'In Southport, the spark for the rioting was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration.' (Getty Images)
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Following the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the aftermath, like those of other recent terrorist atrocities, was marked by what later revealed to be a coordinated British government policy of “controlled spontaneity”. Pre-planned vigils and inter-faith events were rolled out, and people handed out flowers “in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support” as part of an information operation “to shape public responses, encouraging individuals to focus on empathy for the victims and a sense of unity with strangers, rather than reacting with violence and anger”. The aim was to present an image of depoliticised community solidarity within the state’s benevolent, if not adequately protective, embrace.
What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who has been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.
In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.
There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.
Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.
But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.
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SubscribeSome 30 years ago the Muslim population in Britain rioted over a book ‘The Satanic verses’. This terrified the Establishment which has been appeasing them ever since to the detriment of moral sense and indeed Western values. Young white girls were allowed to become sacrifcial offerings for the sexual gratification of Pakistani Muslim men in the hope of diverting them from rioting. Oppossition to the influense of 7th century Islamic values, has been brutally oppressed while the likes of Anjem Choudary promoted Salafi jihadism with impunity.
Having finally understood that our liberalism is seen as weakness by Muslims, some in British society, have taken a leaf out of the Islamic book and started to riot, not over a book, but over the brutal murder of three little girls. It matter not that the culprit is not a Muslim, he is a foreigner in every sense especially in the moral sense that to kill the innocent is foreign to our moral values.
How long and how often this type of rioting will last will depend on Starmer’s ability to demonise those who wish to fight back again the Islamic push into Western democracy.
Racist rubbish.
Lucy Letby killed at least 9 children. Following your logic she is a foreigner in every moral sense. Thus you contort yourself and your argument to tar all foreigners. The epitome of racism.
Now are there some Islamist preachers or advocates of abuse or violence who need locking up, or deporting if that is a legal option? – yes.
But… what of the main thrust of the article? Is the writer also “racist”?
Just throwing slurs around isn’t debate, and it’s not intelligent. Think harder; about what’s happening, and why. Or, like Starmer, can you only knee-jerk in response to the reality of problems you and your ilk are causing in communities up and down the country through your ideological blinkers?
If she is guilty, she is also ‘foreign’ to western morality & should be locked away for life.
I think Elaine’s point is that there are some cultures in which you can kill &/ or rape women and children with impunity & we’ve not only imported them but kowtowed & protected them & their culture blindly for decades.
The amount of semi-tolerated femicide in parts of the developing world, even of little girls, is horrendous if you knew, or cared to know, anything about it.
Racist rubbish.
Islam is not a race. It is a supremacist ideology based on superstition – and therefore as subject to criticism and ridicule as any other irrational belief system. Including yours.
To accuse people of Racism when discussing issues of race is puerile.
Have you lived in an area with a high Pakistani Muslim population? The first complaint I heard of was Mother saying the Police ignored the Pakistani heroin dealers.
Having a drink with a women Police detective I said ” Presumably you speak Urdu ” She looked amazed. I said the Army and the FCO run language courses , surely the Police make use of them , otherwise how can they question people whose only language is Urdu ? The reality is the Police have been ignorant of criminal activity by Pakistani Muslims for decades.
There are also the grooming gangs of Rochdale, Rotherham( 1400 girls raped), Huddersfield, Oxford, Bristol, etc.
When Labour MP Ann Cryer mentioned the problem she was ignored and Sarah Champion MP was told to keep quiet for diversity.
Religions have a World view. What makes it difficult for Many muslims to assimilate into British culture as compared to those from Sikhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Jainism and Buddhism?
Please explain what attitudes Muslims must alter to assimilate into Britain and live harmoniusly with Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Jews ?
Under Islam are all people equal ? What is the significance of dar al-Harb?
You are correct. There is a real issue about immigration into the UK, people do have cause for complaint, there are justified grievances surrounding some aspects of Islam in the UK and, particularly, in the role of the state in dismissing these concerns.
Howe er, failing to recognise that the native British population has its fair share of wicked people is a mistake made by this commentator and others.
It’s an error that shifts focus away from legitimate causes for concern and allows those on the left to nibble away and not answer the questions from a large section of the British people.
“It matter not that the culprit is not a Muslim, he is a foreigner in every sense especially in the moral sense”
Fully agree partly because this recent murderer is just the final straw, also because it is not only concern about Muslims but also because any reasonable person will expect such a criminal to normally be a foreigner and a Muslim.
‘They’ are not the only criminals but they are massively over represented and they are guests in our country. Now is the time to deport any who break any rules.
To where do you deport someone born in the UK ?
where their parents are from as they still have, it seems so, the same values as their parents brought from abroad. To kill little kids with a machete sounds to me like barbarism and totally like someone from the global south would do!
It wasn’t so long ago that someone from the global north (Dunblane to be precise), who went by the name of Thomas Hamilton, shot dead 16, or more, schoolchildren. The problem is, that there are mentally disturbed people of all races, creeds and colours, and unless they’re already on the radar, it’s very hard to foresee them doing something horrific like this.
Of course, there have always been crimes of apparent senseless brutality. But that’s not the point here.
But then, what is the point of this argument?
Ah, that explains why police are always puzzled as to the motive of whatever heinous crime was committed.
I think we’re all puzzled as too why someone would commit this horrendous crime, aren’t you?
A lady vicar who was minority and ethnic affiars officer for a diocese said the two major concerns for their sons were recruitment into violent criminal gangs and into violent Islamic terrorism. For example Richard Reid
Richard Reid – Wikipedia
It would appear that violent Islamic terrorists are good at recruiting people with mentyal problems.
List of people convicted under Terrorism Acts in the United Kingdom – Wikipedia
Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame – Saturday 11th February 2023 (gbnews.com)
How many girls have been raped by men of the Muslim religion ?
In 2014, a damning report published by Professor Alexis Jay concluded that more than 1,400 children had been raped, beaten and sexually abused by gangs of paedophiles in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
Huddersfield grooming gang – Wikipedia
Rochdale child sex abuse ring – Wikipedia
Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal – Wikipedia
Derby child sex abuse ring – Wikipedia
Oxford child sex abuse ring – Wikipedia
Halifax child sex abuse ring – Wikipedia
Starmer was DPP from 2008 to 2013 and did very little to prosecute grooming gangs.
Two incidents in isolation – you might have a point But this incident is not in isolation.
A specific segment of the population have all this in common, despite making up only. c.4% of the population:
systematic grooming, drugging and raping of c. 10k young girls. In Telford it was close to 1/3 of all men in the town from this group who were involved
disproportionately high number of people in the prison population – nearly 4x their proportion as a demographic
perpetrate 67% of acts of terror, and occupy 3/4 of MI5’s caseloads
actively carried out the vast majority of recent terror attacks – from 2x london bridge attacks, to Manchester Arena bombing to Westminster bridge attack and more thwarted
More importantly in the context of this event, in the last couple of weeks have seen immigrants/this demographic:
fomenting riots in Harehills
assaulting armed police in Manchester Airport (to which the narrative was rapidly put out they were the victims)
stabbing an Army officer in Kent
involved in a mass knife fight in Southend
The “oh but other bad people sometimes do bad things” argument doesn’t cut it I am afraid
You may have some difficulty with that. Most countries dont choose to accept murderers who were not born there.
Yet Britain does.
This kind of mass murder from the deranged is a lot more common, in fact you may say routine, in USA. I also recall it happening in parts of Scandinavia (no, not from immigrants). Global south tends to me more authoritarian and orderly, and therefore this kind of event would be far rarer than the libertarian north. You’re basically projecting what you don’t like about your own culture to people you don’t like.
What are you talking about. You just don’t know about it because you don’t see it in the press.
Absolutely. If it were the case that for instance Egypt or Morocco didn’t have far more real crime they wouldn’t need authoritarian government. Many muslim countries do not keep proper crime statistics in fact. After all the aim of Sharia law is not equality before the law but to punish a few in a draconian manner in order to apply exemplary justice.
So in your thinking school shootings are a routine event in the rest of the world, but they’re not reported in the press?
I suggest you read about the Janjaweed,recent Pakistan history, Syria, killing of Muslim by Muslims in Iraq and Algerian Civil War.
Janjaweed – Wikipedia
Algerian Civil War – Wikipedia
Names of the Islamic State – Wikipedia
I was referring lone wolf shooter type scenarios as was the original commenter. Having said that are you seriously giving me an example of a colonial civil war as an example?
Have we so quickly forgotten the 800,000 machete murders in Rwanda in 1994? While knife murders happen everywhere, knife genocide only happens in the global south.
Are you saying you’re more content with it when only one side has wide-spread use of guns like it was in North America?
True, if you have allowed so many immigrants to come to a country, that they cannot be sufficiently integrated later generations will have to suffer the consequences. We see it in my home country too.
What’s your home country?
In 1947 the Indians required the British to go home. Some of them had been born in India (Spike Milligan, Cliff Richards et al) but it was home they had to go.
Not true. Many Anglo Indians stayed on, and by law they were guaranteed representation in parliament., until as recently as 2019.
But then, unlike the muslim invaders of India who preceded the Brits and the current invaders of Britain itself, the Brits, for all the ills of colonialism, were a civilised people who were respected by Indians for their contributions to humanity.
And the Brits definitely never went around committing random acts of terror or form grooming gangs to target girls from other ethnicities.
My mother was the daugter of a Scottish tea plantation manager in Assam, which she left as a child refugee when the Japanese invaded.
Thanks for replying. By Anglo Indian do you mean someone with an Indian and a British parent?
What about someone like Joanna Lumley; born in Srinigar to two British parents? Is she an Anglo Indian?
Apologies for the late reply.
In effect it referred mostly to mixed parentage but there were some whites as well, and not necessarily of British origin – Tom Alter was a beloved personality who was White, but not British origins, and considered himself Indian.
There might have been random acts of violence but there wasn’t, as far as I know, systemic acts of violence or hatred against Whites after 1947.
Yes. In fact many Britons ” stayed on”. In my city Calcutta all commerce was dominated till the early 1970s by the great Scottish managing agency firms- McNeil Magor, Dundee Jute, Shaw Wallace, Andrew Yule, James Finlay, Balmer Lawrie et al.
