Empire Within: Hostile Environment in Contemporary Britain

Hostility, Governance, and the Failure of Care

Britain’s hostile environment policies framework did not emerge fully formed in the 2010s; they are the latest expression of a much older political logic. Its roots lie in the British Empire’s economic model, which accumulated national wealth through three interlocking systems of domination: the enslavement of African peoples, the extraction of raw materials and goods from colonised lands, and the coercive labour regime imposed on colonial populations and  Britain’s own poor. Across these domains, Britain perfected techniques of classifying, disciplining, and exploiting populations—techniques that survive today in domestic immigration enforcement, welfare policing, and the punitive governance of ethnic minorities and working-class youth.

Britain’s machinery of domination was never restricted to colonised 'others'. The English class system developed from its feudal brutalism as a domestic counterpart to imperial rule. In the centuries before and during colonial expansion, Britain effectively colonised its own poor. Enclosure stripped peasants of land; workhouses confined the destitute under conditions tantamount to imprisonment; child labour powered factories and mines; vagrancy laws criminalised poverty itself. The working class—children included—was coerced into serving Britain’s industrial and imperial ambitions through violence, starvation wages, and moralising rhetoric that framed the poor as idle, undisciplined, or undeserving.

Hence, this Hostile Environment policy is not an aberration within an otherwise benign system of governance. It is the contemporary expression of a deeper political inheritance: a colonial political theology that equates sovereignty with punishment, belonging with conditionality, and care with moral judgement. While articulated through immigration policy, its governing logic now structures welfare, youth policy, and public services more broadly, reshaping the social ecology of Britain itself.

This logic rests on the sorting of life into categories of deserving and undeserving. Migrants, racialised communities, welfare recipients, and increasingly working class young people are positioned as morally suspect populations whose access to security must be earned, monitored, and repeatedly justified. As in colonial governance, deprivation is not a policy failure but a regulatory mechanism. Suffering becomes instrumental, framed as deterrence, discipline, or fiscal necessity.

The consequences are socially corrosive. The Hostile Environment fractures solidarity by transforming public goods—housing, healthcare, social security—into sites of privilege, exclusion and surveillance. Welfare institutions are hollowed out, no longer functioning primarily as systems of collective care but as mechanisms of moral filtration. Fear replaces trust, and entitlement gives way to conditional mercy. These dynamics damage not only those directly targeted, but the social welfare of the entire country, undermining public health, child wellbeing, institutional legitimacy, and democratic cohesion.

This environment also provides fertile ground for the rise of racialised nationalist politics. Hostility, once embedded in law and administration, is normalised in public culture. Migration and welfare are framed as threats rather than shared social realities, diverting attention away from structural inequality, austerity, and elite accumulation. The racialised right does not emerge in opposition to hostile governance; it is enabled and legitimised by it.

Set against this model is an alternative political imagination found in Indigenous, social democratic and relational societal frameworks. Here, authority is not exercised through exclusion but through responsibility; governance is measured by its capacity to sustain life, relationships, and future generations. Belonging is not transactional but relational. Care is not a reward for compliance but the foundation of social order. From this perspective, the Hostile Environment represents not strength but failure: a breakdown of the state’s ethical and relational obligations.

Re-imagining governance through a relational lens does not imply the abandonment of sovereignty, but its redefinition. Sovereignty rooted in stewardship rather than punishment strengthens social welfare, restores institutional trust, and enhances collective resilience. In a context of climate instability, demographic change, and economic uncertainty, policies premised on deterrence and exclusion are not only unjust but unsustainable.

Ultimately, the crisis revealed by the Hostile Environment is not simply one of immigration or welfare policy, but of governing imagination. Britain faces a choice between continuing to reproduce an imperial logic of discipline and disposability leading inexorably to a cruel and despotic ruling class, or cultivating a politics of care capable of sustaining socioeconomic life in an interdependent world. The measure of power, in this sense, lies not in how effectively a state excludes, but in how well it enables life to survive and flourish—within and beyond its borders.

