Lawless Britain – the crisis that could put Farage in Number Ten
MATT GOODWIN
HERE are four things that happened in Britain in recent weeks.
A 24-year-old father was stabbed to death in an affluent part of London when a man tried to steal his watch.
An Albanian with 50 criminal convictions was allowed to stay in the country after a judge ruled his crimes were ‘not extreme enough’.
A pensioner who said he ‘just wanted to go home’ was beaten to death in Islington by three teenage girls who filmed the assault on their phone for entertainment.
And an asylum-seeker from Syria, Mohammed Wahid Mohammed, who was working illegally in Britain, repeatedly raped a 12-year-old girl in Birmingham.
What do all these shocking cases have in common?
They are all depressing symbols of what we might call Lawless Britain – a chaotic, dark and degraded society that looks more like the fictional Gotham City than a modern civilised nation.
A place where criminality is completely out of control, anti-social behaviour is normalised and accepted by our hapless, soft-on-crime elites, and the underlying social contract between the people and their rulers feels as if it’s about to collapse.
I’m clearly not the only person who thinks this way. Far from it.
While the ruling class scoffed at my recent suggestion that London ‘is over’, on account of its becoming a cesspit of criminality, immorality and uncontrolled immigration, polling just released by Survation shows that millions of British people feel exactly the same way as I do, not just about London but the country. The results really are staggering.
They point to a hardworking, law-abiding majority who are sick and tired of how a toxic cocktail of mass immigration, economic stagnation and incompetence in Westminster is ripping the heart and soul out of the country, tearing the social fabric apart, and leaving much of the country unrecognisable.
Astonishingly, or perhaps not so astonishingly if you happen to live outside the elite bubble in the real world, the pollsters found that roughly half of all British people now think Britain ‘is becoming a lawless country’.
Just think about that for a moment.
Not a fringe minority. Not an extremist fringe. One in every two people you see on the street think Britain is becoming ‘lawless’, which rockets to six in every ten Tory voters and three in four Reform voters.
‘The safety of the people,’ wrote the great Roman statesman Cicero, who tried to uphold the republic in the face of impending collapse, ‘shall be the highest law.’
But what happens when the state, and the politicians who run it, no longer appear interested in fulfilling their first duty by keeping their own people safe?
What happens when those people see not a safe society but one that appears to be breaking down, wrapped in a culture that’s no longer their own, in a country that’s fast becoming ungovernable?
And what happens when the people have had enough of watching the rampant law-breaking, the deterioration of their communities, the degradation of their nation and, even worse, the refusal of their elected officials to do anything about it?
The answer, warned Cicero, is that their society will collapse as citizens withdraw from the social contract and make it much easier for outsiders to exploit this internal weakness.
While this might sound dramatic, it’s worth looking at the latest statistics that reflect the grim, new reality of life in Lawless Britain —a country where everybody either has a story about being a victim of crime, or knows somebody who does.
Violent crime is up sharply. More than 2 million violent crimes were recorded last year, up from 634,000 a decade ago.
Knife crime is also up, with more than 50,000 offences recorded last year, while knife-related deaths are up 240 per cent in a decade.
Shoplifting, up 20 per cent in the last year, is at the highest level ever recorded. Rapes and sexual assaults have surged, up 300 per cent since 2012.
And our borders remain wide open, with the small boats a visible and powerful symbol of the impotence of the state and its inability to keep its own people safe.
This is why, as that new polling shows, large and overwhelming majorities of Brits have concluded their politicians have lost control and criminals are operating with impunity, free to inflict whatever nightmare they want.
More than 60 per cent of British people say violent crime, sexual offences and anti-social behaviour are ‘out of control’.
Nearly 70 per cent say the same about shoplifting, which appears to have become de facto legal, with videos of brazen thieves going viral most days.
The same share, nearly 70 per cent, say the same about drug offences, which is hardly a surprise given the oppressive smell of cannabis that hangs over the streets of most cities, itself a reminder of the state’s humiliating defeat in the War on Drugs.
Nearly three-quarters say the same about knife crime, which much like drugs has become another permanent feature of our national life, with 15-year-old Harvey Willgoose being the latest child to be stabbed to death in a society where child-on-child murder is now so rife people barely even notice the murders at all.