As a small child I have many pleasant memories of Hogmanny and traditional X’mas lunches etc at the British dominated Clubs.
Anglo Indian can mean both domiciled in India, as well the mixed race people. I was taught by Anglo Indian teachers as all public schools were dominated by them right till the mid 1980s.
See my response above
For them it is jail rather than deportation. But hopefully the image of rapists and killers being put on one-way flights will dissuade most potential offenders.
It won’t. The death penalty has never stopped murderers.
It stopped them doing it ever again though.
Rwanda?
Rwanda was in my view a daft idea still being promulgated by Tory leadership candidates.
Yes, a pretend ‘solution’ to a problem for which the government had no solution. It knew that the scheme could never pass muster legally which gave it room to fillibuster with legal challenges followed by appeals followed by new idiotic laws and further challange appeal cycles. All to deflect from the complaints of the electorate who had voted several times for lower immigration and a crackdown on illegals. This reprehensible gaslighting cost millions of taxpayer pounds and contributes far more to this week’s riots of exasperation than Starmer’s pathetic authoritarian over-reach.
How confusing, another Claire D.
Prison.
The country of his parents! He seems to have absorbed the murderous proclivities of his ancestors!
Rwanda seems willing if the price is right.
Why not deport him back to where his parents came from?
As far as I’m aware it hasn’t been confirmed what faith the Southport attacker is. As a Rwandan he and his family are very likely Christian. But that’s not to say that people can’t convert. I think we had all best wait and see on that key point.
His parents are active in the local church. He may of course have his own religion or none.
I’m hoping there is no religious element to the attack. My concern is his supposed lack of contact with his own family. That makes me nervous that we are likely to hear stuff that will make this situation worse than it already is.
The scapegoating of Tommy Robinson as a method of distracting attention from the real elephant in the room is not going to end well for anyone.
Whilst I don’t agree with everything he says, he has been right about a lot of things that the establishment over the years has sought to cover up.
He most certainly should not be prosecuted again for trying to tell the truth.
Watch the video that got him sued for defamation where he shows how public money was used to silence the truth about what really happened and sign his petition not to be prosecuted for showing it now.
https://urbanscoop.activehosted.com/f/11
I agree. Robinson is an irrelevance trotted out by the left to defend their crazy immigration policy.
Yes, the left are terrified of white people forming their own ‘in group’ consciousness, which is why they demonise ordinary, powerless white people as ‘far-right’.
If the left were consistent, and did the same to other racial/ethnic groups, then you could at least say they are genuinely trying to be ‘anti-racist’. But, they go out of their way to whip up as much hate and racism and in-group preferences as possible in others. This contradiction, double standard, tells us that the left really does hate all white people, and that their obsession with open borders is about hate and colonisation.
The only way out is white in-group awakening, I hope this protests, are the beginning of areal movement, that is joined by the middle class and eventually becomes respectable. We just have to stop listening to the fascist left and organise.
The Left don’t “hate all white people” – that will be slightly bizarre since most of the left ARE white. However they want white people – and indeed non white people and Muslims to conform with their diversity, inclusion, and equity agenda.
Otherwise and I’ve heard this argument before I think the only way forward is that the indigenous community people should be encouraged to self organise and defend their interests.
But we are a long way from that at the moment. Even Farage is toxic to many liberals. Until and unless the majority of white people, and not just a powerless underclass, really feel pain from the policies we’re following, unfortunately we will continue down the path of mass immigration that we are already going down.
“The Left don’t “hate all white people” ”
They do, remember, leftism is now defined by its anti-white racism – the old school liberal left is out of power totally.
The stupid and fearful ones might not be intentionally anti-white, but they are de-facto anti-white as they parrot the narrative regardless. The end result is the same.
I was a bystander and curious onlooker at the Satanic Verses march, watching the police kettling a large group of rioters on Wesminster Bridge. Objects were being thrown. I chatted to a couple of young muslim guys standing near me. They both had jobs in local government in Yorkshire, but told me that if it wasn’t for fear of jeopardising their employment they would be on that bridge. They felt that muslims weren’t given the respect they were due, and the publication of Rushdie’s book was a flashpoint for a sense of separateness and grievance that was already there, 35 years ago, among second generation immigrants who were, on the surface, ‘integrated’.
The core problem is that mullahs infiltrate the minds of young Muslims long before Western education has a chance to take root. The first thing Saudi Arabia and the UAE did to de-radicalise their countries post-911 was to lock up all the noisy mullahs. The West, unfortunately, is too busy protecting malicious mullahs’ right to free speech!
The last Shah’s grandfather was far more extreme in dealing with the mullahs.
I guess they missed the bit about respect being earned, not given.
Which Rule of Law were they respecting?
Well said!
I have a friend who is half Persian and half Lebanese. Her mother is a Maronite Christian, and her father fled the Islamic Revolution as he considers himself an agnostic, and feared for the worst. She understands both Farsi and Arabic. She has been saying for 25 years, based on the conversations she’s overheard through the decades, that the integration of most Moslems is a myth. She’s a Catholic, btw, but most Arabs/Middle Easterners assume that she shares their faith and culture.
Presumably in law the alleged perpetrator of the Southport murders is Welsh. Whether what motivated him comes from somewhere else is yet to be determined. If it did, why did the offerings of multiculturalism and the communities not satisfy?
Islam is a religious state. Not one of many religions. Hardly surprising if it forms a political entity if it exists in a ‘community of communities’ which, operating more like a zoo, cannot address its concerns.
Mr Roussinos should be praised for the lucidity of his descriptions of all these elements. The scales fall from the eyes. If only the imperial rulers of Westminster could find a master chef who could stir the alphabet soup of British society post New Labour into a dictionary. If only these rioters could understand that if they call themselves ‘white’ this is a defeat for them.
True. This is not a fight between whites and others but between freedom loving people and the tyranny of leftist & Islam.
My sentiments entirely. That is the truth of the matter and I would go further.
Islam has seen, and taken advantage of, the possibilities of mass emigration of its followers from the third world to the UK, the EU and America.
Hundreds of millions of them, urged on by promises of 72 virgin like prizes, led by Imams may turn the west into Sharia led countries within a couple of decades.
The West must back Israel if it wants to remain decent and law abiding and democratic (the least worst form of government given human nature!).
Never forget that Radical Islam is antique, unchanging, vile, evil and has “allowance from above” to lie and deceive in the advancement of the cause of Islam.
Never forget Hamas’s example on Oct 7 and the Hostages that still remain in its captivity.
This. Islam, if devoutly followed, is completely incompatible with a secular West.
We don’t have blasphemy laws. We haven’t burnt witches for centuries. We don’t have lese-majeste crimes, we allow comedians, novelists, and other artists to say what they’d like, and we don’t murder people for disobeying a magic sky friend.
But we will always, in the West, have terrible social unrest, and no small amounts of violent crime, if we allow large numbers of people into our countries who disagree.
There’s no place in West, or at least there shouldn’t be, for Dark Ages barbarism. We are ruled by secular laws, not by priests, and we guarantee equal legal rights to all human beings.
Our rights to private property, to free expression, to due legal process, and to basic safety are sacrosanct. There’s no legitimate reason for any government to ignore them. Enforcing them is any government’s primary function.
When those very basic rights are violated, the violators should be punished, even if they have brown skin, even if they have faraway ancestry, and even if they pray to a very different God.
When governments do otherwise, horrible problems occur. Which is what we’re now experiencing.
Israel is just another Middle Eastern country – it has no claims for support. It’s also possible to sympathise with Palestinians while not being sympathetic to immigration. In this case the perpetrator wasn’t Muslim anyway.
A tad ingenuous to state Israel is just another Middle Eastern country whatever side of the fence you are on.
From my side,its the only democratic ,multi faith,liberal country in the region and abulwark against the Shiite extremism of Iran and its proxies.Plus the only Country in the World whre Jews are safe from anti semitism and 21st Century pogroms.
To say Israel is just another Middle Eastern country is not just “A tad disingenuous” (but thank you Pedro) It is entirely out of touch, disrespectful and inaccurate, but like Israel herself the UK allows Mr Bhoto to freely say whatever he likes in the UK unlike every other country in the middle east bar Israel .
Islam is a violent cult.
That’s a stupid comment.
Well, there you seem to give a pretty good justification for the use of the term islamophobia! It almost sounds like something from Mein Kampf. There is a real problem, but demonising the large Muslim community as such, who are here to stay, is not the way to go! Do you actually know any Muslims? I do. Do you actually think the promise of 72 virgins is a real motivation for more than a tiny minority of Muslims, and even they are probably faking it.
Then we have the obvious fact that “Islam” is not like the international communist movement, which was coordinated and often explicitly directed from Moscow. It doesn’t even have anything resembling a Pope, most if not all adherents would at least pay lip service to.
The supposedly cynical but actually naive (not to say stupid(!) Right actually don’t seem to even “get” political and ethnic conflict. There is no understanding acknowledge that religion is often a cover and justification for tribal / national exceptionalism, exactly as in Northern Ireland. Not too much “love thy neighbour there”, we might well notice, despite the strong Christian tradition on both sides!
This “Islam is evil” narrative would be perhaps more acceptable if people also thought that fundamentalist Christianity was evil in a similar way. After all the latter has perpetrated enough horrors at throughout the world in history. But of course tribally they are “our guys” and the Muslims are (or were) the “others”.
The Right would therefore in my view be well advised to steer clear of this anti Muslim rabbit hole, which is a completely losing strategy apart from anything else.
None of this means that we should not be coming down much much harder on those people who actually are inciting division and violence. Ironically it is Muslims who maintain conservative family traditions more than most any other groups. The main issue with the large Muslim population is that it’s very difficult to integrate them meaningfully because of the lack of intermarriage. But their crime levels are much lower than for other groups.
Do you work for the BBC or The Guardian?