Polycentric Dynamics from Cell to State: Why Balanced Polycentricity Is the Fundamental Architecture of Resilient Systems

Across biological, ecological, and human systems, resilience emerges not from centralization or fragmentation but from balanced polycentricity — the coordination of multiple semi-autonomous units within a coherent, adaptive whole. From the level of the cell to the structure of the state, life demonstrates that no system can remain stable by relying on a single dominant center of control, nor can it survive without mechanisms that integrate diverse components into shared regulation. Balanced polycentricity is not merely one possible configuration of organization; it is the architecture that makes complex life possible.

At the biological level, the hierarchy from cell → tissue → organ → organism is inherently polycentric. Cells operate with their own regulatory machinery, maintaining homeostasis independently, yet survival depends on intercellular communication, feedback signaling, and metabolic interdependence. Organs are composed of locally autonomous tissues but function only through synchronized physiological regulation. Even within a single organism, no singular structure commands total control; instead, endocrine, neural, and immune systems form overlapping regulatory centers, each capable of influencing but not overriding the others. This distributed architecture ensures that failure at one node does not collapse the entire system, a core principle of resilience.

Ecological systems amplify this logic. Forests, coral reefs, soils and grasslands are polycentric networks of species, nutrient pathways, and microclimates. Stability arises from functional redundancy, diverse response strategies, and decentralized feedback loops. No single species, trophic level, or biogeochemical pathway holds absolute authority; instead, multiple agents simultaneously regulate energy flow, nutrient cycling, and population dynamics. Ecologists consistently find that systems with higher polycentric complexity — more distinct yet interacting centers of regulation — are more resistant to disturbance, more adaptable to environmental variability, and more capable of long-term persistence. The scientific consensus is clear: biodiversity and distributed ecological regulation are inseparable from systemic stability.

Human governance mirrors these dynamics. While modern states often aspire to centralised unity, empirical evidence—from Ostrom’s common-pool resource studies to contemporary resilience theory—shows that large-scale systems function best when they adopt polycentric governance structures. In these systems, communities, institutions, and regulatory bodies retain local autonomy but remain connected through shared rules, monitoring, and communication channels. This enables rapid adaptation to local conditions while preventing fragmentation into isolated or conflicting units. Such arrangements distribute risk, reduce the consequences of failure, and promote innovation through diversity.

Crucially, both extremes undermine stability. Excessive centralisation — whether in a biological organ, an ecological system dominated by a single species, or a political system controlled by a single authority — reduces adaptive capacity and makes the system vulnerable to collapse. A monocultural field, a top-heavy bureaucracy, or a single-point biological regulator becomes brittle, unable to respond to perturbations. Conversely, excessive multiplicity without coordination results in fragmentation: unregulated cell proliferation becomes cancer; unbounded species competition destabilizes ecosystems; uncoordinated political actors produce governance failures.

Balanced polycentricity provides the corrective to both extremes. It allows self-interest to operate at multiple scales while embedding each autonomous unit within a network of reciprocal constraints and feedback. It ensures that diversity is not merely tolerated but functionally integrated. It prevents domination by any single center while preventing chaos across many. It is, in scientific terms, the optimal configuration for robustness, adaptability, and long-term systemic persistence.

From the micro-scale of cellular regulation to the macro-scale of global governance, the conclusion is consistent:
Resilient systems are polycentric. They thrive when many centers of agency operate in constructive tension, each autonomous yet none isolated, maintaining a balance that neither hierarchy nor fragmentation can provide.

Balanced polycentricity is not an ideological preference but a structural necessity for any complex system seeking endurance across time.

The Human as System: A Bio-Mimetic View of Being

The human being is often imagined as a single, unified self. Yet biologically, each of us is a plurality: billions of living entities cooperating in colonies of cells, microbiomes, and organs. This internal complexity mirrors the living systems around us — forests, oceans, and atmospheres woven together by reciprocity.

Alongside this biological reality, humans build symbolic systems: colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, even the -isms that define identity and ideology. These are not natural laws. They are extensions of human cognition — shaped by emotion, imagination, and the need to survive. In this sense, the system is the human, and the human is the system. We build the world from the structures already inside us.

But unlike natural systems, human-made systems are filtered through ego. Ego separates, controls, and protects its own continuity. Through this lens, self-interest becomes the central source of systemic corruption, pushing societies toward domination rather than reciprocity. When human-made systems forget the principles that sustain life — finitude, regeneration, interdependence — they drift into extraction and imbalance.

