that are already starting – about segregated Muslim areas, blasphemy laws, the rise of Islamic sectarianism in politics, Pakistani Muslim rape gangs, the spread of antisemitism and the capacity of Islam to integrate into the Western nations − will all seem quaint by comparison. Already, the White British are in a minority in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, Luton, Slough and Watford. Soon, if it is not already, they will slide into minority status in Blackburn, Bradford, Cambridge, Coventry, Crawley, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Oxford, Peterborough, Reading, Sandwell and Wolverhampton. Then, in Hertsmere, Bedford, Bexley, Oldham, Preston, Pendle, Thurrock, Derby, Havering and Bromley, among many more.
Nothing reveals the scale and speed of Britain’s transformation more honestly than what is happening in schools. Once, names such as Thomas, Jack, Oliver and Noah dominated.
By 2023, Muhammad – in the top ten since 2016 – had replaced Noah as the most popular boy’s name in the country. Another new entry in 2024 was Yahya, the name of the Hamas leader who oversaw the worst mass murder of Jews since World War II.
The speed of change is staggering. Between 2001 and 2021, the share of foreign-born residents in Britain soared to 17 per cent.
Today, it is closer to 20 per cent. In other words, nearly one in five people now living in Britain − roughly 13 million − were not born in this country.
Official figures, too, show that nearly 350,000 foreign-born families will benefit from extra welfare handouts, with nearly 200,000 coming from only ten countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Somalia, India, Ghana, Afghanistan and Iraq. More than five million people in this country now prefer to speak a language other than English.
A street sign with English and Urdu. In 2025, the NHS reported that one in ten patients do not have ‘functional English language skills’, with most speaking Urdu or Bengali
A welcome sign in 33 different languages at St. Pauls Nursery School and Children’s Centre, Bristol in 2013
In 2025, the NHS reported that one in ten patients do not have ‘functional English language skills’, with most speaking Urdu or Bengali. Translation leaflets had to be sent out in 50 languages with the 2021 census.
You do not need to be a demographer to see where this leads.
Do you want the political, social and religious cultures of Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Albania and Iraq to be imported into Britain at scale?
These are societies that are often marked by deep ethnic and religious divisions, low trust in institutions and completely different ideas about justice, family, sexuality and women’s rights.
Albanians, who make up roughly one in ten foreign prisoners, have the highest arrest rate of any nationality in Britain − 210 for every 1,000 of their people.
They are followed by Afghans (a rate of 107), Iraqis (93), Algerians (73), Moroccans (70) and Somalis (65). The rate among British people is 12 for every 1,000. North Africans are convicted of sexual assault at around seven times the rate of British people.
Yet anyone who questions such change is dismissed as paranoid, exaggerating or scaremongering. But there are good reasons why all people living here should feel deeply concerned. The ethnic and culture core of a nation is what holds it in place, like an anchor.
It is what provides a sense of shared identity, culture, history, values and way of life. Once this anchor gives way, there is nothing to hold the nation in place.
There is a reason why more diverse nations are also less trusting, more divided and fragmented: because they do not have this unifying core.
You can already see the warning signs. The eruption of antisemitic protests. The rise of ‘homegrown’ Islamist terrorists. State institutions such as West Midlands Police appearing to prioritise Islamist thugs when telling travelling football fans from Israel they are not welcome in Birmingham.
Nobody ever voted for Britain to be transformed in this way. Nobody was ever asked if they wanted it.
So how did Britain arrive at this point?
Whether on the Left or the Right, Labour or Tory, politicians have surrendered to the forces now transforming Britain – or, even worse, are actively encouraging them.
It is easy to focus on headline issues like soaring legal immigration or the spiralling number of illegal migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. But these are symptoms, not the disease. The real cause of our national unravelling is a new ruling class that no longer believes in the nation, no longer values its historic majority and no longer really cares about the continuity of the country and its people.
It is using its power to remake Britain around its deranged worldview of suicidal empathy.
This ruling elite’s loyalties lie not with Britain but with a global class of other elites. As Sir Keir Starmer admitted in 2023, he prefers Davos to Westminster.
Time and time again, the hard-working, law-abiding majority is expected to pay the financial, cultural and social costs of these decisions.
For example, the warped mindset behind our spiralling welfare bill which is projected to exceed £400billion a year by 2030.