I suggest you study Qutb, Mawdudi and Khomeini and the workings of Tablighi Jamaat and Hizb ut Tahir. Basically it is a rejection of Western Culture- especially emanciption of women; democracy, the idea that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law and a return to 7th century style life with Sharia Law. The sexual intercourse with non Muslim girls under the age of 16 years of age by Muslim men is not a crime within Sharia Law.
The reason why Muslims in India wanted a separate country was because they would not accept living in a democracy( one person one vote ) where the majority of the population was Hindu.
Show me where a Muslim man will take orders from a Hindu or Jewish woman.
When one has diversity one also has a diversity of conflicts, as shown in the relations between Pakistan and India.
Seek help.
Pogrom – mass violence against tiny minority of Jews who may live differently, had no aspiration to undermine, forcibly convert or destroy the wider culture. And even when Jews assimilated completely, to the point of abandoning their culture and religion, the Nazis hunted them down. Trying to burn a Mosque down is not a pogrom. It’s not great. It’s a terrible thing. But it’s an expression of a belated and possibly too late anxiety about a religion that expressly commands adherents to take over, convert the wider culture, destroy British/European christian cultures…And if literal military Jihad is a minority proposition, opinion polls show that a very large majority of British muslims hold terroristic, illiberal and genocidal opinions towards homosexuals, Jews …and sometimes other Muslim factions (Sunnis, Sufis etc). And Islam has form – Armenian, Assyrian massacres,,,,the destruction of Jewish populations and culture in every single country in the Middle East and North Africa, except Israel, and they are working on that. Everywhere that Islam becomes a majority, this is what happens, without exception. And Muslims are on course to be a very large, politically determining minority within Britain in just 20 years. So if burning a Mosque is the price of getting the political class to even recognize the problem, it may be a price worth paying. Starter could prevent any further mosques from being burned by simply listening, and organizing a national debate on the problem – and acting accordingly. Moratorium on immigration. Zero immigration from Pakistan, Afghanistan North Africa and the Middle East in perpetuity. Immediate deportation of any illegal immigrants from those countries. Immediate deportation of radical clerics. Monitoring and Closure of mosques pushing Islamicism. And finally 20 years of coercive if necessary integration and assimilation with a view to creating a shared culture across all of Britain. British flags in classrooms – the banning of all other forms of ideology from the classroom. An end to DEI. An end to multiculturalism. Multiethnicity – fine. But one shared culture. National service for late teens (no higher education, no health, no pension for those who resist/refuse). Life long local service – so that Brits of all stripes have to work along side each other – cooking, cleaning, mending, building for the NHS, for schools….. It would not be the old shared culture – pre mass migration. No problem. Change is normal. It will be a new shared culture. It will not be Muslim – but rooted in Christianity.
Starmer won’t do this of course. The problems will get worse and in 20 years we will be experiencing low level permanent ethnic civil war, with enclaves….etc. Happy days. Vote REFORM
What’s extraordinary is that if I were to say that Islam is a supremacist ideology that legitimises violence against outsiders, the oppression of minorities and the subjugation of women, most Muslim scholars would happily agree. It’s only white liberals who would want to imprison me.
The recent elections have clearly shown the Muslim path. Candidates campaigned on one issue, Gaza, and this illustrates how dangerous is the policy of appeasing Muslims. The widespread anti Israel/Jew marches that were allowed to spread their hatred clearly showed the two tier policing we are experiencing, when shown against the Tommy Robinson march. If the non integration of Muslims, the constant appeasement (the teacher from Batley is still in hiding) is allowed to continue, Britain as a free, tolerant society with its cultural tradition of law abiding citizens is finished.
I’m not sure there is a need to particularise specific ethnic groups to get the gist of the article ,which I thought excellent but I understand that it’s hard not to.
A lot of the explanation for the escalation from the poor white side of the community is the increasing alienation of that community. For years they’ve basically been told to suck it up accompanied by the obvious lie that immigration is an unmitigated boon.
It clearly isn’t when incomers make no attempt to integrate within our societal norms and when it is obvious to all that in unskilled employment, immigration suppresses wages and disincentivises innovation.
My ancestry is Irish and exactly the same claims were made about Irish immigration in the 19 th century and they were equally valid. Fortunately, the Irish being by and large a gregarious people , integrated successfully and added to our shared culture, which wasn’t so different to begin with.
On top of this, whilst low skilled immigrants do contribute to taxation they also take in benefits as well as straining resources in housing, education and medical services. That is not the profile of a net contribution.
I also think there is a danger in the government’s depiction of all rioters being hard right and being ripe for retribution with the full force of the law. Obviously, I’m not condoning rioting but given what we’ve seen in relation to demonstrations by JSO and the Palestinian supporters, if the response is much more severe, then that will feed into the narrative that the indigenous population is treated as second class.
How is this relevant to the contents of the article?
This piece is helpful to me because it communicates what I assume is the ruling-class Narrative on immigration and race.
Of course it is utter bilge. That’s because the educated class doesn’t understand the ordinary middle class and doesn’t want to, old chap.
Four things:
The tribe of the lower class is race or the ethnic group.
The tribe of the middle class is the nation.
The tribe of the educated class is the “community” of educated people all over the world. Needless to say, the global educated class is special, as special as special can be.
A state — as a community of people living in peace under a single government — is created by victory in war, because all the men called to the colors become comrades in arms.
That is all.
EH!
For foreigners like Americans to be able to understand Britain in the C21st it is essential for them to realise that the educated middle class in Britain loath and detest their own country’s native working class people more than they loath and detest absolutely anything else in the world. This is so shocking that it’s very hard to fully accept but as soon as you realise this terrible truth, everything else becomes so much easier to understand.
The British educated middle-classes hate the native, white working class more than they care about the murder of little girls – it really is that bad.
Sadly this is quite true, except that not all the middle class join in, but certainly the majority of the ones with power and influence.
Same as the US. Anyone remember the murder of whiteJasmine by a black policeman, 2014?
Excellent article.
“In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism.”
It’s too late for that. Assimilation only works when you have migrants arriving in small numbers with weak communication with their ancestral homelands. It is a matter of survival to assimilate. Now we have uncontrolled mass immigration, along with relatively cheap international travel and instant communication with friends and family back home. This means the formation of parallel communities within the host nation, and the asymmetric multiculturalism that goes along with it as described in the article.
I’m more positive, although recognise the volume has not helped, nor our reluctance to be clear our Citizenship requires some tests and responsibilities. I suspect in 50-60 years though the British nation will have absorbed and assimilated much has it has done for hundreds of years and in fact our core values continue to have a much bigger change impact on the arrivals than the reverse.
A visit to many northern small and medium sized towns shows this is not going to be the case. Even towns like Middlesbrough, previously integrating earlier migration far better than say Rochdale, have been utterly transformed in the last decade. In all of these places British identity is already or will be a minority, replaced by the sectarian notion of ummah. This sectarianism has even extended its reach into the state, and several of these LAs now have exclusive sectarian political groups growing out of what is still notionally the Labour Party. This is bringing sectarian arguments into service provision and contracts. Public sector diversity quotas fan escalate discontent because one sort of monoethnic SME can bid and another sort of equally monoethnic SME cannot. This is Lebanon style multiethnic integration: zero integration where every single decision is viewed through the lens of sectarianism, and where nearly all the Christians have gone.
Unhappily Nell, a very clear and accurate acount.
You clearly have no acquaintance with the modern history of India, let alone of Lebanon and, indeed, most of the Levant and Maghreb.
I suggest you read up on the changes in the Muslim World post 1924 with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood and on Qutb who quotes Ibn Taymiyyah . You are about 50 years out of date. Muslim women in Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Malysia had more freedom in 1973 than today.
When Muslims came from Pakistan, India anmost Arab countries up to 1973 they were more secular, tolerant and Westernised than today.
The inability of Westerners to understand that many Muslims have become less secular post 1973 is why many are not assimilating.
Perhaps instead of hoping for assimilation, citizenship for immigrants should be dependant on accepting the mores of the accepting country and discarding those of the old including especially religion.
Quite. A vote for a Local Council candidate should never be about Gaza for starters.
Asking them to accept the dominant religion of the country whose citizenship is applied for makes no sense in Western democracies where there is freedom of religion. Some countries, like Czechia, do not even have an official religion (looking at your handle, I guess you are familiar with that country).
What applicants for citizenship must accept is that the law stands above and is separate to religion and that all religions (including the decision to not have a religion) are due equal respect within a secular state.
That kind of secularism sounds nice, but if you dig a layer deeper, you realise it is precisely the root of the problem. For where do the laws come from?
They come from the morals, and that is fundamentally religious. The reason the muslims don’t integrate is because there is nothing for them to integrate into.
If the West hopes to save itself, it must return to its Christian roots. And by ‘Christian’ I explicitly mean Roman Catholic.
That’s a wearisome sectarian post. The reason the west outpaced other societies and got democracy, free speech and science was because we abandoned that sort of thinking. That was the enlightenment.
In England there is a tradition of The Christian Church pushing social reform.
St Wilfred preaching against slavery in 1008 AD . John Ball Priest. Roger Bacon said Faith and Reason were separate.
John Ball (priest) – Wikipedia
Read J Burke ” The Day the Universe Changed “. Most of those who created The Industrial Revolution were Non- Conformists and Quakers and they were the major movers against slavery along with the C of E Clapham set.
Founders of the Labour Party were Baptists and Methodists and E Bevin and J Callaghan were Baptist preachers and Sunday School Teachers.
Or as an Anglican or Lutheran, or really any of the mainstream denominations. Their basic moral beliefs are the same as ours. (The former two even have the same litanies.)
Besides which, have you heard any of the Pontiff’s latest pronouncements? Sometimes I wonder if we traded an Inquisitor for a Jesuit version of Che Guevara. The Inquisitor was far preferable!
Either way, I would take a Protestant ruling class or government over Sharia without protest. Under Sharia, one might have to be a polygamist, but would be forbidden alcohol, and I simply don’t have that level of fortitude.
I don’t think I could deal with more than one wife without the booze, that’s for sure.
Returning to authentic Christian roots would involve going a great deal further east than Rome (‘the Church of Rome hath erred’), i.e., to Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria.
By Roman Catholic do you mean rampant kiddie fiddling?