This is all before you get to the widespread public perception that the justice system in this country is not only incompetent but ‘two-tier’, deliberately rigged to be more lenient toward minorities and foreigners than the British majority.
How else can you explain why a mother with no previous criminal convictions such as Lucy Connolly was sent to prison for nearly three years for sharing a few inflammatory words on social media, while a migrant from Eritrea, who entered Britain illegally on a small boat and was put up in a taxpayer-funded hotel, and went on to sexually assault a girl with special needs, was sent to prison for 14 months?
Just as alarming as the rising tide of crime is the total collapse of public confidence and trust in the justice system, with many tax-paying, law-biding Brits now clearly feeling as though they’re living in the Wild West and are on their own.
Remarkably, not even one in five Brits say they have confidence in the UK government to deal with crime, while a big majority, close to six in ten, no longer have confidence in politicians to deal with this rapidly intensifying crisis.
This is how a society falls apart. Not through a ‘big bang’ but rather through the drip, drip, ebbing away of public support for a system for which citizens are paying to keep them safe but which shows remarkably little interest in doing so.
What are the political implications of all this?
As Milton Friedman said, only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real and radical change. It’s only during a moment of crisis that the politically impossible suddenly becomes the politically inevitable.
Which is why it is not the established parties addressing Lawless Britain but Nigel Farage and Reform UK, who are now moving to fill this enormous open goal in British politics.
In Westminster at the start of a six-week national campaign, Farage said he is putting all criminals on notice and will now lead ‘the toughest party on law and order this country has ever seen’.
Reform UK, he went on, will address Lawless Britain directly by building a string of Nightingale-style prisons within 18 months of taking power, like the hospitals that suddenly popped up during the covid pandemic.
A Reform-led government would also end all early release schemes for violent offenders, sex offenders, and those carrying knives, remove the most hardened and dangerous criminals to El Salvador, make further spaces available in UK prisons by deporting some 10,400 foreign criminals, deliver 30,000 more police officers within five years, ensure all shoplifters face arrest, end ‘two-tier’ justice, and scrap all ‘Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion’ initiatives in policing.
While the ruling class who have delivered all the crime, chaos, and carnage you see around you today are already groaning and moaning about all this, blabbering on about the costs, practicalities and civil liberties once again, I suspect, they will show themselves to be completely adrift from the people they have consistently let down.
What those people will hear as Reform takes its new campaign across the country will be a series of messages they’ve wanted to hear for a very long time.
‘Get tough on crime’. ‘Deport foreign criminals’. ‘Stop letting criminals out of prison’. ‘End woke policing’. ‘Abolish two-tier justice’.
The elites will hate it. London will hate it. Sir Sadiq Khan will hate it. Emily Maitlis will hate it. The Rest Is Politics will hate it. And all those other members of the morally righteous Luxury Belief Class who routinely advocate extreme policies, the costs of which they will never have to pay for themselves, will hate it.
But given what the latest polling shows, and given the current mood among millions of people out there who have always leaned much further to the right on crime than their hapless rulers in Westminster, I suspect Reform’s message will resonate.
It is now very clear Farage intends to go for power by running what we might call a ‘core vote campaign’, focusing heavily and perhaps only on issues that play well to his party’s strengths and on which there is widespread public agreement.
End mass immigration. Fix the borders. Lower the cost of living. And, now, get tough on crime. That is it. There is no need for Reform to complicate or over-think things.
The ruling class laughed when Nigel Farage started talking about the need to leave the European Union. They laughed when he started talking about the need to end mass uncontrolled immigration. Now they are laughing as he targets widespread public concern over rising crime. But you know what? Given the dire state of the country and the dark mood out there, I doubt they’ll be laughing for long.
Going hard on crime in a country that has gone soft on crime is a clever move by Farage and one that will only strengthen his revolt against a status-quo and a political establishment that have fundamentally failed to fulfil what Cicero talked about —their very first duty to protect and prioritise their own people.
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on July 22, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
This article (Lawless Britain – the crisis that could put Farage in Number Ten) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Matt Goodwin
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