By Maria Bregman, writer, literary and art critic
I stuck Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men on the TV the other night. I haven’t seen it in years. You know the one. That relentless, grey look at a future Britain – 2027, supposedly – where the borders are shut tight and refugees are rotting in cages on the coast. The government slogan in the film was “Only Britain Soldiers On.”
When it came out in 2006, it felt like a grim warning. Watching it now, in late 2025, it doesn’t look like sci-fi anymore. It looks like the news.
We need to be precise about what is happening here. Let’s be clear – I’m not talking about the “Global Talent” lot. The virtuoso violinists, science geniuses, or the tech designers and AI entrepreneurs with the big bank accounts? They’re fine. They will always find a side door.
We are talking about the people at the bottom. The refugees. The desperate. And the government’s new hardline proposals – the twenty-year route to settlement, the potential seizure of assets, the relentless “status reviews” – are targeting them with a precision that feels eerily familiar.
Why familiar? Because British culture has been rehearsing this scenario for forty years. We have spent decades writing books and making films about a fortress island that trades its humanity for security. And now, almost sleepwalking, we seem to have decided to build the set design for real.
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
It’s strange, isn’t it? Britain has always been the world leader in producing its own nightmares. From Orwell’s 1984 to 28 Days Later, we have a cultural obsession with the idea of the “shut door.”
Orwell gave us the vocabulary – Doublethink, Unperson – but it was the visual storytellers who showed us what it would actually look like.
Look at the new proposals. The idea is that a refugee arriving here might have to wait twenty years – two decades – before they can call this place home. In the meantime, they exist in a state of suspended animation, liable to be removed if the wind changes.
This is pure P.D. James (who wrote the novel Children of Men). It’s the creation of a sub-class of humans who are in the society but not of it. In the film, we see refugees (they call them “fugees”) rounded up and put in cages in Bexhill-on-Sea.
We aren’t using cages on the beach yet. But we are building invisible cages of bureaucracy. A twenty-year probation period is a cage. It’s a way of saying: “Your existence here is a privilege we can revoke, not a right we respect.”
When you strip a person of their timeline – when you take away their ability to plan for next year, let alone the next decade – you are doing something distinctively dystopian. You are turning them into a ghost.
The Aesthetic of “The Zone”
There’s a scene in 28 Days Later where the protagonist wanders through a deserted, silent London. The horror there isn’t just the zombies; it’s the emptiness. It’s the loss of the chaos that makes a city alive.
I worry that these policies are pushing us toward a cultural version of that emptiness.
Refugee art – and the art that comes from the diaspora – has always injected a necessary friction into British culture. It brings trauma, yes, but also vitality, different rhythms, different colours. It interrupts the polite greyness of the establishment.
But if you tell every asylum seeker that they must keep their head down for twenty years, that they must be invisible to survive, you kill that art stone dead. You don’t get the vibrant, messy clash of cultures. You get silence. You get compliance.
We are creating a “Zone” where people exist just to work and survive, terrified that if they make a noise, or make art, or make trouble, the “status review” will go against them.
It brings to mind the bleakness of V for Vendetta (the graphic novel, more than the movie). The government in that story wasn’t just violent; it was obsessed with purity. It wanted to scrub the “mess” away. This new push to seize assets – to take wedding rings or cash from arrivals to pay for their keep – has that same scrubbing energy. It’s about stripping the individual down to a unit of economic cost. It’s dehumanizing in the most literal sense of the word.
The “Bureaucratic Horror” Genre
The scary thing is, reality is actually more boring than the movies. In the films, there’s always a resistance. There’s a Clive Owen character trying to smuggle someone to safety.
In reality, the dystopia is made of paper.
I was speaking to a playwright recently who has been trying to write about the current asylum system. She said she was stuck. “It’s not dramatic,” she told me. “It’s just… waiting. It’s people sitting in damp hotel rooms in the Midlands staring at their phones for five years.”
This is the “Bureaucratic Horror” that Orwell hinted at but Kafka perfected. The horror isn’t a boot stamping on a human face; it’s a letter in the post saying your application has been paused. Again.
How does the cultural sector respond to that? It’s hard to dramatize inertia. It’s hard to make a movie about a twenty-year waiting list.
And that’s the danger. The cruelty is so slow, so drawn out, that it becomes invisible. It doesn’t look like a crisis. It just looks like life. The “Hostile Environment” wasn’t a single event; it was an atmosphere. And this new policy deepens that atmosphere. It makes the air heavier.
The Moral Mirror
I think back to Years and Years, that Russell T. Davies series from a few years ago. Do you remember it? It showed a Britain slipping incrementally into fascism, not with a bang, but with a shrug. There’s a scene where a character suggests that people in the camps “have it quite nice, actually.”
That is the precipice we are standing on.
When the government talks about these measures – seizing assets, blocking settlement – they use the language of “fairness” and “deterrence.” They sound reasonable. They sound like they are just managing the numbers.
But the arts have a duty to strip that language away and show the moral reality underneath.
The reality is that we are looking at the most vulnerable people on the planet – people fleeing war, persecution, climate collapse – and telling them: “We will take your jewelry. We will hold you in limbo for a generation. And we will do it to protect our way of life.”
What “way of life” is that, exactly?
If our way of life requires us to enact the plot points of a dystopian thriller, is it worth protecting?
The Loss of the “Messy” Human
We often talk about the “cultural contribution” of refugees in terms of the superstars. We list the famous names – Freddie Mercury, Rita Ora, M.I.A. – and say, “Look! They enrich us!”
But this defense falls into a trap. It implies that you only deserve sanctuary if you are a genius.
The new hardline policies double down on this. They are designed to filter out anyone who isn’t immediately “useful.”
But true culture – and true humanity – is messy. It’s not just about the geniuses. It’s about the difficult people. The traumatized people. The people who don’t learn English perfectly in the first six months.
In Children of Men, the miracle isn’t that a genius is born; it’s just a baby. A crying, noisy, helpless human baby. The film argues that life itself is the value.
Our policies are arguing the opposite. They are arguing that life has no value unless it can be audited.
The Final Cut
I walked along the South Bank yesterday. The brutalist concrete of the National Theatre looked striking against the grey sky. It’s a building that was built in an era of optimism, an era that believed art belonged to everyone.
Now, it feels like a fortress.
We are drifting into a version of Britain that we used to warn ourselves against. We are becoming the country of The Children of Men, but without the dramatic cinematography. Just the cages. Just the greyness. Just the cold.
The writers and directors who imagined these futures weren’t trying to predict the future; they were trying to prevent it. They held up a mirror and said, “Don’t become this.”
We didn’t listen. We looked at the mirror and thought it was a blueprint.
And now, for the thousands of people facing a twenty-year wait to simply exist, the credits are rolling on the British dream. The question is: will the rest of us stay in our seats and watch, or will we finally try to rewrite the script?