“The reason the muslims don’t integrate is because there is nothing for them to integrate into.”
That is nonsense.
The muslims refused to integrate into the multi faith Arab culture. They refused to integrate with Christian Middle East, Zoroastrian Iran, their conflict with Hindu India continues to this day.
Don’t make excuses. They don’t integrate because they are supremacist and intolerant, and want to dominate other cultures.
On reflection, I think I agree. But we still need to return to our moral foundations.
Religions are all due an equal level of respect, but only as religions. Faith is a private matter, and worship or spirituality is a basic human right. This is so morally obvious that one shouldn’t even have to state so.
What is equally obvious is that religions are NOT to be granted the prerogative of the state, as they are under fundamentalist Islam, which is precisely the problem we’re facing. Westerners do not want to live under strict interpretations of any set of religious laws, particularly ones so odious as strict interpretations of Sharia.
Of course most or at least many Muslims are not crazed fanatics, nor should individuals be forbidden from praying as they like, and living as they like. They do in fact have far more rights and liberties here than they would in most of their countries of origin.
But they are not allowed to attack Jews, nor punish blasphemers, nor forcibly convert infidels. They can’t stone adulterers, nor force women into modest clothing, nor prosecute witchcraft or apostasy.
Their rights end where the rest of ours begin. If they’d like to live in safe, stable, prosperous western countries, then they must live by our basic rules, and not theirs.
Nor should we be so enervated and naive as to allow them to do so.
Their only alternatives, if they persist, should be prison, or repatriation.
Only your own religion is due respect. All others are due tolerance but only if that tolerance is returned.
Too many UK Muslims do not tolerate any other religion let alone the UK’s historic, cultural and official religion.
That is why both Conservative and Labour government wants uk flooded with millions of savages from Muslim countries and Africa.
To make it harder with every passing year to remove them.
Just look at constant flow of illegals from France.
Just sink the boats.
Czechia has no single established religion, but there is constitutional recognition for religions (as organisations) with a particular connection with the country’s history and identity. This status carries with it some legal privileges, for example in the right to run educational/cultural institutions with public funding input. The religions with this status are Christianity (mainstream varieties) and Judaism. A Muslim organisation attempted to apply for this status some years ago, but there was an outcry and the matter was quickly dropped.
The problem is that Islamists turn their noses up at equal respect. They think they are superior to non believers, and want special privileges not equality. They don’t understand equality, it is alien to their culture. That’s what makes them so dangerous.
You fail to realise that the Muslim Brotherhood and other similar groups wish to return to Sharia Law.
“citizenship for immigrants should be dependant on accepting the mores of the accepting country and discarding those of the old including especially religion.”
This might not be an unreasonable idea at a theoretical level, but practically speaking, especially at this stage in proceedings, how on earth would it be achieved? The only way to set about doing so has monstrous implications for state overreach – just not an option.
It would though be possible to stop these chappies taking out their terri towellng mats of a Saturday morning on the High Street to say prayer with some one hundred other fellow worshippers.
It has been argued that the Roman emperors in Constantinople resisted the ‘Germanification’ of their provinces. Whereas in the Western Empire, the incoming peoples were of sufficient numbers to alter society and its governance, the Western emperor eventually only being paid loose fealty by local ethnic governors.
Perhaps those emperors ensconced in Ravenna would have recognised in their final years the relationship between the Roma of Leeds and the imperial authority in Westminster. Or that between the imperial centre and the colonial governors of the ‘communities’.
At the same time, the new peoples in the Western Roman provinces lost contact with their homelands. In doing so they became locals, evolving into the peoples of feudal Europe.
If immigration is in large numbers, assimilation reverses direction, is not stopped despite what the governors of the British state might want.
Shouldn’t immigrants to our society be treated as ‘foreign residents’, who have no call on housing, welfare,schools, hospitals and therefore have to be self reliant via insurance. As a concession they should not have to pay income tax. They should not be offered citizenship except in the case of bona fide marriage. In this context trouble makers could be deported.
Hard to live in a country and not use its roads, health services, water and energy infrastructure etc. Does any country allow workers not to pay tax? (Exclude asset owners in tax havens).
Mostly agree but of course they should pay income tax. They are guests and need to pay their hosts for their lodging.
Very perceptive!
“Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do.’
Words can only be better than bricks if people are allowed to use them.
The people brave enough to use words instead of bricks, got bricked themselves for speaking the truth.
Brick wounds heal. Words live forever.
The pen is stronger than the sword.
Who was bricked, physically, for daring to speak about inter-ethnic conflict? Or is that an exaggeration?
Concur there are occasions when we really must speak about this, but there is also a way of doing it that doesn’t stoke further division. Far Right driven social media, and you can listen to the likes of Robinson and Tate from earlier this wk, pedalled the Southport murderer was a recent Boat arrival being watched by the security services – clear tosh and lies. They knew what they were doing though didn’t they, and even more so as the clicks on their social media were monetised.
Just how much of a following does Tommy Robinson have in Merseyside?
And Andrew Tate is as Black as Kamala Harris. His father, Andrew Emory Tate, was a breakthrough African-American chess player.
Far Right Black people? Are they the new scapegoats?
.
I’m confused about the references to Tate. Unless I’m confusing him with someone else, he’s definitely a Muslim and keen to proclaim it.
It still amazes me that Commonwealth citizens who have any residential rights in the UK, such as a student visa, get full voting rights for the duration. I don’t know of any political party that plans to change this.
Dear B.Emery, “Words can only be better than bricks if people are allowed to use them.” Excellent statement . Thank you.
Or vice versa.
As a person, according to Ancestry.com, of part English, part Irish, part Scottish, part Welsh, and part Norwegian and Swedish ancestry and am Australian born, what does ethnicity mean? Clearly, I am of Australin nationality.
Ethnicity may be as fraught as Race when it comes to politicisation of identity. I choose to identify as an Australian with a historical North West European background. Anything more complicated and I may become self conflicted about which bits to prioritise ( eg. I don’t want my Irish bit to hate my English bit or the other way round).
But do you broadly wish to live according to Western values, of freedom and freedom of expession within the law?
That’s what divides communities; those who wish to integrate and those who don’t. That’s why it’s not about racism per se. J Watson, take note.
Absolutely.
Addendum for any new readers: the comments by J Watson have been removed.
Edit: Sunday am – and now they’ve been reinstated.
Like all generational Australians, (including the burgeoning number of self-ID’d Indigenous) I too am a mixed bag. By generational, I mean that all my grandparents were also born in Australia, before Federation in 1901, and knew no other country. Several before them too.
By marriage and settlement of many years, I’m UK citizen too. I happily accept and am part of UK constitutional monarchy, cultural inheritance and rule of law. Like Aris, I resent being chucked into a general ethnic pigeonhole of “white” while everyone else gets to choose from more sub-genres than hip-hop and heavy metal combined.
Goodness me Brian, you’re probabaly a relative!
He could be. I believe the Kneebones are connected to the Hipbones by way of the Thighbones and eventually to the Backbone and your ancestors the Ventricular Chambers.
Same. I’m an interesting mix of British Celtic and Scandinavian, and Austrian with a bit of Italian. While this might have been a terrible inner conflict durin ww1 and 2, today I’m comfortable with the shared values as a British (and Canadian) citizen.
So 80 years ago my forbears would have been blasting one another’s heads off. But it’s possible to reconcile, but you have to work at it. The Muslim minority here in the uk expressly doesn’t.
This is going to go on until something really dreadful happens
Australin ?
Shouldn’t that be Austrayan ?
You are ethnically Australian. There is such a thing.
How long until the BBC start to go after Badenoch for speaking the plain truths that they have long been complicit in hiding.
The Guardian has begun. Count the Badenoch articles just this week.
Well if she becomes Tory leader I’m voting for her. She’s an outstanding example of assimilation.
I think I’ve got a nascent girl crush on her. She’s just fearless and fierce and forthright in a way so many other politicians aren’t (or in a way others try to nail, but can’t – Suella Braverman, ahem).
Also, she’s able to stand up and tell it like it is on integration because she’s made the journey herself (I believe she considers herself a 1st generation immigrant). That gives her an authority on the matter that other politicians can’t hope to muster.
I maintain: you only understand the trials, tribulations and inner psychological struggles of integration if you’ve been there yourself.
I like Badenoch, however she is tiny minority of integrated migrants.
Basic question is why do we need any of them, especially Muslims?
Douglas Murray calculates that mass immigration cost this country well over 100 billion a year.
So much for them being net contributors.
The BBC news this morning has already aligned the rebels with these terms, Far Right, facist, Nazi, racists. It’s aleardy not safe to be Jewish in the UK. Soon, very soon it’s not going to be safe to be white. I’ve decided I’m black now, like Kamala Harris! [Or maybe I’m going to be a man, or a tree, or…. ] NURSE QUICK!
A good read. I can’t help thinking that if society struggles to understand the difference between “sex” and “gender”, are they ever going to understand the difference between “race” and “ethnicity” ?
Absolutely. I’ve noticed that many commenters, discarding the idea that the Jewish people are a race, have decided that they’re a religion – ignoring all the Jews who are secular or even practice another religion such as Buddhism. I’ve pointed out many times that the Jewish people are an ethnic group. The distinction is important because if being Jewish is simply a religion, Zionism is no longer understood as a national self-determination movement on par with other ethnic self-determination movements of the 20th C which are accepted without a blink.
I know this isn’t about Britain but I use the the Jewish people as a good example of the distinction between race and ethnicity.
I’m not making a rhetorical point here; I’m genuinely seeking clarity.
Is it the case that a gentile can convert to Judaism and become Jewish? If so, wouldn’t that prove that Jewishness is a religion and not an ethnicity?
This is in parallel to the claim that Islamophobia is not racism per se, because Islam is not a race either.
I always think of the analogy of a Native American tribe which adopts an outsider. They become in every way a member of the tribe but the tribe isn’t any less an ethnic group. Converts to Judaism likewise become Jewish by adoption, but the Jewish people remains what it is – a tribe with its own customs and ways and bloodlines.
