Hardly a day passes without some news item out of Britain that underscores the depth of the crisis in that country.

Over the weekend, it was news that 1,500 migrants had crossed the English Channel illegally from France — in less than 72 hours. During a stretch of good weather, hundreds of people disembarked at migrant processing facilities in Dover on a daily basis, bringing the total number of Channel migrants this year to 38,450, well above the 36,816 who crossed during all of 2024.

The surge of illegal migrants came just as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government had been suggesting that the low number of crossings in recent weeks was thanks to government policy. Turns out it was just because of bad weather. “We see it repeated time and time again. When the winds blow and the waves pick up, we get few if any crossings. When conditions calm down, they surge across in large numbers,” said one maritime source.

The Starmer government had previously claimed that its “one in one out” agreement with France had been working. The scheme, which took effect in August, means illegal migrants who arrive on small boats can be detained and sent back to France in exchange for an equivalent number of migrants who apply for asylum legally. It’s the sort of plan you come up with when you want to be seen as doing something without actually doing anything.

But even on those terrible terms, the policy quickly became an embarrassment. In October, “one in one out” made headlines when an Iranian man who had been deported to France under the agreement was apprehended entering the UK again just days later. After he was deported a second time, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood claimed, outrageously, that it was evidence “the system is working.”

This kind of official response belies either astounding incompetence or barely-disguised malice. You would think that confronted with thousands of migrants illegally entering Britain from France every week, the government would rightly conclude that France is allowing migrants to cross the English Channel illegally en masse. You would think there would be repercussions for that. But instead, the British people get farcical statements from their political leaders about how the “one in one out” policy is working, even as the boats stream across the Channel.

Meanwhile, the consequences of unchecked migration and non-assimilation are playing out on the streets of increasingly dangerous British cities. Most of the migrants arriving in Britain are from places like Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalian — societies that have very different views of civic life and of civilization itself. Most of them are Muslim, and upon their arrival they are absorbed into one of Britain’s many growing unassimilated Muslim communities — in Birmingham, Bedford, and parts of London like Tower Hamlets. These are places that only bear a faint resemblance to what they were 20 years ago thanks to mass immigration.

It has become impossible not to notice the change. Last month in Birmingham (a city that’s now a third Muslim), local authorities announced that fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv would not be allowed to attend the teams’ Europa League match against Aston Villa. The official reason given was that police could not guarantee the safety of the Tel Aviv fans. That was true enough, but the full reason, as everyone knew, is that the city’s Muslim population is both antisemitic and violent, and if Jewish Tel Aviv fans showed up in numbers, they would be attacked by a Muslim mob. (As it happened, a few Jewish fans did show up to protest, and police herded them into a nearby steel-ringed basketball court that protesters referred to as a “Jew cage,” even as Muslim fans roamed around chanting, “death to the IDF,” “Allahu Akbar,” and “from the river to the sea.”)

On top of non-assimilation, there is the issue of migrant crime, which is often directed at white British women. Last month, a 19-year-old asylum-seeker from Sudan named Deng Chol Majek was convicted of murdering 27-year-old Rhiannon Skye Whyte, who worked at the migrant hotel where Majek lived. Majek followed Whyte from the hotel to a bus station, where he stabbed her 23 times with a screwdriver, 19 times in the head. Afterwards he went to buy beer and was later seen dancing with other asylum-seekers in the hotel parking lot.

Last week, a man named Wayne Broadhurst was walking his dog down the street in west London when he was randomly attacked and killed by an Afghan refugee wielding a large knife. The accused attacker, 22-year-old Safi Dawood, has also been charged with the attempted murder of his landlord and a 14-year-old boy.

Beyond the migrant crisis (but certainly related to it) there’s a growing sense in Britain that civil society itself is in freefall, that much that was once stable is now crumbling. Incidents of random violence, whether perpetrated by recent migrants or the unassimilated children or grandchildren of migrants, seem to occur daily. Last week a 19-year-old woman was found dead in the street in a Birmingham suburb. Her alleged killer is 41-year-old Mohammed Azim, a man who was previously convicted on three separate sexual assault-related charges in 2013 and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Why was he out on the streets? No one seems to know.

Then on Monday, a woman who had been attacked randomly at a bus stop in Birmingham on Friday died in the hospital from her injuries. The man arrested in the attack is 21-year-old Djeison Rafael, who was also charged with two separate counts of assault, possession of a bladed weapon, and assaulting a detention escort officer.

The cumulative effect of all this is a growing feeling among the majority indigenous English population that the government is destroying the country through mass immigration, legal and illegal, and a policy of pandering to the unassimilated Muslim minority. The Starmer government is locked into a Soviet ideological framework, unable politically to alienate its Muslim base and unable to enact reforms that might save the country. Britain’s political leaders are operating under conditions of fear and duress, unable to manage or even name the crisis now engulfing them, and losing control of the country day by day in real time. What this portends is widespread civil conflict.

In the meantime, we are watching a once-great nation — our mother nation, in fact — collapse into ruin. It is harrowing and sad to witness. It should also, for us Americans, be a cautionary tale.

A 100-year-old British veteran of World War II appeared on a morning news program Friday, proudly wearing his war medals. The man, Alec Penstone, was 15 years old when World War II broke out in 1939. He volunteered as a messenger during the Blitz of London, pulled dead bodies out of bombed buildings, and joined the Navy as soon as he was old enough. He promised his father, a World War I veteran who witnessed the horrors of trench warfare, he wouldn’t join the Army. Penstone served aboard submarines and then an escort aircraft carrier that played a vital role in the D-Day landings, sweeping for mines and search for German U-Boats. He’s one of Britain’s last heroes of that war.

Asked by the flippant, grinning hosts of the morning show what his message was to the British public ahead of Remembrance Day on November 11, Penstone said this: “My message is, I can see in my mind’s eye those rows and rows of white stones of our friends and everybody else that gave their lives — for what? Our country today, no I’m sorry, the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result that it is now. What we fought for was our freedom, we find now it’s a darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it.”

https://twitter.com/TPointUK/status/1986767495798182369?s=20

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.