A new report on British social cohesion finds that 42% of Britons believe Muslims cannot integrate into British society, and 55% believe the country's national identity is disappearing because of diversity. The findings come from "Britain Under Strain: The Broken Social Contract, Democratic Distrust and the Mainstreaming of Extremism," authored by Sara Khan, who stood down in 2024 as the UK's first counter-extremism commissioner, and co-authored by Dr Matthew Godwin, formerly of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change's extremism policy unit The Guardian.

Khan also served as the government's independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience between 2021 and 2024, giving her direct institutional exposure to the data streams — Prevent referrals, community tension monitoring, hate crime reporting — that inform this kind of assessment. The polling underpinning the report was conducted by More in Common, surveying 4,094 adults in spring 2026, a sample size sufficiently large to permit subgroup breakdowns by party affiliation, age and religious identity, which the authors use extensively.

The topline integration figures sit against a striking counterpoint: 85% of British Muslims surveyed said they favor integration, according to the report. The gap between perception and self-reported attitude — 42% of the general population doubting Muslim integration against 85% of Muslims endorsing it — is the kind of divergence that tends to animate debates over whether polling on "integration" is measuring behavior, perceived behavior, or something closer to generalized anxiety about demographic change.

That anxiety registers elsewhere in the data. Sixty-one percent of respondents said the social contract — the implicit understanding by which citizens accept the authority of institutions and norms in exchange for those institutions functioning fairly and predictably — had broken down. Thirty-three percent said they support remigration, a term whose meaning has shifted from a niche far-right policy proposal toward broader currency in mainstream discourse over recent years. Thirty-one percent were open to the proposition that non-white people would never be as British as white people. Partisan sorting is pronounced: among Reform UK supporters, 71% believe Muslims cannot integrate, more than 25 percentage points above the national average.

The report does not confine its scrutiny to attitudes about Muslims or immigration generally. It also surfaces findings about antisemitism and conspiratorial belief within British Muslim communities themselves: 64% of British Muslims surveyed said they believe white people are working against Muslims, and 56% said the same of Jewish people. Twenty-seven percent said they believe the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated. Those figures will likely draw as much attention, and as much contestation over methodology and framing, as the integration numbers — they complicate any narrative that locates extremism-adjacent belief exclusively on one side of Britain's cultural divide.

On political violence, the report finds a generational split. Eighty percent of Britons overall say political violence is never acceptable, but that figure drops sharply among 18- to 34-year-olds, 29% of whom consider it acceptable in some circumstances. A related finding — that 28% of Britons believe individuals should ignore rules and institutions that get in the way of change — speaks to a broader erosion of procedural legitimacy that extends beyond any single issue or community.

The researchers also logged offline activity, counting 1,784 far-right events and 225 Islamist events over a 12-month period, a ratio that offers a rough empirical counterweight to political debates in which the relative scale of far-right versus Islamist mobilization is often asserted rather than measured.

The report's timing places it just ahead of the planned launch later in 2026 of the UK Extremism and Democratic Resilience Centre (UKEDRC), a body whose remit will presumably draw on exactly this kind of longitudinal attitudinal and event data. Khan's authorship carries institutional weight here: having held the government's two most relevant advisory posts on extremism and cohesion in succession, she is positioned as someone whose warnings are difficult for policymakers to dismiss as either alarmist outsider commentary or captured insider spin, though critics from different directions will likely try both framings.

Iman Atta, director of Tell Mama, the NGO that supports victims of anti-Muslim hate, is cited in coverage of the report's release, reflecting the practical stakes for organizations working with communities named in the polling The Guardian.

The broader significance of this report lies less in any single statistic than in its attempt to document, with survey rigor, a set of grievances and suspicions that have circulated anecdotally across Britain's political spectrum for years. Numbers like the 42% integration figure or the 33% remigration figure will be seized upon selectively — by those arguing Britain's multiculturalism has failed and by those arguing the polling itself measures little more than manufactured resentment. Both readings are likely to miss the report's more uncomfortable suggestion: that distrust in institutions, contempt for outgroups, and openness to circumventing democratic norms are not confined to one community or one end of the political spectrum, but distributed, unevenly and sometimes reciprocally, across British society as a whole.