It’s one of the strange aspects of Jewish identity that you can only join the Jewish people by conversion to the religion, but those born Jewish do not lose their identity if they don’t practice the religion.
I think most feel it’s the volume rather than inward migration per se that creates the tension and problems. The legal growth has been signed off and agreed, esp by a Right Wing Govt in power for last 14 years, for supposed economic reasons. There will be some signed off asylum seekers, (and it’s poss the Southport murderer family came as a result of the mid-90s genocide in Rwanda), but primarily, and painfully, the migration has been driven by economic policy. We have a tendency to forget that as places a big question on our economic model which we like to avoid confronting.
Culturally of course we swapped EU migration, more often from a western tradition and values, for a wider worldwide importation net through the folly and lies of Brexit. Oh the irony.
Assimilation is easier if numbers lower, but it also can be aided by other policy we’ve avoided – strengthened citizenship requirement including command of the language (although one suspects some of the Southport Rioters might struggle with a basic citizenship test) and ID requirements (especially as an added deterrent against illegal). Accessing some services, other than a safety net, perhaps linked to strengthened citizenship requirements?
Agree with many of the Author’s contentions but let’s not equate the coordinated thuggery and social media stoked conspiracy of what is happening now with likes of the Leeds (Roma) and Leicester (Muslim/Hindu) examples of riots. Both need to be stamped on hard and perpetrators locked up too, but they are not of equivalence. We need to remember what happened too in the summer of 2011 when riots and looting spiralled for a couple weeks across our cities moving quickly from alleged reasonable grievance into common criminality. Be careful what we try to justify as it rarely ends quite where you hoped.
“Right wing government in power for fourteen years…”?
I rather think you’ve got your piece of straw on the wrong foot…
I had rather hoped that having all you earlier comments deleted might make your class hatred a little less extreme. No chance, eh?
Culturally of course we swapped EU migration, more often from a western tradition and values, for a wider worldwide importation net through the folly and lies of Brexit.
Except, of course, we didn’t. Immigration from South Asia long predates the arrival if Eastern Europeans under the terms of your beloved single market.
But we did unfortunately HB. You just have to look at the numbers.
On the removal of comment – what sometimes happens is a comment draws a response that is threatening etc and Unherd take both down. There are some on here can’t stop themselves. You and I may disagree, alot, but doesn’t drift into personal threats
A greater measure of the same thing is not business as usual.
The state may have wide coercive powers, but what if they are they built on a foundation of sand? The account written nearly twenty years ago, A Land Fit for Criminals, by a probation officer, David Fraser, is revealing in this regard.
Fraser’s observation that the failure of the state to protect its citizens even from everyday crime calls into question the state’s legitimacy. The USSR had ‘wide coercive powers’.
If anyone were to think that local services can supervise the ‘neurodivergent’ only need remind themselves of how frequently they hear these ‘authorities’ confess that they are ‘learning lessons’ after a tragic death of someone, often a child, in their care.
The controlled spontaneity continues its work at present. Faith leaders pray in the streets of Southport. A nan, named Pat, holds up a placard for the press to photograph, standing outside a mosque in Liverpool to ‘protect’ it. Bless. But Pat, why not show true solidarity and enter the mosque as a convert? Why the remove of the outsider?
The most thoroughly nauseating thing about this Southport episode and others like it is that what was once regarded as private grief is now commodified as a community possession. Private sorrow purloined by the state and its spontaneity marionettes as the only remaining thing it has to use to smooth community relations. Even grief cannot be allowed to have a private life.
As for the community in Southport, we are told by roving street pastors that it will ‘heal’. Have they not read the Gospel? A house divided against itself must fall – and great will be the falling of it. And before that, the blind will be led by the blind towards that stumbling. Before the flood, these deaf pastors are told by Jesus of Nazareth, everyone was carrying on their lives as if it would all continue as it always had been – until the sudden moment the deluge carried them all away.
The Southport ‘community’ will forget these children. Not callously, but inevitably. While the parents continue everyday to fall into a bottomless pit. A well of dark gravity of irretrievable loss. Continuing among the fading remnants of their world until their lives are utterly spent. As W S Merwin put it in the poem Separation: Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its colours.
To admit that the kind of obviously selective policing routinely seen in Britain isn’t “fair” but then concluding by saying things will just somehow carry on is a bit optimistic. Also, in view of the violence coming from different “communities”, I fail to understand how the British ethnic majority can be seen as the most volatile actor here.
I’ve been away a while but I’m still British enough to understand that fairness and fair play goes to the core of Britishness and that acceptance of (and submission to) the institutions that govern you is, in part, conditional on the perception of them operating in a manner which is seen as fair.
And they aren’t. And when the majority ceases to accept the institutions and the structures governing their shared life, you have enormous and very serious problems.
Keir Starmer’s speech, skirting as it did around the violence committed by other ethnic groups, was the most tone deaf thing I’ve heard. I think your new Labour government is going to learn quite quickly that the limits to the policing and governance methods relied on in the past 3 decades have been reached and that simply cracking down on the “far right” or “ultranationalists” or whatever label they’re being given is going to backfire in a large way.
Those idiots throwing bricks at mosques and burning police cars need strict policing, but they are the tip of an iceberg of shared feeling and discontent that needs to be actively, fearlessly and above all FAIRLY addressed rather than this kind of lazy, minimal “just-enough-to-keep-the-peace” governance.
The ‘just enough to keep the peace’ governance – the recovery strategy – that Mr Roussinos describes (see also, Lucy Easthope, The Recovery Myth), is a tacit acknowledgement that these disturbances which have very specific characteristics as opposed to everyday crime, cannot be prevented.
The peace is not kept.
And when it is restored, it is at a lower level of tolerance than before. These actors in the ‘organised spontaneity’ are the ones who say, ‘peace, peace’, when there is no peace ‘For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace‘. (Jeremiah viii.11).
Tellingly, this recovery strategy of organised spontaneity was not used in the Salisbury attacks. A chemical weapons attack on a nuclear power, though potentially threatening war, was not of the same characteristics as these ethnic disturbances, such as in Leeds. There was no perceived threat by any community to itself. It was on a par with an oil tanker that had jack-knifed on a motorway and the spillage had to be cleared up.
I think you are right about fairness. People have been watching Palestinian protesters engage in thuggish behaviour for six months now in Canada and elsewhere with the police doing absolutely nothing. This type of violence has been unprecedented in Canada – Jewish day care centres and schools have been shot up and fire bombed. A school bus was torched last week. Jewish neighbourhoods have been invaded by mask wearing thugs threatening residents with smiling police watching on. Cracking down on anti immigration protesters after all of this kid glove treatment – even though they deserve it – is likely not sitting well with a lot of people.
“controlled spontaneity”? … a nonsensical oxymoron: “uncontrolled spontaneity”? …a nonsensical tautology. Just the sort of yukspeak used by governments to torture our language in the attempt to fool the masses.
No. By ‘controlled spontaneity’ he meant the officially sanctioned response to an atrocity like Southport or the even worse Manchester Arena attack. He meant people being expected to clutch little candles and sing ‘Don’t look back in anger”
Actions can have consequences:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/25/albanian-man-taken-from-uk-psychiatric-ward-to-deportation-flight-report#Echobox=1721895553
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Emily_Jones
Fantastic article.
Indeed it is. Earned my subscription.
A good essay. But I think too generous toward Starmer. His reaction to the riots cannot mask his identitarian and progressive ideological reflex; super tough authoritarian language toward the idiot white protesters (we are watching you) which contrasts so much with his response to the earlier Leeds riots and machettes in Southend. He had 14 years to address the problems facing a hitherto successful multicultural experiment now going sour because of Leftist political mangling. He had an opportunity to address the huge disquiet and fears held by a vast silent non rioting majority. A fear not just about the violence on our lawless streets but now the shadow of sectarianism in our politics too. A fear that mass uncontrolled migration of 8 million has unhinged the country and broken public services. The debate over double standards or Two-tier knee bending policing was already red hot and had seen Suella booted out of Cabinet. The litany of violent crimes by those seemingly full of hatred toward us and our Western society was so great it simply required him to say what Badenoch has said today – that we now have a serious scary problem, one the State has to commit itself towards tackling via a firm even handed calm policy to bring order, assimilation, control. But no. Astonishingly, in just three weeks, this former legal/human rights champion of open borders and asylum has destroyed the Rwanda plan and the hope of a deterrent toward people smuggling; then came the grubby appeasement on Hamas/Israel. The naked imbalance in his rhetoric on lawless streets (does he not recognise it? Is it deliberate,?) has instantly disastrously positioned his Progressive State and its police as one allied more closely to the interests of minority victim groups..as happened so horribly with the grooming gang scandal. Coupled with Reeves shrill and mendacious debut – one drenched in naked socialist class war – the new Labour Government has swiftly revealed an inner ideological fervour. Starmer told us he is a Progressive and a Socialist. Neither credo tread lightly on our lives. It is a recipe for disorder and further communal agony. They have turned their backs on a much needed middle path and opportunity for genuine enlightened change. Instead they seem to be charging, blundering into a minefield.
naked socialist class war
The difficulty I have with this is that what Reeves is clearly doing is building a case for further expropriating the general population in order to reward the home counties state class that is now Labour’s principal base of support.
Whilst that is certainly a form of ‘class war’ it certainly doesn’t conform to the traditionally understood meaning of the phrase.
Good post otherwise.
