In late 2023, after he had served as former prime minister Boris Johnson’s chief adviser in Downing Street, I came across Dominic Cummings using a phrase almost previously unheard of in British politics: “the deep state.”
It ought not to have surprised me. Cummings, as well as being one of the most powerful chief advisers to a prime minister in UK history, was the architect of the successful Leave campaign that catastrophically extracted the UK from the European Union. Vague notions of “the people” vs “elites” was the bread and butter of the Leave campaign, and yet the phrase “deep state” still felt particularly ominous coming out of the mouth of someone as close to power and policy as Cummings. I, and many other supporters of the UK remaining in the EU, had warned that the triumph of Brexit, and its overtly illiberal narratives and imagery, would lead only to the radicalization of the right. But this invocation of the deep state by Cummings, and his conviction of its existence and his determination to destroy it, opened my eyes up to the growing reality of that radicalization.
The idea of a clandestine, anti-democratic bureaucracy pulling strings behind the scenes has its roots in Turkey and in post-communist Europe, where the legacy of secret police and opaque party networks makes the concept plausible. In the United States, it was borrowed from Hungary’s illiberal democrat strongman Viktor Orbán and mainstreamed by Donald Trump and his allies. In the UK, however—with no equivalent history of lustration or entrenched shadow bureaucracy—it was particularly absurd. And yet, here was the most powerful (it should be said, unelected) man in Johnson’s government openly borrowing the vocabulary of American and European illiberals—some of the most radical political forces at work today.
Cummings’s alleged conviction of “deep state” conspiracism was a tiny red flashing light of what is now unfolding in the UK. A politics that was once confined to fringe movements has become not just mainstream but dominant. In 2025, Reform UK—the party led by Nigel Farage, the veteran Brexit campaigner, former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader and perennial opportunist—is outpolling Labour, the governing party. Dozens of Conservative Party MPs, councillors, and even Members of the Scottish Parliament have defected to Reform, sold by its triumphant trajectory and overtly illiberal agenda. Thus, there is no time to write this phenomenon off. Rather, we need to try and understand this rising illiberalism in all its complexity, beginning with what I call its “thin” nature.
We need to try and understand this rising illiberalism in all its complexity, beginning with what I call its “thin” nature.
Vignettes of a Crisis
Far-right activists are marching in unprecedented numbers in Britain: in London last month, more than 100,000 people joined what organizers hailed as the largest anti-migrant protest in British history, led in part by Tommy Robinson (born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), the former football hooligan who founded the English Defence League (EDL) and has since become a “counter-jihad” figurehead.
Alongside this mobilization is a frenzied nationwide campaign to fly the English flag, consciously modelled on America’s MAGA aesthetics of ultranationalist loyalty and belonging. In Scotland, my home, faced as we have been for centuries with loyalists and their aesthetics, we crudely call this phenomenon “flag shagging.” But it is no laughing matter.
The UK is reckoning with what I have termed thin illiberalism: the widespread uptake of exclusionary, conspiratorial, and authoritarian rhetoric, sloganeering and imagery across the political spectrum. This is not yet “thick” illiberalism.
The UK is reckoning with what I have termed thin illiberalism: the widespread uptake of exclusionary, conspiratorial, and authoritarian rhetoric, sloganeering and imagery across the political spectrum. This is not yet “thick” illiberalism of the Hungarian or Russian or, alas, American variety, where state institutions are systematically captured and liberal democracy hollowed out. Instead, it is discursive—a narrowing of the imagination and of permissible political speech. The slogans are familiar: “stop the boats,” “take back control,” “protect our borders,” “the people versus the elites.” The resonance is undeniable, and the Brexit referendum was the crucible.
Sold as a vague populistic rebellion against distant European elites and conflated with immigration to the UK from the rest of the world, it quickly hardened into a politics defined by resentment, xenophobia, Islamophobia and a performative siege mentality.
The assassination of pro-immigration Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 was an early flash of the violence latent in this rhetoric: her killer, a veteran far-right activist, shouted several slogans about “British independence”—one of the key themes of the leave campaign—as he shot and stabbed the young parliamentarian.
Nearly a decade later, the Southport riots of 2024 revealed the same dynamic in amplified form. The riots occurred after a disturbed teenager tragically murdered three children at a dance studio. Despite there being no motive for his attacks, misinformation about the identity of the assailant spread rapidly on far-right Telegram channels and was amplified by Elon Musk on his social media platform (and, often, vehicle for his personal ideology) X (formerly Twitter). The false claim (quelle surprise!) was that it had been a Muslim immigrant.
The result was a week of rioting across English towns, with “missiles” thrown at mosques, fires started and looting rampant, not to mention the targeting of refugee housing across the country by right-wing mobs intent on smashing windows, gaining access, and setting fire to the facilities.
