The Oxford definition of grievance , “a real or imagined cause for resentment,” captures a tragic symmetry in British public life today. What began as a Muslim sense of grievance against state power (foreign policy, Prevent, Trojan Horse, victim mentality, “British but not accepted as British” etc.), and social prejudice has been reflected back by sections of the working-class, who now feel dispossessed in their own country. The politics of grievance has become a mirror in which both sides see their own wounded pride staring back. In this critical opinion piece, I want to share how this has become a mirror. If we can see the perspective in their greater whole, we can hopefully forge a way forward. There are genuine challenges across all communities, and the best way to tackling this is first recognising the roots of the challenges, being realistic about where we are and then finding common ground to address the challenges. What follows in this article is not a claim about motives or moral equivalence, but an analysis of recurring patterns in political psychology and public discourse.
Xenophobia has long shaped the social and political landscape of Britain
Though the word xenophobia” itself is modern, the fear or hostility toward outsiders has deep historical roots, evolving with Britain’s shifting sense of identity, empire, and decline. Across the centuries, while different groups have filled the role of the “stranger,” the emotional structure of the sentiment (fear of loss, resentment of change, and a longing for purity or control) has remained constant.
In medieval times, xenophobia took religious and occupational forms rather than racial ones. After the Norman Conquest (1066) resentment brewed between the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon population and the French-speaking Norman ruling class. During the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381, Flemish merchants in London were hunted down and killed. They were accused of taking English jobs and corrupting local morals. Lombards, from Lombardy in Northern Italy, who served as moneylenders because Christians in England were forbidden to charge interest, faced hostility through being heavily taxed. The expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 marked one of the earliest and starkest examples of institutionalised xenophobia, driven by superstition and economic jealousy. The Great Fire of London in 1666 was blamed on French and Dutch Londoners. “Foreigners” were never just outsiders; they were moral threats and convenient scapegoats in times of unrest.
With industrialisation and empire, xenophobia became entangled with class and economic anxiety. The Irish, arriving in big numbers during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s, were sometimes vilified as violent and inferior, blamed for crime and undercutting wages. Punch cartoons often portrayed them as ape-like and subhuman. Protestant elites blamed Irish Catholics for moral decay and political instability, turning class resentment into ethnic hostility.
Anti-Catholicism remained a stubborn feature of British life well into the Victorian age, expressing a suspicion that Catholic loyalties lay with Rome rather than Britain. Other groups like Chinese sailors, African and Asian “lascars,” and later Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, were both needed and resented. The Aliens Act of 1905, modern Britain’s first immigration law, was passed largely in response to anti-Jewish agitation.
In the 20th century xenophobia transformed into a racialised phenomenon. The end of empire brought new citizens from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa to a country still haunted by imperial hierarchy. Invited to rebuild post-war Britain, these migrants met hostility in housing, employment, and policing. The Notting Hill and Nottingham riots of 1958, and later the rise of the National Front, revealed a deep unease with multiculturalism. Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 captured elite as well as popular anxiety: the fear that immigration would dissolve the British national identity. In this period, xenophobia fused with nostalgia: a longing for a whiter, simpler, and more certain Britain that never truly existed.
By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the “outsider” had changed again. The “Rushdie Affair” in 1989 saw the emergence of “Muslim” as Britain’s new xenophobic frontier: the “Muslim” as cultural, not just ethnic, “Other.” After 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings, that anxiety hardened into suspicion and surveillance, shaping both public policy and popular imagination. Later, EU enlargement redirected resentment toward Eastern European workers (Poles, Romanians) whose mobility symbolised a loss of economic control. The 2016 Brexit referendum channelled all of these impulses into one phrase: “take back control.” Beneath the constitutional debate lay the same emotion that had animated centuries of grievance: the fear that the country was no longer one’s own.
What is striking across these historical episodes is not simply hostility toward foreigners but the emotional continuity of xenophobia in Britain. Its objects change, Jews, Irish, West Indians, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Muslims, Eastern Europeans, but its function endures. It surfaces whenever social or economic disruption unsettles a collective sense of belonging. It draws strength from the belief that elites have betrayed “the real people,” that tolerance and celebration of “Other” is weakness, and that national identity is something fragile, forever under siege.
