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How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict This week’s riots won’t be the last

'In Southport, the spark for the rioting was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration.' (Getty Images)

'In Southport, the spark for the rioting was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration.' (Getty Images)


August 3, 2024   8 mins

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.

Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution.”

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

“In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism.”

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. 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. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it 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. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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elaine chambers
elaine chambers
4 months ago

Some 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.

j watson
j watson
4 months ago

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.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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?

Dr E C
Dr E C
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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.

William Cameron
William Cameron
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

To accuse people of Racism when discussing issues of race is puerile.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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?

Jonathan Andrews
Jonathan Andrews
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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.

Rob N
Rob N
4 months ago

“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.

William Cameron
William Cameron
4 months ago
Reply to  Rob N

To where do you deport someone born in the UK ?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 months ago

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!

William Edward Henry Appleby
William Edward Henry Appleby
4 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

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.

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
4 months ago

Of course, there have always been crimes of apparent senseless brutality. But that’s not the point here.

William Edward Henry Appleby
William Edward Henry Appleby
4 months ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

But then, what is the point of this argument?

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 months ago

Ah, that explains why police are always puzzled as to the motive of whatever heinous crime was committed.

William Edward Henry Appleby
William Edward Henry Appleby
4 months ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

I think we’re all puzzled as too why someone would commit this horrendous crime, aren’t you?

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
4 months ago

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.

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
4 months ago

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

William Cameron
William Cameron
4 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

You may have some difficulty with that. Most countries dont choose to accept murderers who were not born there.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
4 months ago

Yet Britain does.

Emre S
Emre S
4 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

To kill little kids with a machete sounds to me like barbarism and totally like someone from the global south would do!

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.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
4 months ago
Reply to  Emre S

What are you talking about. You just don’t know about it because you don’t see it in the press.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 months ago

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.

Emre S
Emre S
4 months ago

So in your thinking school shootings are a routine event in the rest of the world, but they’re not reported in the press?

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
4 months ago
Reply to  Emre S

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

Emre S
Emre S
4 months ago
Reply to  Charles Hedges

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?

J. Hale
J. Hale
4 months ago
Reply to  Emre S

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.

Emre S
Emre S
4 months ago
Reply to  J. Hale

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?

Anders Wallin
Anders Wallin
4 months ago

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.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
4 months ago
Reply to  Anders Wallin

What’s your home country?

D Glover
D Glover
4 months ago

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.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
4 months ago
Reply to  D Glover

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.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
4 months ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

My mother was the daugter of a Scottish tea plantation manager in Assam, which she left as a child refugee when the Japanese invaded.

D Glover
D Glover
4 months ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

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?

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
4 months ago
Reply to  D Glover

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.

Sayantani G
Sayantani G
4 months ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

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.

General Store
General Store
4 months ago

See my response above

Simon Neale
Simon Neale
4 months ago

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.

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
4 months ago
Reply to  Simon Neale

It won’t. The death penalty has never stopped murderers.

Graeme Crosby
Graeme Crosby
4 months ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

It stopped them doing it ever again though.

Claire D
Claire D
4 months ago

Rwanda?

William Cameron
William Cameron
4 months ago
Reply to  Claire D

Rwanda was in my view a daft idea still being promulgated by Tory leadership candidates.

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
4 months ago

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.

Claire D
Claire D
4 months ago
Reply to  Claire D

How confusing, another Claire D.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
4 months ago

Prison.

Katja Sipple
Katja Sipple
4 months ago

The country of his parents! He seems to have absorbed the murderous proclivities of his ancestors!

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
4 months ago

Rwanda seems willing if the price is right.

J. Hale
J. Hale
4 months ago

Why not deport him back to where his parents came from?

Dylan Blackhurst
Dylan Blackhurst
4 months ago
Reply to  Rob N

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.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 months ago

His parents are active in the local church. He may of course have his own religion or none.

Dylan Blackhurst
Dylan Blackhurst
4 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

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.

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
4 months ago

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

William Cameron
William Cameron
4 months ago
Reply to  Adrian Smith

I agree. Robinson is an irrelevance trotted out by the left to defend their crazy immigration policy.

Victor James
Victor James
4 months ago

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.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
4 months ago
Reply to  Victor James

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.