Thin illiberalism works like this. A single incident—a stabbing, a boat crossing, or some tabloid revelation about an asylum hotel—is narrativized as evidence of national collapse.
Thin illiberalism works like this. A single incident—a stabbing, a boat crossing, or some tabloid revelation about an asylum hotel—is narrativized as evidence of national collapse. Hashtags and slogans are repeated until they are common sense among vast swathes of people. Migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are collapsed into one menacing mass—with Islam, the bête noire of global illiberalism, often front and center. Violence often follows, not despite the language but because of it.
Reform UK has made “Stop the Boats” its rallying cry, echoing the increasingly illiberal Conservative government that preceded the current Labour government, as well as Donald Trump across the Atlantic. Similar to how “build the wall” functions in the latter case, the slogan is not about policy detail but about emotional architecture: fear of invasion, betrayal by elites, the promise of restored sovereignty.
The Labour Party under Prime Minister Keir Starmer has chosen not to challenge this language but to mimic it. Starmer himself declared that Britain had become an “island of strangers.” Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader and official Leader of the Opposition, has framed immigration as an existential question for Britain’s cultural survival.
The point is not that Britain is on the verge of dictatorship. Rather, it is that the lexicon of illiberalism has become the lingua franca of politics. What was once extreme is now routine. When the boats, the refugees, the migrants and the Muslims become the only thing anyone talks about, liberal democracy itself is besieged. Thus, to fully grasp what is happening in Britain, we need to clarify what thin illiberalism means.
The point is not that Britain is on the verge of dictatorship. Rather, it is that the lexicon of illiberalism has become the lingua franca of politics.
Illiberalism: Thick and Thin
I borrow part of the terminology from International Studies scholar Seth D. Kaplan, who distinguishes between “thick” and “thin” moral orders. In Kaplan’s account, thick orders are deeply rooted and coherent; thin ones are fragmentary, partial, and unstable. I adapt this distinction to illiberal politics.
Thick illiberalism is what we see in Hungary under Viktor Orbán or in Donald Trump’s United States today: a deliberate project to capture state institutions, rewrite constitutions, and embed a majoritarian ethnonationalist worldview in law. It is structured, programmatic, and self-conscious.
Thick illiberalism is a deliberate project to capture state institutions, rewrite constitutions, and embed a majoritarian ethnonationalist worldview in law. Thin illiberalism, by contrast, is discursive. It does not set out to dismantle liberal democracy outright. Instead, it corrodes it through vocabulary.
Thin illiberalism, by contrast, is discursive. It does not set out to dismantle liberal democracy outright. Instead, it corrodes it through vocabulary—through the ceaseless repetition of slogans and frames that cast migrants as invaders, elites as traitors, and sovereignty as perpetually under threat. Thin illiberalism narrows the political imagination without yet dismantling the machinery of democracy.
The media and communications scholar Michał Krzyżanowski describes this process of normalization: “[F]ar-right ideologies eventually become accepted as ‘normal’ or treated as…the procedural or institutional and public-policy mainstream.” The political theorist Jan-Werner Müller makes a similar warning: “When politicians who are seen as mainstream treat an extremist far-right party as normal, public opinion will tend to follow.”
Thin illiberalism is the mechanism of this process as it applies to the modern assault on liberal democracies from the right. It does not need to seize power directly. It seeps into mainstream speech until it shapes the common sense of politics.
And yet thin illiberalism does not remain thin. Once entrenched, it provides the scaffolding for thick illiberalism.
And yet thin illiberalism does not remain thin. Once entrenched, it provides the scaffolding for thick illiberalism. Slogans like “Stop the Boats” may begin as discursive weapons, but they legitimize policies that would have once been unthinkable: withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, indefinite detention in military camps, mass deportations. As we have seen in the United States, where MAGA first came for the rhetoric, so to speak, the thin is a pathway to the thick.
This is why Britain is such an instructive case. Unlike Hungary or Poland, it has no recent history of authoritarian rule or thick nationalist ideology. Its illiberalism is improvisational, memetic, and parasitic on borrowed ideas. But precisely because it is thin, it is also contagious. From Brexit’s “Take Back Control” to Reform’s “Stop the Boats,” Britain shows how quickly discursive frames can harden into common sense—and how easily common sense can shade into coercion.
What is particularly remarkable is not the extremism of illiberalism in the UK but the mainstream’s mimicry of its extremism. Thin illiberalism thrives in this mimicry because it seizes not just policy debates but cultural concepts. The case of “DEI” in the United States—diversity, equity, and inclusion—is instructive. Once an innocuous bureaucratic acronym, it has been seized by MAGA and transformed into a symbol of weakness, corruption, and elite overreach.