Nearly 8.5million people rely on Universal Credit welfare, and taxpayers are contributing £10billion every year to provide welfare to more than 1.2million foreign nationals.
Suicidal empathy is seen with housing policy, as taxpayers spend an estimated £6billion a year subsidising social housing for foreign-born households, and also with foreign policy, such as the plan to hand tens of billions of pounds to the government of Mauritius for a lease on the Chagos Islands.
And it is unmistakable in the Net Zero agenda which has left Britain with the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world and a national debt costing more than £100billion a year in payments just to service the interest on this debt.
Suicidal empathy is found, too, in the justice system, where the New Elite’s soft-on-crime policies allow serious offenders to serve only 40 per cent of their sentences, in the elevation of transgender ideology above basic biological reality and in the erosion of free speech and individual liberty.
Once these core beliefs have seeped into schools, universities, the media, museums, galleries and the creative industries, the country begins to systematically turn against the majority.
If one day marks the beginning of the project to demographically replace Britain’s historic majority, it was the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour government on May 1, 1997. It was the start of an unprecedented experiment: mass uncontrolled immigration. This policy did not divide Left and Right; it united them in the belief that to unleash mass immigration – no matter the consequences – is ‘compassion’.
In each year after 1997, Britain experienced more immigration than during the combined 1,500 years between the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth century and the end of World War II.
From 2018 to 2025, nearly 200,000 illegal migrants crossed the Channel in small boats – enough to fill a city the size of York and more than the combined number serving in the Army, the Navy and the RAF.
Add the estimated 700,000 to 900,000 illegal migrants already in the country and a further 180,000 illegal migrants forecast to cross the Channel before the next general election, and Britain could soon have 1.3million illegal migrants – a population larger than that of Birmingham.
Despite mass immigration being one of his most consequential legacies, Blair said almost nothing about it after leaving office.
In a 700-page autobiography, he devoted barely a couple of pages to the subject, brushing off public concern as ‘emotional’.
Successive Conservative governments promised change – but delivered continuity.
The financial cost of all this has been colossal. In 2024, the Office for Budget Responsibility revealed that each low-wage migrant worker is a net fiscal drain on the country from the moment they arrive. By the time they reach the age of 81, each one will cost the taxpayer £465,000.
So, what must be done? What is now unfolding in Britain is what Donald Trump has warned that Europe faces: ‘civilisational erasure’ – the looming disappearance of special and unique identity, culture and people.
We stand at a historic crossroads that our ancestors never imagined. Before this decade ends, we will either reclaim our future or we will lose it.
For the past 30 years, it has not mattered who occupied No 10 Downing Street.
Whether Labour or Tory, a succession of governments have imposed a single, suffocating project on the rest of the country with the State growing ever larger: Big Welfare, Big Debt, Big Tax, Big Spending, Big Immigration, Big Net Zero, Big Censorship − big on everything except the virtues that once made Britain bloom: individual freedom, hard work, entrepreneurship, free speech, aspiration, controlled borders, stability and manageable change.
The alternatives that are required are not extreme. They are the minimum for national continuity. We must end Britain’s dependence on low-wage, low-skill migration from outside Europe – a model that depresses wages, undercuts British workers, puts a strain on housing and reshapes the country around people who do not share our culture.We must leave the European Convention on Human Rights and repeal the Human Rights Act.
We must overturn two-tier multiculturalism and replace it with a far more assertive state policy of assimilation. Britain cannot continue to tell newcomers they should retain their distinctive identities and cultures while telling the historic majority to jettison theirs.
What about bringing millions of British-born, economically-inactive people back into work? Or creating serious incentives for British families to have more children? We could stop spending billions of pounds on welfare support for people who are not British and, instead, plough this money into frontline public services for the British people.
Other countries grasp the importance of these things.
Above all, the underlying ideology of the ruling class and institutions that imposed this demographic revolution has to be overhauled. Otherwise, we will fail in our promise to our ancestors to pass on the country that we know and love.
The hour is late but not too late. Britain is not yet dead but it is in mortal danger.
If it is to be saved from suicide, it must be now.
Extracted from Suicide Of A Nation by Matt Goodwin, to be published on Monday by Northstar at £12.99 ©2026 Matt Goodwin.