All of this unfolds while the human organism remains profoundly finite. Our bodies depend on ecological networks; our minds depend on relational worlds. To ignore finitude is to design systems that deny the conditions of their own survival.

At the same time, humans are continually transforming. Biological renewal, mental development, and technological expansion shape us in layers. The rise of machinic technologies — artificial intelligence, automation, bioengineering — reflects our impulse to reproduce aspects of ourselves in material form. Yet these machinic systems must learn from biological intelligence rather than replace it.

This is where bio-mimicry becomes essential. Nature thrives through feedback, cooperation, and regeneration. The human body is a living model of this logic. If human systems are to endure, they must move closer to the relational intelligence of ecosystems: designing with limits in mind, embedding reciprocity, and honouring the cycles that allow life to flourish.

To be human, then, is not to dominate systems but to participate in them. We are finite, plural, and always becoming — biological, mental, and machinic at once. Understanding this offers a different kind of clarity: that sustainable futures emerge not from mastery, but from alignment with the deeper, regenerative logic of life itself.

Neo-colonialism : The British Establishment and the Extractive Culture of Capital

The foreign takeover of England’s vital sectors — water, housing, transport, and industrial infrastructure — cannot be understood apart from the complicity of the British establishment, whose institutions, ideologies, and governance structures sustain the very conditions for dispossession. What appears as external control by foreign investors is, in fact, an extension of internal culture: an establishment historically conditioned to align with global capital rather than communal welfare. The monarchy, the City of London, the Treasury, and political elites operate as domestic brokers of imperial logic, facilitating the transfer of national resources to transnational investors under the guise of economic modernity.

Within the Extractive/Relational spectrum, the British establishment exemplifies the Extractive pole — hierarchical, acquisitive, and self-legitimating. Its authority is maintained through ritual and rhetoric: the monarchy symbolises divine order, finance symbolises prudence, and austerity symbolises virtue. Beneath this ceremonial surface lies an ideological continuity from empire: the belief that wealth and power naturally concentrate in the hands of a few. This is a cultural theology of extraction — the sanctification of private ownership, the erasure of collective responsibility, and the normalization of inequality.

The result is a form of internal colonialism, in which England becomes subject to the same logics of exploitation it once imposed abroad. The City of London, legally semi-autonomous and financially opaque, functions as a metropole of global capital rather than national governance. As Bhattacharyya (2018) notes, neoliberal Britain perpetuates the economic order of empire by other means: through debt, speculation, and privatisation rather than conquest. The establishment thus presides over a self-inflicted recolonisation, ensuring the extraction of value from public goods into private, often foreign, hands.

In contrast, the Relational pole offers a radically different ontology — one grounded in interdependence, reciprocity, and shared stewardship. This is the logic of the commons, both in Indigenous traditions and civic governance. Elinor Ostrom’s research (1990) demonstrated that communities, when entrusted with self-governance, develop durable and equitable systems for managing shared resources. Far from chaotic or inefficient, such systems embody a collective rationality — one grounded in accountability, trust, and care.

Through this lens, England’s economic vulnerability — where foreign investors control essential utilities and housing — reveals a cultural disconnection from the commons. The Extractive establishment cannot conceive of value beyond accumulation and domination. Yet Ostrom’s work, like Indigenous ecological thought, exposes a more sustainable form of governance: one where stewardship is not a moral luxury but a structural necessity. The Relational paradigm thus reclaims what the Extractive model displaces — the understanding that life, land, and resources are not commodities, but relations to be tended.

Decolonising the English economy, therefore, requires more than policy reform or nationalization; it demands a reconfiguration of governance and culture. It entails shifting from hierarchical control to relational accountability, from private ownership to communal stewardship. Water, housing, transport, and national infrastructure must be reimagined not as instruments of capital accumulation but as commons — domains of care structured around social, ecological, and intergenerational responsibility.

The irony of post-imperial Britain is that the system it once exported — the extractive culture of empire — has returned to its shores, consuming its own foundation. The path beyond this recursive coloniality lies in embracing the relational paradigm: communal, regenerative, and accountable. Only through such a transformation — institutional, cultural, and spiritual — can England begin to decolonise itself from both the global capital it serves and the establishment that enables it.