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To close off 2025, we asked Britons how they felt about the divisions facing the country.
Mirroring the growing salience of migration as an issue, one significant shift we’ve seen over the past year is a rising proportion of Brits who say that our biggest divide is between migrants and those born in the UK. Nearly half of Britons (47%) now select this as one of our greatest divides, overtaking the gap between rich and poor (45%).
How positively Brits view migration and multiculturalism is a growing faultline that clearly shapes how people vote. Majorities of Conservative and Reform voters say immigration is our biggest divide; most Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters point to class/wealth as a bigger split.
Interestingly, the rich-poor divide is less important to Reform voters than any other group - with only 25 per cent seeing it as a top issue, having been supplanted among this voter group by migration and cultural cleavages such as ‘between Muslims and non-Muslims’, ‘white people and ethnic minorities’ and ‘woke and non-woke’.
More broadly, a record number of Britons (nearly two-thirds) say the UK is divided - the highest since we began tracking this in 2022.
The proportion of Britons who say the UK is divided has risen from 54 per cent to 64 per cent, while the proportion who say it is united has dropped from 20 per cent to just 15 per cent.
Cut across our Seven Segments, Established Liberals stand out in their optimism - they’re split on whether the UK feels united or divided. Rooted Patriots are the most likely to say the UK is divided (80 per cent), a sentiment shared across right-leaning segments but also Progressive Activists (71 per cent).
While Britons see the country as divided, most still feel that these differences are surmountable: 55 per cent say that “the differences between Britons are not so big that we cannot come together.”
Yet a rising number of Britons feel that the differences between us are too great to overcome: 45 per cent hold this view, the highest since we began tracking in 2020, and an increase of 10 points since May of this year.
This is another key fault line in Britons’ understanding of the country’s divisions. Interestingly, it does not map neatly onto how divided people feel the country is. While Progressive Activists are more likely than average to say the UK feels divided, they are also among the most optimistic in their view that these divisions are surmountable.
Notably, Rooted Patriots are the least hopeful that these differences can be bridged: 63 per cent say that our differences are too big for us to come together.
These beliefs have a clear political dimension: those who vote for more populist parties in the left and right tend to be more likely to say that the UK is divided, and Reform UK voters in particular stand out in their view that these differences cannot be overcome (55 per cent hold this view). In contrast, voters for traditional mainstream parties are often more likely to view the UK’s differences as surmountable.
With a sense of division linking closely to the decline in support for the political and social status quo and helps to explain the fragmentation of our politics in recent years.