A major new report on British social cohesion has found deep and widespread alarm about national identity and integration. Forty-two percent of Britons surveyed believe Muslims cannot integrate into British society, and 55% say the country's national identity is disappearing because of increasing diversity. The findings come from "Britain Under Strain: The Broken Social Contract, Democratic Distrust and the Mainstreaming of Extremism," authored by Sara Khan, who left her role 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 brings significant institutional weight to this work. Between 2021 and 2024, she served as the government's independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience, meaning she had direct access to data streams — Prevent referrals (government-flagged cases of potential extremism), community tension monitoring, and hate crime reporting — that shape how policymakers understand these risks. The polling was conducted by More in Common, surveying 4,094 adults in spring 2026. That sample size allows the authors to break down findings by party affiliation, age, and religious identity, revealing important patterns.

One striking contradiction sits at the center of the data. While 42% of the general population say Muslims cannot integrate, 85% of British Muslims surveyed said they favor integration. This gap between what non-Muslims perceive and what Muslims report actually wanting raises a difficult question: is the polling capturing real differences in behavior, perceptions of behavior, or something closer to broader anxiety about demographic change itself?

That anxiety runs deep across multiple measures. Sixty-one percent of respondents said the implicit social contract — the mutual understanding that citizens accept institutional authority in exchange for fair and predictable institutions — has broken down. Thirty-three percent said they support remigration, a term that has moved from fringe policy proposal into mainstream political conversation in recent years. Thirty-one percent agreed with the statement that non-white people could never be as British as white people. Political affiliation shapes these views sharply: among Reform UK supporters, 71% believe Muslims cannot integrate, more than 25 percentage points above the national average.

The report widens its lens beyond attitudes toward Muslims and immigration. It also surfaces troubling findings within British Muslim communities themselves: 64% of British Muslims surveyed said 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. These figures complicate simple narratives about where extremist-adjacent belief originates — they appear across multiple communities and ideological positions.

On political violence, a generational divide emerges. Eighty percent of Britons overall say political violence is never acceptable, but that number falls among 18- to 34-year-olds, 29% of whom see it as acceptable in some circumstances. A related finding — that 28% of Britons believe people should ignore rules and institutions that block change — points to a broader erosion of trust in democratic procedures that extends beyond any single issue or group.

The researchers also counted offline activity: 1,784 far-right events and 225 Islamist events over a 12-month period. This ratio offers empirical data on the relative scale of far-right versus Islamist mobilization at a time when political debates often assert the balance without measuring it.

Khan's role matters here. Having held the government's two most relevant advisory positions on extremism and cohesion in succession, she is positioned as someone whose analysis is difficult for policymakers to dismiss out of hand, whether as alarmist outsider commentary or insider talking points — though critics from different directions will certainly attempt both readings. The report's release comes just ahead of the planned 2026 launch of the UK Extremism and Democratic Resilience Centre (UKEDRC), a body whose work will likely draw directly on this kind of data.

Imam Atta, director of Tell Mama, the charity that supports victims of anti-Muslim hate, has spoken to the report's practical stakes for organizations serving communities featured in the polling The Guardian.

What makes this report significant is not any single statistic but rather its systematic attempt to document, with survey rigor, grievances and suspicions that have circulated anecdotally across Britain's political spectrum for years. Numbers like 42% or 33% will be seized upon selectively — by those arguing Britain's multiculturalism has failed and by those arguing the polling measures little more than manufactured resentment. But these readings often miss the report's more difficult finding: that distrust in institutions, contempt for outgroups, and openness to bypassing democratic norms are not confined to one community or one end of the political spectrum. They are distributed unevenly, sometimes reciprocally, across British society as a whole.