We're Approaching the Year Children of Men is set. Does the Dystopian Classic Mirror Britain Today?

P.D James' novel, published in 1992 and adapted into an Oscar-nominated film by director Alfonso Cuarón in 2006, imagines Britain in 2027 as the world's last stable nation amid an infertility crisis.

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Anyone who’s seen Children of Men (2006) will remember the opening shot. People crowd around a TV in a London cafe as a news broadcaster announces that the world’s youngest person, ‘Baby Diego’, has been murdered by one of his fans. It’s a tell-all scene that imagines what a world that has faced eighteen years with no new births may look like.

The year: 2027.

Based on P.D. James's 1992 novel, Alfonso Cuarón’s brilliant, Oscar-nominated adaptation of the science fiction modern classic was released twenty years ago.

Children of Men’s opening shot.

When James wrote Children of Men over three decades ago, she wasn’t focused on the present or an alternate reality. Instead, she sculpted a world 29 years into the future. Details differ in the film. Instead of being set in 2021, the timeline is pushed 6 years forward to 2027, giving viewers who saw the film during its premiere 21 years of relief.

According to an archived 1993 New York Times review of the novel, P.D. James stated that when it came to the book’s concept, she wondered, “I wondered if there was no future, how would we behave”? Less than a decade until the turn of the millennium, James, born in 1920, had lived through WWII, the Cold War and became a single parent when her husband returned home from war traumatised and subsequently institutionalised.

She likely knew that she wouldn’t live to reach the year she had set her novel (she died in 2014, at the age of 94), but after living through a century of chaos, the endless challenges humanity may face long after she was gone were great enough to imagine a world barely standing on two legs.

When we, in 2026, try to imagine what the world will look like in 2055, many of us will probably want to change the subject. Whilst 80s film series like Back to the Future imagined the 2010s positively, surrounded by flying cars and advanced technology that we either failed to achieve or are still trying to make a reality, they never predicted a world even more chaotic than the one we lived in.

Remember, despite the cheesy 80s fashion trends and peppy pop music, the prolonged Cold War had many people fearing nuclear war daily. Thirty years into the future was the least of their concerns. 80s Hollywood, for the most part, was overly optimistic and productive, churning out a steady supply of popcorn flicks.

No one wanted to think about the future with nihilism in gear yet alone make movies about the terrible ‘what ifs’?. Even with nuclear war films like The Day After, American filmmakers still portrayed such a disaster as one that humanity could move on from. How easy, difficult, or fast or slow this rehabilitation would be was never made clear. But there was never any indication that the world could not recover from such a tragedy.

That’s why a terroriser like the nuclear-war holocaust classic, Threads (1984). When it originally aired on BBC2 on 23 September 1984, the British TV film kept many households up for nights, some even a week. Mortified by its’ fact-driven, documentary-style manner that predicted exactly what may come for the country if a nuclear bomb were to be dropped on the English city of Sheffield, the film was too real and hit far too close to home for people already worried about nuclear war before viewing the film. Director Mick Jackson had even said himself that he found that The Day After was a “blown opportunity”.

Over 40 years later, we dodged a nuclear fallout. Nearing 2027, unlike the reality faced in Children of Men, we are not on the brink of extinction. Whilst birth rates have dropped due to people having fewer children, having children later, putting off starting a family indefinitely, or choosing not to have children at all, we are nowhere near what Children of Men predicted.

However, no one ever seriously predicted Children of Men’s prophecy of an infertility crisis. A possibility? Maybe. But, to be frank, the least of society’s concerns right now.

It’s not the infertility aspect of the film that is scary as we approach the very year the film was set, but rather how vulnerable people are treated in crisis and how the world may avoid succumbing to a hopeless future by exterminating ourselves before fate beats us to it.

Headlines indicating events that have taken place around the world in Children of Men (2006)

One of Children of Men’s themes that resonates with Britain today is immigration, specifically asylum seekers who have become the scapegoat for Britain’s problems such as employment and increased housing costs.

In the film, a devastating immigration crisis has unfolded. In a world gone mad and uncertain, the threat to humanity’s existence has resulted in war and chaos around the globe.

The United Kingdom is one of the last stable nations left. Despite this, Britain is now a military state unable to cope with flooding asylum seekers. Police constantly round up refugees and either imprison them in refugee camps where violence and poverty reign or execute them in concentration camps.

In this dystopia, themes of censorship and police brutality are conveyed as a consequence through the character of Janice, the wife of our protagonist’s best friend. A former journalist, Janice was tortured so severely that she has since been in a catatonic state. Her crime: reporting the truth.

Janice (Philippa Urquhart) and her husband, Jasper (Michael Caine), in Children of Men (2006)

Immigration has been a hot topic globally since Donald Trump began his second term as President in the US in January 2025. During his previous term from 2017-2021, Republican Trump came under fire for his brutal use of ICE and immigration detention centres, where young children were separated from their parents as further incidents of inhumane treatment was discovered.

When Trump beat Democrat candidate and former VEEP, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 elections, Trump had already promised his voters mass deportations and reform of the American immigration system that would target legal immigrants as much as asylum seekers and undocumented individuals.

Unlike in 2018, when inhumane immigration centres across the US hit the media, Trump’s approach to immigration reform sparked a global trend.

