Recently, I walked through Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham. I had to remind myself I wasn’t in Kabul or Karachi.

And no, that’s not a xenophobic statement. It’s simply a description. And it’s one most would agree with , though few would dare to say it out loud. Streets lined with shops sporting signs in Urdu or Arabic. Hijabs, burqas, the call to prayer echoing across neighborhoods once known for pubs and post offices. This is cultural disintegration passed off as progress. Walk the streets, and one can see it all for oneself.

London is still the capital, still the city on the postcards. But Birmingham is the nation’s most honest mirror. It tells the truth that polite society avoids. If Britain is dying, then Birmingham is the full-body X-ray showing where the cancer has spread. The most recent news out of the city involved a garbage strike. This is the kind thing that leaves entire neighborhoods piled high with garbage—the sort that drips and steams in the heat. It’s easy to dismiss an incident like this as just another public services dispute. Easy, that is, until you realize it’s part of a much deeper failure. The city council, once the pride of Midlands governance, is bankrupt. Birmingham, the heart of the Industrial Revolution, is flat broke. Roads are littered with holes. Schools are underperforming. Crime is up. Investment is down. Piles of garbage now serve as metaphors for municipal decay.

But the decay isn’t just economic. It is, in no uncertain terms, civilizational. Many of Birmingham’s neighborhoods are functionally segregated. Integration, once the promise of multicultural Britain, has turned into a farcical fiction. There are areas where English is hardly spoken, where British norms and values hold little sway, and where a kind of imported religiosity shapes not only culture, but law. This is not just an immigrant problem. It’s also a governance problem. A political problem. A truth problem.

If you mention it, you’re branded a reactionary. Or worse. But if you don’t, then who will speak for the native-born Birmingham families, who’ve seen their entire way of life erased in a generation? Who speaks for the elderly working-class couple whose street has become unrecognizable, their local shops replaced by halal-only butchers, their local medical services overrun, their culture condescended to as “outdated” by the bright and shiny people who won’t ever set foot in the area?

Again, let me be clear: this isn’t racism; it’s recognition. To pretend that this level of transformation—economic, demographic, and spiritual—can happen without consequence is not enlightened. It’s dangerous and delusional. Birmingham didn’t vote for this. The people living in Birmingham, both white and nonwhite, were not consulted. These changes were imposed from above, decades ago, by politicians in Westminster and do-gooder bureaucrats in Brussels and London.

Birmingham is what happens when a city is left to drift, degrade, and die. It was once the heartbeat of Britain, the workshop of the world. Now it’s a case study in managed decline. A place where ambition used to hum in every rail and rivet, where factories roared and council estates buzzed with working-class activity. That’s all gone now. What remains is an empty shell, a city that lost its unifying identity many years ago. Religious fragmentation has replaced civic unity.

There are now more than 200 mosques in Birmingham. And while freedom of worship is a cherished value, it cannot survive in a vacuum. The British state, paralyzed by fear of giving offense, has failed to enforce any kind of cultural coherence. Sharia councils now operate in the city, offering rulings on matters like divorce and custody that bypass British courts.

Extremism festers, escalating in the shadows. Birmingham has one of the UK’s highest concentrations of support  for the implementation of Islamic law. Nationwide, 40 percent of British Muslims are in favor of Sharia law. This isn’t pluralism. It’s parallelism. And it’s frightening.

And so Birmingham is more than just a city. It is an alarm bell.

When public services collapse, when garbagemen strike, when civil infrastructure crumbles, when youth unemployment soars, and assimilation fails, what can one expect to rise in its place? In Birmingham, it is resentment. It is identity politics. It is religious tribalism. And it is a deepening sense that no one is in control.

Of course, what happens in Birmingham won’t stay in Birmingham. It is the future toward which many other British cities—and the West, generally—are sleepwalking. The question is whether anyone is willing to acknowledge it the obvious or whether, like so much else in the UK today, people will just carry on pretending things aren’t that bad. Shall we pretend that the garbage bins will be collected soon? That the tensions are overblown? That the culture hasn’t really changed? That the streets don’t feel foreign? That everything’s fine?

Everything is not fine. Birmingham tells us so. Loudly. And in more languages than one.