Is Britain becoming more divided — and more resentful?

MATCH OF THE DAY: GROUP GRIEVANCE — UK 0, EU 1

Referee: Fund for Peace

Brexit was sold as a way to take back control. Ten years on, the visible result is a Britain still stuck at 6.1 on group grievance in 2024, against an EU benchmark of 3.56 in Fund for Peace's Group Grievance table. That matters now, not just historically, because Starmer inherits a country where grievance has been politically mobilised but not politically settled. This is the first thing to see: on the Fund for Peace definition of Group Grievance, Brexit did not just reveal division; it helped lock it in.

1 PROBLEM

This is not a one-off Brexit hangover. It is a persistent grievance pattern. The Fund for Peace indicator asks whether schisms between groups are deepening through unequal access, political exclusion, intolerance, repression, scapegoating, or unresolved historical grievance. On that test, the UK rises from 4.7 in 2012 to 5.9 in 2016, then hits 6.4 from 2017 to 2020 before easing only slightly to 6.1 by 2024, while the EU line moves the other way. Fund for Peace’s own 2020 report states that “Group grievance has been steadily worsening since 2010, with a score of 4.1 in 2010 and 6.4 from 2017 onwards”. The verdict is simple: Britain did not clear the grievance spike; it settled into it.

Why?

3 REASONS

1) PLAN — no route back to social settlement.
The Group Grievance methodology asks hard, practical questions: is there reconciliation, reintegration, reconstruction, compensation, or any serious mechanism for addressing communal grievance? In the UK material, Fund for Peace does not describe a post-Brexit reconciliation strategy of that kind. Instead, its 2020 Brexit analysis says Britain faces the longer task of “decontaminating toxic political discourse and unifying a divided society”. Brexit had a route to exit, but not a route to repair. 

Plan score: UK 2/10, EU 6/10 — one side managed disagreement; the other banked it.

2) POLICY — grievance became political fuel.
Fund for Peace defines the indicator around schisms over resources, services, political inclusion, scapegoating, and rhetoric that turns social difference into political heat. Its 2018 analysis says the referendum arrived amid “unprecedented levels of division and group grievance” and warns that “divisive policy-making and rhetoric is simply incompatible with a country’s ability to thrive”. That is the policy story: grievance was not cooled, bridged, or absorbed; it was repeatedly activated. 

Policy score: UK 3/10, EU 6/10 — Britain treated division less as a risk to manage than as a resource to use.

3) PERFORMANCE — the plateau is the point.
In your comparison table, the UK is still 6.1 in 2024 while the EU is 3.56, with Germany and Italy also much lower. France is worse, which matters, because it stops this becoming melodrama.

But Britain still looks like a poor performer in reducing grievance after the post-2016 shock. The broader 2017 Fragile States Index warning was that even stable democracies can be damaged when “highly divisive political campaigns” and “societal wedge issues” sharply worsen grievance indicators. Britain fits that warning almost too neatly. 

Performance score: UK 4/10, EU 7/10 — not Europe’s worst case, but far too good at staying resentful.

FINAL WHISTLE — what this score really means

Britain’s problem on Group Grievance is not that politics became emotional. It is that grievance became structured. The deeper mechanism is visible in the Fund for Peace methodology: this indicator is about divisions between groups, access to resources and political inclusion, historical grievance, repression, scapegoating, and communal distrust.

Britain did not build a convincing route back from the referendum to a renewed social bargain, so the grievance surge lingered long after the vote itself. That is why the EU line cooled while the UK line stayed high in your comparison.

Starmer therefore inherits more than a noisy politics. He inherits a country where resentment has been normalised as part of the operating environment. If that does not change, the risk is not simply more anger. It is a politics that keeps harvesting grievance faster than it can reduce it — and that is where the wider league table starts to matter.