You are right. Their self proclaimed ‘socialism’ is mixed in with progressive groupthink and is therefore something brand new. Class war still, but the old definition does not capture it. Starmerism is instinctively pro union and more ardently still pro State where union power now resides (lets hope we see unions fight for the North Sea workers, thrown onto the pyre). But what has rapidly emerged is a scary new iLabour deology wholly infected by the identitarian mania and virus. See how they already are segmenting us. Us and Them. The Elect and the Damned ‘Working people’ with no savings and the legally privileged minorities are good and worthy of the full protection of the State. The Rich, Non Doms and all wanting to use our elite schools fall outside. Working class white Brexiteers do not. Nor do British Jews. Nor- incredibly – do the legions of workers in the private sector who hold the investments thst fuel our economy. We are seeing a ‘Fourth Way’ emerge. Unlike Blair’s Third Way (ok with capitalist growth which is used to feed a bigger State), these hardcore progressives (detached from reality in their 14 year opposition cave,) are actively hostile to free enterprise. Hostile!! The SME sector – and its greedy kulaks – are about to be blitzed and nobbled by insane new race and worker rights. The seeds of their Govenment’s failure – incredibly – have been sown in a matter of days. A re affirmation of their primary allegiance to minority victim groups and disdain for the fears of a majority about the lawless streets and mass migration. A destructive naked class attack on all the true engines of possible growth. A commitment to a broken bloated workshy State and the likes of immoral Young Doctors. Ludicrous belief in ‘growth’ via Soviet style top down Statist Mission Growth through three dud ideas – an impossible property bubble, an EU alliance and ruinous blackout inducing green eco dreams/,follies. Blair would never have made war on so many. But the die is cast. The Fourth Way it is. The Damned must take their medicine.
But already we feel the tremours. Honeymoon over. Blinkers off.
Well if he hasn’t already realised he soon will. He’s got to change his tune. I was appalled by the recent riots but I understand them. Immigration from the 3rd world has to stop.
There were lots of votes for ‘progressive’ parties at the last election. Hopefully they will enjoy the outcome.
In their leafy suburbs and villages with their cheap cleaners and plumbers, their children in private schools and access to private doctors?
I would agree with all of it apart from one phrase.
“hitherto successful multicultural experiment”.
It was never successful and it will never be.
It is just that problems were easier to hide because numbers of migrants were much lower.
Any examples of successful multicultural country?
Good post, good question. What I was trying to signal was that the British working classes had by the1980s made uniquely positive strides in welcoming migrants. Our toleration is no myth. Look at the mixed race data! It contrasts so much with France or Russia. The first vanguard generations of both SE Asians and Caribbean workers shared in this success. But then all changed. The Left in local govt from the 1980s on, introduced top down their toxic alternative credo of multiculturalism, undermining assimilation, trashing native culture, building ghettoes – see the Honeyford Affair – …and then in the nineties came radical Islam to inflame that community and further shatter cohesion. Blame for the decade long slide and failure of our multiculturalism sits squarely with the mischevious ideological Left (now esconced in Government)..not a white working class already left far behind by globalisation, the savage impact of the single market and the London Elite’s obscene regional bias. They did good. The destroyers are in the House.
If only they would literally blunder into a minefield things may improve.
What a profound mess, which will create problems for centuries. And all due, all of it, to the fools who smugly consider themselves the smartest people alive.
The post-WW2 order is a regime, and like all regimes, it won’t last eternally.
The post-WW2 order was set up by the United States. It gives the US military and economic hegemony over Europe. Under the platitudes and euphemisms, is a strategy of divide and conquer. The US, like all empires before it, doesn’t want anyone competing against it. Balkanising Europe has been the strategy of the US ever since the collapse of the European imperial order after WW2.
Once the US empire starts to weaken, hopefully that is already happening, then the situation in Europe will change dramatically.
How it plays out we have no idea – decolonisation, partition, Islamification? But the childlike stories about ‘multiculturalism’ are just that, stories for the children to keep them comfortable as the big boys play the great game.
Regrettably “Europe”, as in the EU, is not run by anyone who would remotely count as a “big boy”, or, frankly, even adult. It is run by children who aggrandise themselves by issuing more laws, and more regulations but who cannot grasp the first principles of the geopolitical reality.
Strangely Merkel probably did. Allying cheap commodities from Russia with German engineering was certainly a way to get into the game in a meaningful way. And what else could her private talks with Putin have entailed?…certainly not mere pleasantries. Why she then went off on an immigration binge is unfathomable.
Not really unfathomable. The Stasi have reverse engineered the collapse of West Germany using Merkel as a front woman.
The state of Germany now …….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DS-ssBXu78
“Regrettably “Europe”, as in the EU, is not run by anyone who would remotely count as a “big boy”, or, frankly, even adult.”
I agree, I think Europe suffered total defeat to the US in WW2, and has been in a state of nigh on vassalage ever since. I think the UK is functionally a semi-automous state at best, as is most of Western Europe.
The point is, these infantile stories about ‘multiculturalism’ are surface level fairy tales. Those with power ( we can argue who they are and what they want) clearly want a balkanised and easily exploitable Europe. It’s regime policy. Change will only happen once decolonisation from American empire happens, the US collapses or weakens, or there is regime change within the United States itself and changes American imperial strategy 180.
According to someone from Security apparatus of EU country, his German counterpart was asked this question at security conference.
He said “she wanted Nobel Peace Prize like Obama”
Mind you, he did not say she, he was much more rude.
Sorry we didn’t just let you all become part of Imperial Germany or a vassal of the Third German Reich, and again your welcome for not becoming a protectorate of the United States of Soviet Socialist Republics, but hey if you really want out I’ve heard China is welcoming anyone with open arms you just have to agree to let them punish your citizens for any expression of anti-China sentiment, and avoid mentioning Taiwan exists, and make sure your PM pays proper homage to Xi like Treudue does.
That fact of the matter is that a small island nation like Britain cannot steer matters meaningfully in an age of continent sized nations, and populations numbering in the order of hundreds of millions, when the decision was made to give up its Empire the decision was made to give up it’s great power status. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong I’m saying it is what happened as a matter of fact. The one bargaining chip that you still have is you had a chance to get a seat at the nuclear table while they were still inviting people which assures you will probably be able to maintain your independence as a nation but not much beyond that in all likelihood.
Thank you for the honest reply. But you have to understand, just as you once demanded independence, so will we one day.
You raise a number of points.
The USA didn’t support Britain in either war as a matter of morality, but as a matter of self interest. In both cases the USA profited. In WW1 it became the creditor of the British “Empire” (which wasn’t really an empire but a trading system…free trade enforced by the Royal Navy…) and in WW2 it destroyed “Imperial Preference”, a protectionist tariff system, and thus opened markets to US trade.
However the pursuit by a country of its own self interest is entirely right. It is what the rulers of countries do…and should. It enriches the country and its people…but mainly its ruling class.
China is naturally pursuing the same course. And Taiwan is part of China, as is recognised by all, including the USA. The USA will not go to war with China over Taiwan; there is no prospect it could “win” and even if it did there is no benefit for it. Having an eternal liability is no benefit whatsoever, as the USA now realises with regard to “Europe”, which has “freeloaded” on the USA since 1945. No matter who becomes US President, that well is running dry for Europe. It will be interesting to see how Europe copes without nurse holding its hand.
I’m not sure there was a “decision” that Britain give up its “not an empire”. The thing just became unprofitable and not worth the effort of trying to maintain, so it dissolved, under the guise of Britain being the beneficent guardian granting freedom to its wards. The British people didn’t care because they never benefited anyway, only the British ruling class did.
The USA is now in a similar position. The “American Empire” is costly in treasure, and increasingly blood, for little benefit. The USA will become isolationist and protectionist…and do well from it.
As for Britain it will remain a US ally (or vassal…), mainly because there is no realistic attractive alternative. The EU is effectively finished (but doesn’t yet know it) and will fracture, each state seeking its own path. Probably the Western part will become a German economic area and some of the East gravitating to the Russia/ China axis.
Wonderful : “state euphemisms”, “communities”, “community leaders” Keir Starsimer is just the chinless face of today, won’t last long, no ideas and camouflaged with DEI will make matters worse. If our leaders were determined to put effort in to making our great country a place of belonging rather than maintaining segregation through multiculturalism, even better. The most surveilled nation on earth and this PM thinks increasing use of facial recognition is the answer – more euphemisms ? What, stop and search now improved with, stop and present your papers? Good idea Keir….
As so often it is the white working class who have done the maths and are acting accordingly. Unlike the pearl-clutchers and keyboard warriors.
Not really a case of ‘doing the math’. But even the most yobbish brick-chucker has a better understanding of how societies operate than the woke Western leftist educated/academic. The latter is a Neitzsche-style ideological ‘superman’ (ie always right/right side of history) type, a late-stage Enlightenment product (hyper-‘rational’, hyper-hubristic) who has less in common with the rest of the world than your average yobby rioter, hence less instinctive understanding of how communities/society/other cultures work ie poorer understanding of reality. The brick-chucker doesn’t ‘do the math’, the wokester does but comes up with (incorrect) self-confirming mathematical answers to complex psychological questions.
Self-evidently, Starmer, who has been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack
Let’s not talk about the many failures of the CPS in this sphere whilst he was DPP, eh?
We said some time ago that Starmer has poor stuff for national leadership. He has shown a consistent inability to read the national mood, relying on negative voting instead. His own party will now be lining up to replace him, talking tough while lining up a new round of Eurofederalism.
Cabot
5m
The Violent protests are a tragedy . Not because they happened but because of what didnt happen . If there had been peaceful marches about violence of an ethnic origin in the UK politicians would have had to listen.
But the thick thugs let the politicians off the hook and let them dismiss concerns as “Far Right”
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The politicians will Not listen to white protesters be they violent or peaceful. Protest violently you’re a racist thug. Protest peacefully you’re a still a racist bigot.
Worse still, they’ve politicized the police to such an extent that they either take the knee or run from conflict when it is a visible minority but seek to exacerbate the situation when the protesters are white and arrive with truncheons at the ready, riot shields, police dogs and horse.
I suspect that, if the marches were peaceful to begin with, the police would pretty quickly make sure they weren’t. The narrative of ‘violent thugs’ has to be maintained.
The Solution lies in Freedom of speech .
I agree, but I’m not sure how you mean…
This is the first of the ‘How (Insert European Country here) Ignored it’s Ethnic Conflict’ articles written by hypocritical cowards from Unherd, Spiked and the Spectator who have for years resolutely avoided the subject of Islam, and in many cases contributed to the gaslighting and scolding of those who’ve bothered to understand the ideology.
“But modern Britain… is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so.”
Yep, boiling the frog slowly so he won’t jump.