Working-class right grievance
Working-class right grievance in the UK has deep roots in both economic and cultural dislocation. The decline of industry from the 1980s (the closure of mines, mills, and factories across Wales, the North and Midlands) has left many communities feeling abandoned and betrayed by political elites, who are often perceived as London-centric and disconnected from the realities of everyday life. Since the Credit Crunch of 2008, unemployment, increase in inequality, shrinking towns, and limited social mobility has created a pervasive sense of neglect, which was frequently expressed through cultural rather than purely economic terms: resentment toward immigration, multiculturalism, and what was framed as the erosion of traditional British identity. Politically, this sense of alienation grew as many working-class voters felt abandoned by both Labour and Conservative parties, particularly from the 1980s onward, producing fertile ground for populist rhetoric. Brexit, in this context, can be read as the crystallisation of decades of economic, social, and cultural grievance, providing a political outlet for feelings of being ignored and powerless. Even more recently, Boris Johnson’s idea of “Levelling up” has been well and truly buried, first by Liz Truss, then by Rishi Sunak and now by Sir Kier Starmer.
While such grievances are often framed publicly in terms of culture, community, or national identity, it is important to recognise that often the working-class right’s resentment is not always articulated as explicit racism. Instead, it tends to emerge through coded or indirect language that emphasises economic precarity, a sense of being overlooked by political elites, or anxieties about rapid social and demographic change.
These concerns, taken in isolation, are not unique to any one group. What distinguishes them is the way they are experienced as threats to status and recognition, rather than simply as policy disagreements. As a result, issues such as immigration, multiculturalism, or changing social norms are frequently interpreted through the lens of marginalisation, where the underlying fear is less about difference itself and more about the perceived loss of recognition, influence, and cultural security, what some might describe as status anxiety or cultural displacement.
Because these feelings can be expressed through morally legitimate vocabulary (“fairness,” “community cohesion,” “being left behind,” or “protecting local identity”) they circulate widely without attracting the stigma associated with overt prejudice. In themselves, such concerns are legitimate and widely shared. Over time, however, when repeatedly framed through a narrative of loss and neglect, they can harden into a sense of moral injury and dispossession. It is in this form that they begin to shape how segments of the working-class right interpret social change and perceive minority communities, including Muslims, often viewing them not as fellow citizens but as symbols of a broader cultural displacement.
In recent years, parties on the right of politics, most notably Reform UK, have positioned themselves to channel this frustration into a formal political agenda. They appeal to voters disillusioned with both Labour and Conservative, emphasising sovereignty, law and order, anti-“woke” cultural messaging, and scepticism toward immigration. By presenting itself as a defender of the “forgotten” working-class communities, it taps into economic, cultural, and social grievances simultaneously, offering a sense of validation and agency to those who feel left behind. Importantly, Reform UK’s rhetoric frames these grievances as principled and systemic rather than personally directed at minorities, allows it to mobilise resentment without resorting to overt racial hostility. Though from time to time overtly racist and xenophobic messaging does seep through, such as saying: “I am fed up with seeing so many black and brown faces on television ads.”
Social media platforms such as X, Facebook, and TikTok have become key channels through which working-class right grievance is expressed and amplified. Unlike traditional broadcast media, which is regulated by Ofcom, these “content creator” platforms operate with minimal editorial oversight. In the aftermath of Trump’s second term, many platforms have become increasingly permissive, allowing emotionally charged and unfiltered narratives to circulate rapidly. Users share stories of economic hardship, cultural unease, or perceived abandonment by political and cultural elites, generating a sense of collective frustration and mutual validation.
A particularly notable shift is the increasing sophistication of the content. Far from crude or amateur messaging, much of it is now professionally scripted, and algorithmically optimised to trigger emotional engagement. Memes, short-form videos, and curated threads increasingly deploy persuasive storytelling, selective statistics, evocative imagery, and identity-laden language. Themes such as immigration, multiculturalism, or so-called “elite wokeness” are framed as existential or “civilisational” threats. Narratives like the “great replacement” are not circulated as fringe conspiracies but as polished, digestible pieces of media designed to be easily shared and internalised. This level of sophistication allows grievance politics to spread more effectively, reaching audiences who might otherwise reject overtly extremist messaging.
Fuelling some of this is the steady import of culture-war discourse from the US, which now heavily shapes political conversation and grievance narratives in the UK. Debates over “critical race theory,” transgender rights, cancel culture, and “woke capitalism” are routinely mirrored across British media ecosystems and social platforms, often re-packaged to reflect local anxieties about immigration, identity, and social change. These narratives do not merely echo American concerns, they validate and amplify existing British grievances, presenting cultural shifts as a moral assault on tradition, stability, and working-class life.
