Repairing our broken social contract and combatting extremism should be national security priorities

Guest blog by Dame Sara Khan DBE and Dr Matthew Godwin

In his first intervention on defence and security, Andy Burnham was right to tie Britain’s defence to social cohesion. The connection between the state of our society and our ability to respond to crises was also recognised by Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer. There is no doubt that the government has joined the dots and understands that the societal challenges we face weaken our national defence and resilience. However, the UK is not responding with the strategic approach required to what we think is a national crisis of confidence in our democratic institutions. Unlike our allies, we have not fully recognised or invested in social cohesion and institutional trust as a foundational national security asset.

As our new report Britain Under Strain demonstrates, British society has lost confidence in the reciprocal relationship between the state and its citizens, so essential for governance in a democracy. 61 per cent believe the social contract is broken, a third (32 per cent) support a communist revolution, 40 per cent believe democracy isn’t working (but could with the right leaders) and belief in conspiracy theories like the ‘Great Replacement’ is now widely held. 28 per cent say we should ignore the institutions and rules that get in the way of change - rising to 1 in 3 (34 per cent) among those who feel the social contract is broken. 1 in 7 believe political violence is acceptable in some circumstances. These figures are not peripheral; they represent millions of people in our country.

Nor is this a passing dip in confidence among the population but a structural crisis as a result of a chronic erosion of trust in institutions.  It is undermining the essential societal and democratic resilience required to withstand the malign and hostile activity our country is experiencing.  And our rivals know this.

It is shortsighted to only consider reducing the external threats while doing little to reduce the permissive environment within our nation that will undermine our national security.  The government has repeatedly pointed out the geopolitical threats to our country from hostile states like Russia and Iran.  Divorcing this from the fact that a quarter of Britons express some openness to siding with the UK’s enemies if they disagree with the government’s actions, is myopic.  Furthermore, despite campaigns of sabotage and destabilisation on the part of the Kremlin and Tehran, only 61 per cent see Russia as an enemy and even fewer, 51 per cent, think the same about Iran. While China’s activities aren’t yet comparable to these state threats, its escalating espionage and targeting of dissidents doesn’t seem to have registered with the public – where only 28 per cent view Beijing as an enemy. National resilience, security and democratic defence cannot just be  concern for Whitehall - it should be recognised and treated as a whole of society problem and solution.

While the impact of Donald Trump has undoubtedly cast doubt on British views toward the US – where only 50 per cent view Washington as an ally – successive, frank interventions by US administration figures like JD Vance’s speech last year at the Munich security conference suggest British opinion reflects this decoupling. They also recognise where our defence alliance-building should be focused, with 61 per cent viewing the EU as an ally. These findings should offer the new Prime Minister clearance to accelerate efforts to strengthen our defence ties with the continent and surmount the hurdles preventing us from cementing a new a partnership. Continental division only benefits Russia.

Consecutive governments have long recognised the geopolitical threats we are facing from Russia and Iran and recent steps to designate state-linked entities like the IRGC and Russia’s GRU Volunteer Corps are welcome. However, our report lays out in stark terms the extent to which Russia and Iran are not only injecting extremism into our society but how they are converging with far right and Islamist domestic ecosystems to further unravel our democracy.

Our monitoring shows real convergence with the domestic far right on antisemitic conspiracies and "Great Replacement" narratives, and Russian-linked accounts accelerated disorder after Southport, Epping, and the "Unite the Kingdom" rallies. Iran runs a parallel playbook, aimed at the Islamist domestic ecosystem. IRGC commanders have directly urged UK students to become "soft-war officers".  Despite being ideologically divergent, Russian and Iranian-backed narratives are deeply anti-Western, undemocratic and where antisemitism is a through-line in both ecosystems.

Despite these two different domestic ecosystems, Russia and Iran employ the same underlying method: find where trust has already broken down and focus efforts to destabilise Britain.  But we need to be honest; hostile states like Russia and Iran are not creating these divisions from nothing — they are pouring accelerant on a fire we lit ourselves and which continues to rage.

Russia and Iran have a shared interest in destabilising Western countries as the most cost-effective path to disassembling the Western alliance. This is not a marginal strategy but represents a primary field of battle for these antagonists. Islamist extremists travelling to Iran for the funeral of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and recent photos of pro-Kremlin, far-right leader Tommy Robinson meeting the father of Elon Musk in Russia evidence the destructive alliance between hostile states and domestic extremists.  National security and defence is increasingly shaped not only by military threats, but by attacks directed at the social, civic and democratic foundations that enable societies to function. Hostile states, extremists and transnational networks increasingly seek to weaken democratic societies by exploiting grievances, amplifying division, eroding trust and undermining confidence in institutions, truth and shared values

Repairing the broken social contract which feeds domestic extremists and their hostile state allies is essential therefore to confronting the aligned threats our democratic institutions face from here at home and from abroad.

The government’s approach remains discrete and piecemeal for what is a structural crisis in our institutions. There is no joined-up approach in particular towards strengthening social cohesion, democratic resilience and countering extremism. Many of the current relevant government strategies and action plans including the National Security Strategy, the National Resilience Action Plan, the Strategic Defence Review, the Protecting What Matters action plan - to name just a few - recognise that trust, cohesion and legitimacy are strategic assets and that democracy itself requires defence. But the institutions protecting them remain far less developed, nor have we fully organised the state around that proposition. We have the beginnings of a resilience architecture but the reality is we do not yet have a mature system of democratic defence.

This should be urgently dealt with as the UK is currently in the midst of an accelerating extremism landscape where we are increasingly witnessing the mainstreaming of extremist narratives. The outgoing government’s announcement that it is undertaking an emergency public awareness campaign is far from what is required to ready British society to mobilise in the event of a war or other existential crisis. The National Preparedness Commission last week also produced a report evidencing this very point.  As we suggest the UK should examine preparedness models like Norway’s ‘Total Defence’ concept, which underpins the country’s civilian-military cooperation and where social cohesion and democratic resilience is treated as a national security and democratic defence asset.  

‘Britain Under Strain’ isn’t all doom and gloom. Our polling reveals that some fundamental values remain widely held. 81 per cent of Britons consider fighting for one’s country to be patriotic and 74 per cent say the same about voting – although a less encouraging picture emerges when it comes to young Britons.

And while there are contested narratives about national identity, it is clear from our research that there is significant desire across the country for our democracy to flourish and deliver.  There is still a common ground which can be built on and our polling suggests that British society is prepared for honesty about the threats we face and is willing to step up in times of crisis.  A robust, whole-of-society strategy led from the top is what is required to restore the social contract and ensure our readiness for the challenges to come. Leaving these gaping wounds unattended is just what Russia and Iran want and a weak Britain isn’t in our interests or the world’s.

About the authors

Dame Sara Khan DBE is a leading expert and policy specialist on counter extremism, societal resilience and human rights. She was Britain’s first Counter Extremism Commissioner in 2018 and in March 2021, Sara was appointed by the Prime Minister as the government’s Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience. She has published independent reports and reviews for the UK government including Challenging Hateful Extremism (2019), Operating with Impunity (2021) and The Khan Review (2024).

Dr Matthew Godwin holds a PhD from UCL and focuses on hostile state destabilisation in the UK. He has previously worked at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’s extremism policy unit and as a researcher in the House of Lords. Godwin has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals on a range of topics including far-right extremism, diaspora influence on foreign policy and political institutions.