We’re now a diverse society, they are defined by disunity, it’s how they are and always have been. We can’t split up like Yugoslavia (having no clear ethnic homelands or territories), all very diverse societies have to be held together by force not consent ie an authoritarian state. The so-clever types think it’s a question of management, messaging, education, goodwill or whatever but all diverse societies involve different groups vying with one another for access to state power. We also have millions of people from low-trust, poor-outcome cultures with no history of rule of law. Wokeness encourages special treatment for favoured ‘minorities’ (we never hear about the Chinese ‘community’) but is blind to unintended consequences, it encourages everyone to play the identity game.
For some reason I couldn’t reply directly to J Watson, so it’s here –
“The legal growth has been signed off and agreed, esp by a Right Wing Govt in power for last 14 years, for supposed economic reasons.”
Surely you know large scale immigration from the EU started when freedom of movement was opened up to eastern Europe, and that this was quite definitely under Blair. New Labour were surprised by the scale of it but chose not to try and limit it because of the boost to GDP it provided, or perhaps they had their hands tied by EU rules.
Either way, it’s the mistake that led directly to Brexit, not ‘folly and lies’. Where the Tories come in is to continue the same policy after Brexit, with non-EU migrants, presumably again for economic reasons.
Allowing this scale of economic migration for about 2 decades has already been a disaster. High house prices (also due to loose monetary policy), the young unable to form families without inheritance, stagnant productivity and, if you consider it a disaster (I don’t), Brexit. So much for economic benefit!
This disaster seems likely to only get worse going forward and I fully expect those that have cheered on this migration, even when it’s been to their own detriment, will not recognise their culpability in this at all.
Interestingly not one single eastern European I spoke to during the lead up to the referendum intended to vote Remain. In addition they all wanted to see net immigration across the board massively reduced due to the pressures on housing, schools, services, etc.
To their credit they all saw the irony of their stance (some were fairly recent immigrants.)
Mass immigration kicked off in 1998.
Net inward 1997 47,000
Net inward 148,000
Mainly from subcontinent and Pakistan in particular. Still Bliar of course.
Excellent article.
Aris’ link to Paul Morland is fascinating (https://www.paulmorland.co.uk/) because this guy is a demographer and, at present, this seems to be the key to out troubles which is what Aris seems to be saying. Yet, in the last paragraph or so, he seems to unwind his argument completely concluding that a rather more “coercive” state will easily contain inter-ethnic problems. I am left saying “Why have you told me this story at such length if its significance is so small?” But an excellent article!
Is anyone astonished that a Welshman allegedly committing child murder could result in all this?
Well, a Norwegian stabbed a number of people in Russell Square in 2018.
TransWelshman
Good article. I was struck byStarmer’s reaction to the Southport riot, when he repeatedly referred to the Southport “community” and how “outsiders” had invadedthat community. Theonly community a national politiciian shoul be talking about isthe UK.
Identitarians divide us into multiple groups and communities. You are right. The Nation does not exist in this new credo.
There’s something extremely sinister about the ‘outside agitators and provocateurs’ narrative that they’re developing. How soon before we start hearing about Emmanuel Goldstein?
Besides 4 out of 5 of those arrested in Southport are locals, as a Times writer bravely notes.
If you care – sign here https://urbanscoop.activehosted.com/f/11
Why would a society choose to become pluralist? It happens historically, but never willfully – until the 1990s. We went from assimilation of newcomers, to deliberate Balkanization in the blink of an eye.
No other post-colonial society post-ed its own colonies though…
Ought that not make some difference to the nature of ours?
Wishful thinking. It’s all burning down.
I truly hope that more civic disorder will be forthcoming to show the delusional elites that the citizens they “rule” over have had enough of their ethno-Keynesianism. A nation is more than an economy and more than a business model. Down with managerialism. If you cannot fund the welfare state’s promises without undermining the nation, reduce the promises, reform the welfare state. If you cannot prop up aggregate demand for products, housing and services without undermining the nation, tell your businesses to stop growing domestically and instead look across the border for opportunities.
This was a good column and made many good points. The comments are good also, sprinkled with much frustration at the UK’s political impasse, when it comes to how to deal with religions that won’t “play the game” as it always was understood. The real problem in the UK is that we try so hard to be fair and understanding that we have made a rod for our own backs. This genie of Muslim assertiveness can only be put back in its lamp by forceful intervention by government. Religions (all of them) need to be kept out of the public sphere. They are all simply fairy tales to comfort fearful people, who need codes of conduct to live (and die) by.
The next step in mankind’s evolution is when it learns to dispense with religion.
Regarding your final point, that’s something i’ve been advocating in these columns for quite some time now. If we could do so, we might still regard homo sapiens as a young species, not yet “wise” enough among the generality of world populations to understand the nature of our origins, but with huge potential.
Instead, those who cling to their beliefs simply perpetuate the conflicts which have brought us to this apparent impasse.
I think you’re both wrong.
One of the reasons why immigration is affecting the UK, and Europe in general, so badly is the abandonment of religion, by which I mean the abandonment of Christianity. European culture is dependant on Christianity and is crippled without it. Young people who are idealistic are drawn to pseudo religions like climate extremism, others have ambitions to make money or be social influencers.
Consider how few British youngsters want to be nurses, for instance. A hugely disproportionate number of student nurses are from the Caribbean, Africa or Asia; the common factor is that these are more religious societies. Nursing doesn’t pay enough for secular youngsters to be interested. The junior doctors’ obsession with money is part of the same phenomenon.
Your society with no public religion is an open invitation to those with an alternative vision to take over.
A case of he who believes in nothing will believe/fall for everything?
Trite, and simply untrue. Chesterton was of his time, and it’s that kind of “rent a quote” that needs greater thinking through.
The answer to the “belief” issues that brings us to this point absolutely isn’t to reinforce beliefs, or we create a never-ending cycle of conflict.
Those who advocate for such are lacking the imagination to envisage why “beliefs” arise in the first place, which is entirely to do with the ‘juvenile’ stage of human psychological development.
We must move on from there, not continue to suffer the same delusions.
Religions (all of them) need to be kept out of the public sphere.
Can’t be done. ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ is Christianity. It’s also the basis of all our freedoms. Nothing comparable exists in Islam, which is an all or nothing ideology. That’s why the Islamic world is so dysfunctional. You cannot separate ideology from politics. They go hand in hand.
The West is (or was) successful because it is Christian.
The real game is to build a dominant majority out of all teh pieces that can be convinced they are aggrieved, and that they all share a common background and destiny because of their grievances. That has been the game in the US since the 1950s and 1960s, when the Ford Foundation and allied groups concocted the idea of “Hispanic” to encompass people from people with backgrounds different as native-born Americans whose ancestors lived there since the 16th Century, Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and Brazilians… even as if all Mexicans or Brazilians are the same. Having created this artificial “group,” they are then told they share the same background with other “aggrieved” groups, despite wildly different histories and problems and cultures. The apotheosis to date has been Queers for Palestine, where somehow people whose sexual preferences would get them stoned to death in Palestine see themselves as natural allies.
This was first done to build political support for “social justice” politics, but by the 2000s had been coopted by overlaying it with the globalist agenda of destroying national cohesion as a necessary step toward atomizing society and preparing it for subservience to the new order.
Do not be fooled, the UK governing class has also been pursuing that strategy for decades, slightly adapted to local circumstances, and accelerated after the Brexit vote showed them that there was still strong opposition. (As the 2016 election revealed in the US.)
There is nothing innocent or unintended about the provocations that led to these riots and the government’s reaction. They have to adapt to circumstances as they arise, and will sometimes be clumsy, but their intent and the path they have chosen has been remarkably consistent even in the face of obvious public opposition.
Really good article. I particularily like the distinction between ethnicity and nationality. This isn’t really discussed on the MSM. Also didn’t know that 75% of Brits agreed with Enoch Powell in 1968. Think its time for a referendum on immigration – to have this debate in the open. That is surely the democratic way forward.
The chance of a referendum on immigration being allowed is ZERO (followed by a zillion more zeros). The political class made the mistake of allowing the hoi polloi a say once and were pissed off by the results (Cameron flounced off); they are not going to do that again.
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”–Enoch Powell, April 20, 1968
Just grateful that we left last year. We felt like strangers in the uk, so decided to be strangers in someone else’s country. Far less painful.and lots of tax upsides.
Victorian England, the England of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, was comprised of 99% White Britons, Anglo-Saxons all, with Norman (French), Angles and Saxons (German), and Latin (Roman) ancestry. English today is derived from German roots, with French and Latin influences.
The England of today is fast becoming filled with peoples from dozens of nations, each with their own cultures, gripes, and customs, and few have any wish to become ‘English’. Rather, they want the English to become more like them.
If the ‘English’ are brave and strong, they will not allow this to happen. If they aren’t, it will happen, whether they like it or not.
Just to point out some errors in your list of ancestors of the English.
Anglo-saxons (and other Germanics that came over after the fall of the Roman Empire) contribute less than 40%, along with the Vikings that came from the same areas. Much of the rest is ‘ancient Briton’, or Celtic. There is a contribution from ‘Romans’, but they could’ve come from anywhere in the empire not just Italy. The Normans are also a relatively small component, and they were originally in large part comprised of the same Germanic tribes as the Anglo-saxons anyway, but had learned to speak French. The rest, less than 10%, is derived from the neolithic people in the British Isles prior to the arrival of the Celts. A very small amount comes from the hunter-gatherers that occupied Europe following the ice age.
David Reich mentions in passing that Britush dna has,remained stable for 2000 years.
Yes as shown by dna testing.
I should have understood this piece better if the author had clearly defined what he means by ethnic, racial, civic and community. It is the mealy-mouthed confusion of the meanings of these words which have got us to this position in the first place.
I think the riots are about the obvious inability of government to control the borders – which both major parties have promised to do; and the spending of large sums of taxpayers money on immigrants which we cannot stop entering the country.
“with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society”
Reading this, I was minded to ask for clarification of the difference between ethnicity and race, but later on Roussinos appears to address this himself; not, however, in a very satisfactory way:
“This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race … Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force.”