What is particularly remarkable is not the extremism of illiberalism in the UK but the mainstream’s mimicry of its extremism.
Britain’s border serves the same role. “Stop the Boats” functions less as immigration policy than as an emblem of civilization under siege. In both contexts, what begins as technocratic language is recast as a totem in a cultural battle. The illiberal trick here is majoritarian: to present the numerical majority as the oppressed, and minorities or migrants as pampered overlords benefitting at their expense. Thin illiberalism thus weaponizes the vocabulary of fairness, turning inclusion into exclusion and security into siege. It is a politics that insists the majority is always on the brink of dispossession—and that only drastic, illiberal measures can forestall and reverse the catastrophe.
Thin illiberalism is never confined within borders. It is reflexive, feeding on transatlantic and trans-European exchange, memes, and mutual reinforcement.
Thin illiberalism is never confined within borders. It is reflexive, feeding on transatlantic and trans-European exchange, memes, and mutual reinforcement. The US under Trump has become the hegemon of this process: the pole of global illiberalism to which movements abroad now consciously orient themselves. Even centrists must now appease Trump’s illiberal agenda, for fear of economic consequences and falling out of favor of the world’s most powerful man, with his now world-famous thin skin and proclivity to harbor petty grievances.
Transatlantic Illiberalism
When Trump addressed the UN in September, his speech was invariably reported as “rambling” and “incoherent”; however, while it was both of those things, it had a chilling ideological agenda—to galvanize illiberalism outside the United States. In the speech, Trump called for countries to close their borders and expel foreigners, accused the UN of leading a “globalist migration agenda,” and told national leaders that the world body was “funding an assault on your countries.”
“It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders,” the US president said, appealing to European leaders, in the words of Andrew Roth in the Guardian, to embrace for “blood and soil nationalism.” But he singled out the UK, saying “I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been changed, it’s been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law. But you are in a different country, you can’t do that.” The “terrible mayor” referenced by Trump is of course Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, who has for many years been an object of hatred for global illiberal right. Whether Trump literally believes the absurd idea that Khan is introducing “Sharia law” in London cannot be known, but it doesn’t matter.
Trump was issuing an illiberal rallying cry, a message crafted to shore up the Islamophobic prejudices of the American right by presenting Britain as the cautionary tale—proof that liberal democracy does not lead to freedom but to surrender to foreign cultures. It was also a signal of Trump’s support for the illiberal right pushing the very same conspiracy theories that have so convinced the American MAGA right that the specter of “Sharia law” haunts the UK.
Barely a week before Trump’s speech, Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally took place in London, becoming the largest far-right gathering in UK history. At the march, Robinson declared: “Britain has finally awoken…this is never going away.” He claimed that British courts had ruled that the rights of undocumented migrants supersede those of the “local community.” “They told the world that Somalians, Afghanis, Pakistanis, all of them, their rights supersede yours—the British public, the people that built this nation.”
He accompanied these remarks with a video reel: images of convicted members of a so-called Muslim grooming gang, followed by a clip of a white woman crying. The message was blunt—the courts, the government, and liberal democracy itself had abandoned the British majority. Elon Musk, speaking to the crowd by video link, reinforced the message. “I think there’s something beautiful about being British,” he said, “and what I see happening here is a destruction of Britain, initially a slow erosion but rapidly increasing erosion of Britain with massive uncontrolled migration.” He accused the government of failing in its most basic duty: “A failure by the government to protect innocent people including children who are getting gang raped. It’s unreal the government has failed in its duty to protect its citizens, which is a fundamental duty of government.”
Later in his speech, Musk cast the crisis in apocalyptic terms: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth, I think.” He then called for the protesters to rise up and dissolve the British parliament and overthrow the government. The feedback loop is hardly subtle.
As Daniel Boffey wrote in the Guardian, the London rally was “the lid lifted on a toxic transatlantic soup”—a movement rooted in English far-right street politics but sustained by validation, money, and narratives imported from across the Atlantic. The march, he noted, was as much about the influence of Musk and Trump as it was about any real local grievances.
In this reflexive exchange, thin illiberalism in Britain takes its cues from America’s thickening illiberal order—and in turn, Britain is held up by MAGA ideologues as the dystopian warning of what awaits if the United States fails to follow Trump’s righteous path.
Reform UK’s “Thickening” Illiberalism
Reform UK is the clearest expression of the tendency of thin illiberalism to attempt to thicken. Its policy platform, unveiled in 2025, moves far beyond rhetoric. Branded “Operation Restoring Justice,” the program promises a “five-year emergency plan to track down, detain and deport all illegal migrants in the United Kingdom.” Farage has described the small boats crisis as a “growing threat to our national security” and a “genuine threat to public order.”
