Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attracted attention after referring to the United Kingdom as “the Islamic Republic of Britain.” The comment was made during a podcast interview in which Netanyahu criticized Britain’s development and the country’s increasingly critical stance toward Israel.

Netanyahu made the remark while speaking about the British journalist Winston Churchill, the grandson of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and his positive reporting on Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967. Netanyahu stated that it is hard to find the same kind of attitude in today’s UK.

“Try to find that now in Britain, which one could call the Islamic Republic of Britain,” said Netanyahu. When the interviewer asked whether all of Europe had not developed in the same direction, Netanyahu agreed.

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He then linked the UK with the discussion about Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

“The first nuclear-based Islamic republic will be the Islamic Republic of Britain,” Netanyahu said, adding that at the same time, Israel is ensuring that Iran does not become another such state.

Refers to Vance

The phrasing is not entirely new. Netanyahu referred to a previous statement by US Vice President JD Vance, who in 2024 speculated that the UK, under a Labour government, could become “the first truly Islamist country to acquire nuclear weapons.” Vance had jokingly compared Britain to Iran and Pakistan in a discussion about nuclear weapons proliferation.

Netanyahu’s statement comes as relations between London and Jerusalem have become increasingly strained. Under Labour, the British government has taken a much more critical stance on Israel’s actions in Gaza than previous Conservative governments.

Piers Morgan: “Idiot”

The statement has already provoked reactions. British presenter Piers Morgan, long a fierce critic of Netanyahu’s policies, responded briefly to the comment: “Idiot.”

Morgan’s post received around three million views and over 10,000 comments in the first few hours. However, the reactions were far from unanimous.

Many of the most-liked comments were instead supportive of Netanyahu’s description, referring to changes in Britain’s Muslim population.

The Israeli opposition politician Avi Deboush also criticized Netanyahu. He argued that the Prime Minister, in light of his office, should take greater responsibility for his statements and not joke about the UK, which is a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

From 20,000 to four million

The background to Netanyahu’s phrasing is the sharp increase in the UK’s Muslim population since the postwar period.

Estimates show a dramatic demographic change. About 21,000 Muslims are estimated to have lived in Britain in 1951, corresponding to about 0.05 percent of the population.

In the following decades, the population grew rapidly, spurred by migration from South Asia and other parts of the former British Empire.

In 2001, the Muslim population stood at around 1.59 million, according to the census. Ten years later, that figure had risen to about 2.79 million across the UK.

In the most recent censuses, the number is just under four million. England and Wales had 3.87 million Muslims in 2021. Scotland had another 119,872 according to the 2022 census, and Northern Ireland 10,870.

In total, that’s about four million people, corresponding to around six percent of the UK’s population.

In England and Wales, the proportion identifying as Muslim rose from 4.9 percent in 2011 to 6.5 percent in 2021. The group also has a significantly younger age profile than the population as a whole: the median age for Muslims was 27 in 2021, compared to 40 for the population overall.

This means that the Muslim population in the UK has gone from a small minority after World War II to a group of about four million people today—an increase of nearly 200 times compared to the 1951 estimate.

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