So it appears that ethnicity is just a finer-grained – and for that reason supposedly more precise, and for that reason supposedly more accurate (?) – notion of “race”. Is that right? It remains unclear whether it is supposed to be a biological-genetic category or a social-cultural one, or some sophisticated (sophistical?) mixture of the two. It is even less clear to me that it helps – either analytically or pragmatically. Precisely because ‘race’ was so broad-brush and limited in its applicability, it always had the tendency to devolve into meaninglessness, which was all to the good. If you think that ‘ethnicity’ tightens the concept up, haven’t you just made it more dangerous and divisive? Are those with multi-generation Scottish, Welsh and English ancestry now to be regarded as distinct “ethnicities”, despite all the crossover and multiple layering that has occurred over centuries? Are Geordies, Brummies and Bristolians also to be encouraged to think of themselves in this way, maybe by reference to Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex?
Ethnicity – if this is what it is – seems to be not so much a tightening up of the concept of race, as its definitive reductio ad absurdum.
Ethnicity is Greek. Race is white.
I strongly recommend reading the first link, to the Middle East piece on the “controlled spontaneity”, involved manipulative government attempts at social engineering in the aftermath of violent attacks. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/mind-control-secret-british-government-blueprints-shaping-post-terror-planning
This includes vile attempts to make people believe that campaigns such as “I heart Manchester” were born out of genuine emotions of people on the ground, and were not the work of some sneaky little office-bound clique of official sector propagandists.
It cites the work of Lucy Easthope, a senior cabinet office official, who has written an academic book, The Recovery Myth. Easthope writes,
“But we’re not going to get to the bottom of terrorism by socially engineering a response. We’re not doing the difficult debate. And what that stops, is true learning.”
She is spot on but will any of her colleagues listen to her? No of course not, they’ll go on failing and failing and failing again because that’s just what they do.
I am fed up of government officials, security services, and other well resourced organisations trying to manipulate people’s emotions for the greater good – especially when they are made to feel vulnerable or scared following some outrage or outbreak or other. It’s a sick application of behavioural science; it’s mind control. But more importantly: it doesn’t work, it’s counterproductive, and people can increasingly see straight through their silly little fake lie campaigns. It’s a cowardly way of doing politics and it’s making people angry.
If you want to influence people: treat them like adults rather than pigeons and try and persuade them intellectually rather than messing with their heightened emotions. Because look what happens when it goes wrong – as it inevitably does. There’s more of this backlash to come.
I was shocked by the article linked and have bookmarked it. It explains a lot. I always thought the ‘don’t look back in anger’ responses to terrorism felt contrived (for good or ill human beings just aren’t like that) but to read they were organised by a government unit …
It seems that the rioting is more against the state for creating the issue
The Batley Teacher is the Litmus test here. Can he walk the streets of his Town ?
Two tier Keir spent two minutes laying a wreath and having his picture taken.
He couldn’t even be bothered to visit the critically wounded children still in hospital.
blaming the lions for eating the antelopes when the antelopes are sh*tting in the waterhole…
Good essay,but I disagree about Starmer not being responsible.
Look at his whole career. He defended Abu Qatada and Abu Hamza,failed to prosecute Muslim rape gangs as DPP,won the critical case for benefits for illegal immigrants and has supported the uniparty in its decade long pursuit of mass immigration and the resultant sectarianism.
He’s more than an accessory to a crime.
Fantastic article – great to contextualise what’s happening today in UK and including understanding the “two-tier” response from the police.
Also a hidden gem – Aris occasionally throws in things like this I go “harsh!” while agreeing with it.
“Starmer, who has been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack:”
But he does, he didn’t support the previous government’s attempts to stop illegal migration and immediately cancelled the Rwanda scheme.
Illegals have been coming across the channel in greater numbers since he took office.
The public see his determination to open up our country to even more migrants and are rightly angered by it.
It seems the UK is sharing a malaise common in much of the West: The steady and inexorable replacement of citizens with passport holders. A country is just a place to live, not love.
What is the impetus to protect what you do not value?
I see that a Muslim Defence League has emerged from the shadows to protect mosques and Muslim neighbourhoods. This seems natural. While the English Defence League ceased to function in 2011 and whose purpose was perhaps more aggressive than defensive anyway it also seems natural that various British Defence Leagues will emerge as well. These will be mainly ‘white’ but will also contain assimilated non-Muslim, or even some nominally Muslim, immigrants and next generation immigrants. There will also be Hindhu groups, Sikh groups and African Christian groups. These later will exist mostly in harmony with the ‘native/integrated’ groups although not necessarily with each other, but they will all rub up the wrong way against the Muslim groups who will mostly seek to dominate and expand since their defences are already well organised and secure. On top of this powderkeg will sit a middleclass globalist elite owing little or no allegiance to either tribe or country. The only kind of ‘nation’ that will be able to exist under such circumstances will be a very repressive one with a fierce police force and a granite-faced leadership. We have seen just a hint of that this week, although Keir’s exasperated headmaster act was not very convincing, but they are going to have to replace those petite young women in riot gear pdq.
Interesting article, on the whole convincing view point. However, I think it is erroneous to say that the Reform party is « understood by Farage voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party ». The prominence and visibility of such members and supporters as Ben Habib and Zia Yusuf can not escape Farage voters and opponents. Therefore I disagree with the conclusion that the entry of the party into parliament is a step in the direction of a political system revolving around ethnic rivalries.
I wonder why only the Labour, the Conservative and the Liberal parties ( as well as others such as the SNP) have the monopoly on representing voters without innuendos about ethnicity.
Once I had clear in my mind the difference between multi-racial and Multi-ethnic I was away!
OMG – did anyone else click on the link in paragraph 1 regarding the managed recovery processes in place for terror attacks with unwitting govt messaging via hashtags, staged speeches from imams and twits leading the crowds on facebook with flower laying. Stunning and obvious too.
They really have f#@%ed it all up.
Anyone else have login issues onto UnHerd with alternative search engines such as FireFox or Quant?
UnHerd helpdesk solution is “why don’t you use Google Chrome?” !
Is that so I can better read articles about big tech assisting with social control, censorship and the dystopian AI future?
Jeez…
I’m using Chrome and I’m testing to see if I can reply to you, Su.
Yep, everything works with Chrome grrrr. Beats me how my local library and can cope with Firefox but not UnHerd.
Far right and proud! The rioters are the UK version of the gilet jaunes.
One day there will be bronze statues of Tommy Robinson across the UK.
You ain’t seen nothin yet. The more violently the state cracks down on a population outraged at it deliberately ignoring Rotherham-style rapes of young white girls for years, the growing scourge of knifings and other outrages by Muslims, the more hostility will grow. Police will become the enemy and what’s left of the army will have to be called back from Ukraine or wherever is at the time enforcing globalism. Enoch Powell in the end will turn out to have been right. Apologies are due to Ari for being lumped in with whites. The poor guy has all the sins of imperialism, colonialism, slavery and all the rest laid at his doorstep. And he’s innocent of the charges, every one of them! Kamala switched from Indian to black with no trouble and maybe he can do something along the same line. It seems like he has a lot of hair, so maybe a dreadlocks look would help.
Dave Lodge
Blah
In a Democracy, all must be heard and all opinions considered respectfully. A protest in the street is usually the last resort of normally law-abiding citizens who feel their opinions have been too long ignored or dismissed. A peaceful protest can easily be inflamed by a disrespectful police response. To minimise such protests, a fair hearing of their opinions is necessary, free of media demonization and a Governmental ‘we know best’ attitude.
The political dynamics which came to a head this week are not dissimilar to those of the first half of the 20th C when at a time of economic insecurity and rapid change politicians sought to find scapegoats, back then it was The Jews, today it is Islam.
Aris Roussinos would appear to be ignorant – or dismissive if not ignorant – of the obvious alternative to what Britain’s Lord Hailsham repeatedly called Britain’s ‘elective dictatorship’ model of governance.
This obvious alternative model of governance is, of course, Switzerland’s Direct Democracy model, in which Swiss citizens have multiple binding national referendums every nine months and multiple binding local referendums as well.
The Swiss Direct Democracy model of governance is a model for every other country, as well as the UK. It puts the people in power, not the politicians. We should campaign to have a binding referendum on it as our NEW model of governance. We need it.
Give this a listen/watch. The guy is from Southport so probably has an inkling of what really happened. I suspect the video will be pulled from YouTube soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvA9odna5dw
A great – if depressing – article. I hope that the authors rather complacent conclusion(s) prove to be correct. That is – as I read it – that it will never go back to how things were but, don’t worry pet (apologies!), it won’t ever get too bad, either. Fingers crossed.
Despite the authors well-crafted thesis, surely the 30+ year Western Europe experiment of allowing millions and millions of predominantly young, non-skilled men from the 3rd World – many of whom practice a religion invariably at odds with the beliefs of Western Secularism – free entry is historically unique, at least from a modern perspective. Simple maths – aligned with the reality! – indicates that our GDP / Infrastructure pies (which have been essentially static since the 2007 / 2008 Financial crash) now have to stretch to feeding, sheltering, and providing (the human right to receive) healthcare to many, many more people.
If, as seems evident, our political class refuse to stem the tide the only conclusion is surely that life for the average (make that ‘median’) Briton, in the medium, if not the long, term is going to be one of competing with more and more people for ever decreasing resources and ever decreasing rewards. Maybe the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ crowd have it right: let’s do away with all the technological advances over the last 2 centuries and return to the agrarian life. At least then we natives will be able to experience true solidarity with our more recently acquired brethren. We may even find ourselves getting into boats, destination the continent and beyond…!
Please stop using the terms ‘Islamophobic’ and ‘Islamophobia’ if you don’t want to be thought a brain-dead polemicist. Their dishonesty and intellectual laziness detract from an otherwise thoughtful exploration of a complex issue. Objections to the noxious behaviour of some Muslim immigrants are rooted in the same inferential logic that people rely on and successfully use in other areas of their lives, not in racism or irrational prejudice, much less in a psychological malady. When you pretend otherwise, you simply sabotage your credibility in the eyes of people who know better.
superb!
Excellent and thought provoking article. I had not realised that spontaneity had been managed!