The scale is staggering: Reform claims it could deport 600,000 asylum seekers in its first parliament. To achieve this, it would create a new “UK Deportation Command,” a British version of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), empowered to detain up to 24,000 people at a time in repurposed military bases. Migrants would be offered £2,500 to board deportation flights to their country of origin or to “third countries” such as Rwanda and Albania. And crucially, Reform would seek agreements with regimes few liberals would consider partners, from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the clerical rulers of Iran, to ensure deportees could be returned.
Farage has paired this with a promise to abolish “indefinite leave to remain”—a right long available to those who have lived and worked legally in Britain for five years. “These people,” he said, “tend to be young, tend to be low-skilled…and they are going to be a huge burden on the state. Britain is not the world’s food bank.” He has claimed the policy would save hundreds of billions of pounds; despite the think-tank numbers he cites being formally withdrawn as unreliable.
This is where thin illiberalism poisonously thickens. The slogans of “Stop the Boats” and “Take Back Control” translate into institutional programs of detention, deportation, and majoritarian disenfranchisement. The inspiration is obvious. Farage himself has expressed admiration for Trump’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp. More than 2,000 migrants are held there, with expansion plans for thousands more. Relatedly, the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they were jailed in the sprawling CECOT super-prison without trial. Reform’s plans echo this architecture not just of the camps, deportations, detention but also of legal withdrawal.
This is where thin illiberalism poisonously thickens. Slogans translate into institutional programs of detention, deportation, and majoritarian disenfranchisement.
Reform’s obsession, along with (as of late) the mainstream Conservative Party, is for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which is cast as the last European mechanism that holds Britannia under its stranglehold. The picture that emerges is stark.
Keeping the Faith
These are not isolated shocks, but the thickening of a politics born in the crucible of Brexit—a politics that redefined not just Britain’s relationship to Europe but its relationship to itself. The growth of Reform UK, and the astonishing scale of far-right street mobilization, are the outcomes of this, as well as the ironic globalization and reflexivity of illiberalism. But they are also the outcomes of collaboration and appeasement, as we have seen above. When the Prime Minister describes Britain as an “island of strangers,” he does not co-opt Reform’s vision; he validates it. As history has shown, if a voter base convinced by illiberal narratives has the option to choose between the real deal or a phony populist like Keir Starmer, they’ll choose the former every time.
His attempts to “solve” the problem of small boat arrivals in the UK, along with the controversy of so-called “immigrant hotels,” can only fail because the problems barely exist—or they exist on radically different terms than those suggested by Reform and the ever-more radically right tabloid media.
Starmer is merely shadow boxing against a spectre conjured and entirely framed by Reform and the far-right.
The boats, the migrants, the hotels—all these things are designed to radicalize the discourse, while serving as a Trojan horse for the illiberal culmination of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech: the end of the UK’s postwar liberal migration system and the dismantling of multiculturalism. How does Starmer respond? He unveils widely unpopular plans for digital ID cards, whose sole purpose is to appease far-right lies about “illegal immigrants.”
The illiberal fringe has been allowed to become mainstream because the guardians of liberal democracy surrendered the field.
The illiberal fringe has been allowed to become mainstream because the guardians of liberal democracy surrendered the field. Britain now stands on the edge of institutionalizing illiberalism, of embedding in law and bureaucracy a worldview that treats migrants, refugees, and minorities as existential threats to national survival.
The challenge, then, is not rhetorical but practical. Liberal democracy cannot survive by borrowing its opponents’ language. It must reaffirm itself in substance. That means rejecting the securitization of migration, refusing to sacrifice multiculturalism at the altar of majoritarian resentment, and rebuilding trust in the institutions of law and human rights that illiberals seek to destroy.
Those committed to liberal democracy must hold fast to the conviction that open societies, multicultural coexistence, and the rule of law are worth defending —not just in words but in deeds.
When Saint Athanasius stood against the heresy of Arianism in the fourth century, he was told the world was against him. His reply was simple: “They might have the churches, but we have the faith.” The same spirit is required now. Illiberals may command the rallies, the slogans, and even the polls. But those committed to liberal democracy must hold fast to the conviction that open societies, multicultural coexistence, and the rule of law are worth defending —not just in words but in deeds.
Sam Hamad is a historian and writer specializing in 20th-century fascism, the political history of illiberalism, and the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. He is currently a senior news editor and writer for The New Arab. In addition to The New Arab, his writing has appeared in The Daily Beast, TRT World, and the International Business Times. He has also contributed essays and entries to several books and journals.
Image using “Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends NATO Summit (cropped),” by Number 10 licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic; “Material Culture Left by the Unite the Kingdom Rally 2025 (08),” by Doyle of London licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; “Nigel Farage (54349556169),” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic; “Tommy Robinson (2),” by Shayan Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
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