One notable development has been the far-right’s increasing attempt to co-opt Christianity and Church spaces as part of this cultural struggle. While Britain is far less religious than the US, far-right groups have recognised the symbolic power of Christianity as a marker of cultural heritage and national identity. Their strategy is rarely theological; instead, it is cultural and civilisational. They invoke “Christian values” as shorthand for whiteness, Britishness, and a perceived moral order under threat from multiculturalism and secular liberalism.
British “Muslim” grievance
This long history of insider–outsider tension provides the backdrop to Britain’s contemporary politics of grievance. The emotional grammar of xenophobia (resentment, loss, and the search for moral innocence) now operates within communities that once occupied opposite sides of its divide. Where once hostility flowed from the native toward the newcomer, it now circulates between groups who both feel dispossessed. Muslim and working-class right grievances are, in many ways, mirror images, born of different experiences but sustained in the public imagination by the same feeling of exclusion.
For many British Muslims, grievance is rooted in a sense of being perpetually scrutinised and distrusted: the post-9/11 suspicion, the sting of Prevent surveillance, the Trojan Horse affair, the media narratives that cast their faith as a security question rather than a civic identity. For parts of the working-class, grievance arises from economic neglect, the loss of industrial dignity, and the belief that their culture has become the only one it is safe to deride. Each side sees itself as the wronged party in a national story that no longer honours their place within it.
Among many British Muslims, the sentiment grievance has become a trap. It runs contrary to the Qur’anic command to act with fairness and gratitude, to see trials as opportunities for integrity, outreach, introspection and closeness to God rather than confirmation of doom and fatalistic post-colonial scepticism. Gratitude, in Islamic ethics, is a lens through which perception becomes disciplined. It cultivates agency, humility, and trust in divine justice. Yet the culture of grievance often distorts that lens, replacing gratitude with suspicion and moral injury.
The Muslim public sphere, for instance, has increasingly become populated by platforms that amplify an anti-nationalist outlook and place a heavy emphasis on Muslim grievance. In doing so, they often sustain a mood of perpetual siege, where resentment is reframed as moral clarity and resistance as virtue. Its recurring message “we don’t need to prove ourselves” may sound defiant, but it quietly discourages self-scrutiny, signalling that renewal, reform, or contextualisation of Islam are unnecessary for believers of the Islamic faith.
Increasingly there is tendency toward inward-facing institutional development that risks social separation rather than engagement with wider British society (“Muslim ghettoes” or “Muslim only”) in infrastructure, political representation, welfare and jobs, now much more prevalent in the UK than at any time in my lifetime. The implication is that problems always lie outside, never within, and “Muslim” agency is seen as best expressed through more ghettoisation, not engagement, being at the table, outreach and efforts to win hearts and mind. It’s a form of Muslimness but without Islamic values, in much the same way as the some far-right now promote Christianity but without Christ’s spiritual values and ethics.
Unity of grievance
This architecture of grievance closely mirrors that found within populist strands of the working-class right, particularly across social media, where anger increasingly becomes a source of identity and victimhood a form of moral capital. Contradictory impulses often coexist. The working-class right’s desire to restrict immigration sits alongside expectations of strong public services and economic security. A similar tension appears in parts of the Muslim public sphere, where the call for full “acceptance” as British sits simultaneously alongside the tendency to create insular institutions oriented primarily around “Muslim interests.” In this way, both groups come to inhabit parallel echo chambers, each convinced of its own moral clarity and sustained by a shared sense of having been wronged.
In that sense, Muslim grievance and working-class right grievance now gaze at one another across the same mirror. Each sees the other as privileged, protected, and unaccountable, while regarding itself as the last authentic victim of a rigged moral order.
This is the curious symmetry of modern Britain: the politics of grievance has turned inward. The old xenophobia that once defined “the foreigner” has fragmented into competing claims of exclusion within the same nation. The working-class populist laments a country lost to liberal cosmopolitanism; the British Muslim citizen laments a society that never truly accepted them. Between them stands the British state led by Labour, exhausted, managerial, and distrusted by both.
What unites these grievances is not their content but their form: the transformation of pain into identity. The grievance is no longer just a complaint; it is a badge of authenticity, proof of having been wronged in a dishonest world. In that sense, the politics of grievance today is arguably not a deviation from the history of the British Isles but its continuation, a new chapter in the old struggle over who gets to feel at home the most, and whose wounds are allowed to count the most.