In 2024, after 14 years of Conservative rule, Labour candidate Keir Starmer was elected Prime Minister in the UK. Conservatives had lost much support from their voters over the years, with their harsher approach towards immigration not enough to engage their more centrist voters.

By 2025, immigration was a constant news headline. Far-right groups across the UK had become inspired by the US. This climatic shift was headlined in England in September 2025 when the Unite the Kingdom march hit London’s streets. Inspired by Tommy Robinson, a radical far-right personality known for his blunt Islamophobia and co-founder of the English Defence League, the march has become one of the significant turning points that marked Britain’s shift towards a growing community of supporters of Trump-inspired policies.

From a radical stance on stopping asylum seekers travelling to England on boats to pro-British proposals that would exclude foreign nationals, even those who have become naturalised citizens, from claiming benefits, using the NHS and accessing public housing.

These rising beliefs have largely stemmed from the rising far-right political party Reform UK, the modern-day answer to UKIP. Restore UK, an extremist party publicly promoting and encouraging remigration and values British ethnonationalist ideas, are currently a threat to Reform as popularity for the group, only formed this year, is quietly growing.

In this year’s local elections, Reform reigned victorious across the country, winning 600 seats in contrast with Labour, who had lost a shameful 450 seats. Conservatives plunged with 300 seat losses whilst progressive parties like Green Party and Lib Dems still failed to align themselves with Reform’s achievement.

Many of Reform’s promises will likely not proceed past their verbal announcement. But the party’s popularity has risen rapidly over the last two years, especially due to their intolerance of immigrants and asylum seekers. Their tactics towards targeting the working-class over job concerns has not only won them the vote, but have also predicted a potential win for Reform in the next national elections that could mirror Trump’s America.

Theo (Clive Owen) and Kee (Clare Hope Ashitey) in Children of Men (2006)

Whilst Children of Men approach, although extreme, may hit home when thinking about the current state of and attitude towards, immigration in modern-day Britain, so will the living reminder of Janice, whose freedom of the press is oppressed to the point of her body disconnecting from the world around her.

Whilst the majority of Brits would dismiss worries around Freedom of Speech, maybe even laugh at the suggestion that something so simple and fundamental to a democratic state might even be a legitimate concern in a country like the UK, many on the left side of the political spectrum.

For example, the infamous Palestine Action activists, known as the Filton6.

Back L-R: Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Zoe Rogers, Samuel Corner

Front L-R: Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani

In August 2023, a group of 6 activists broke into an arms factory in Filton, near Bristol, where they destroyed over £1 million worth of weapons that would have supported the Israeli army, the IDF, in their activities, especially in the war-torn Gaza Strip. The activists, part of the coalition Palestine Action, were arrested on site and held on remand for nearly 18 months, far past the six-month legal limit of how long someone could be imprisoned pre-trial without bail.

In the aftermath of the break-in, the Home Office designated Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Supporters would go on to protest the move by organising demonstrations near Parliament in Westminster, where many would hold placards stating ‘I am against Genocide, I support Palestine Action’.

Several of these protests would take place, with over 1000 people arrested during one of the most chaotic demonstrations in September 2025, ] just for holding and displaying these placards.

The demonstrations provoke worrisome conversations about the current state of freedom of speech in the UK. Other perspectives would argue that not only was the ban necessary, but the protests were pointless and arresting officer were only carrying out their responsibilities by arresting protestors who had shown support for a prescribed organisation.

Regardless of any efforts, the ban has stayed in place, with the US recently prescribing the organisation itself. Whilst all of the Filton6 defendants were acquitted on burglary charges earlier this year, majority of the group were found guilty of criminal damage.

In early 2026, two of the activists, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Develin were acquitted on all charges whilst the remaining four activists, Ellie Kamio, Charlotte Head, Fatema Rajwani and Samual Corner, were charged and sentenced as terrorists, becoming the first protestors in modern Britain to be convicted as such.

Kamio and Head were sentenced to 6 years in prison, Rajwani five years and eight months due to her age and Corner recieved eight years and eight months due to an additional charge of GBH as he had accidently hit a security guard with a sledgehammer during the break-in.

Causing court watchers great concern were the restrictions placed on defendants' arguments and the jury as a whole. They were forbidden from exercising jury equity and Justice Johnson concealed information from the jurors; one being that if found guilty of the charges placed against them, the activists would be charged as terrorists.

Palestine Action supporters in London protest the organisation’s terrorist designation by holding signs stating their support. Many in this photo would be arrested for holding these signs.

We have passed both P.D James cut-off for dystopia and even succeeded the film’s timeline. We clearly didn’t meet the bleak expectations Children of Men had in mind for us. Even if faint, horrific predictions come true, some may even say that we’re living in a dystopia. This may be in the world’s recent entry into an AI-centric world and the consequences of climate change beginning to flood in; we are facing rocky times, whether one would label our world as a dystopia or a normal existence. Utopia- we’re far from it.

Even at the end Children of Men, there is a glimmer of hope. Britain’s struggles may seem minimal compared to the bleak challenges an alternative England faces in the film’s version of 2027.

That doesn’t mean we must shrug our shoulders and call it a day. In fact, now is the time we must condemn decisions made that may seem small, but could have the potential to develop into atrocities.

If not, we face a future of regretting that we didn’t fight for what was right sooner.

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*Originally posted on Punky Daydreams' Substack, 21 September 2026