Victor James
Victor James
4 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

“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.

Sean Lothmore
Sean Lothmore
4 months ago

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’.

Vijay Kant
Vijay Kant
4 months ago
Reply to  Sean Lothmore

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!

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
4 months ago
Reply to  Vijay Kant

The last Shah’s grandfather was far more extreme in dealing with the mullahs.

LindaMB
LindaMB
4 months ago
Reply to  Sean Lothmore

I guess they missed the bit about respect being earned, not given.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
4 months ago
Reply to  LindaMB

Which Rule of Law were they respecting?

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
4 months ago
Reply to  LindaMB

Well said!

Katja Sipple
Katja Sipple
4 months ago
Reply to  Sean Lothmore

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.

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
4 months ago

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.

Arthur King
Arthur King
4 months ago

True. This is not a fight between whites and others but between freedom loving people and the tyranny of leftist & Islam.

Mike Fraser
Mike Fraser
4 months ago

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.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
4 months ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

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.

Mr Sketerzen Bhoto
Mr Sketerzen Bhoto
4 months ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

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.

Pedro the Exile
Pedro the Exile
4 months ago

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.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 months ago

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 .

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
4 months ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

Islam is a violent cult.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
4 months ago
Reply to  Clare Knight

That’s a stupid comment.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
4 months ago
Reply to  Mike Fraser

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.

Vijay Kant
Vijay Kant
4 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Do you work for the BBC or The Guardian?

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
4 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

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.

Mike Michaels
Mike Michaels
4 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Seek help.

General Store
General Store
4 months ago

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

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
4 months ago
Reply to  General Store

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.

Hazel Gazit
Hazel Gazit
4 months ago
Reply to  General Store

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.

Brendan Keelan
Brendan Keelan
4 months ago

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.

Vyomesh Thanki
Vyomesh Thanki
4 months ago

How is this relevant to the contents of the article?

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
4 months ago

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.

elaine chambers
elaine chambers
4 months ago

EH!

Geoff Cooper
Geoff Cooper
4 months ago

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.

Frank Leahy
Frank Leahy
4 months ago
Reply to  Geoff Cooper

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.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
4 months ago
Reply to  Geoff Cooper

Same as the US. Anyone remember the murder of whiteJasmine by a black policeman, 2014?

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
4 months ago

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.

j watson
j watson
4 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

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.

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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.

elaine chambers
elaine chambers
4 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Unhappily Nell, a very clear and accurate acount.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

You clearly have no acquaintance with the modern history of India, let alone of Lebanon and, indeed, most of the Levant and Maghreb.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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.

Josef Švejk
Josef Švejk
4 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

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.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  Josef Švejk

Quite. A vote for a Local Council candidate should never be about Gaza for starters.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
4 months ago
Reply to  Josef Švejk

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.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
4 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

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.

D Glover
D Glover
4 months ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

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.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
4 months ago
Reply to  D Glover

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.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
4 months ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

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.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
4 months ago

I don’t think I could deal with more than one wife without the booze, that’s for sure.

geoffrey cox
geoffrey cox
4 months ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

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.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
4 months ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

By Roman Catholic do you mean rampant kiddie fiddling?

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
4 months ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

“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.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
4 months ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

On reflection, I think I agree. But we still need to return to our moral foundations.

Andrew Vanbarner
Andrew Vanbarner
4 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

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.

Rob N
Rob N
4 months ago

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.

Andrew F
Andrew F
4 months ago

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.

Anna Clare Bryson
Anna Clare Bryson
4 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

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.

Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
4 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

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.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
4 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

You fail to realise that the Muslim Brotherhood and other similar groups wish to return to Sharia Law.

A Bowles
A Bowles
4 months ago
Reply to  Josef Švejk

“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.

Josef Švejk
Josef Švejk
4 months ago
Reply to  A Bowles

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.

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
4 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

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.

Ian Cooper
Ian Cooper
4 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

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.

Point of Information
Point of Information
4 months ago
Reply to  Ian Cooper

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).

Rob N
Rob N
4 months ago
Reply to  Ian Cooper

Mostly agree but of course they should pay income tax. They are guests and need to pay their hosts for their lodging.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
4 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Very perceptive!

B Emery
B Emery
4 months ago

“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.

j watson
j watson
4 months ago
Reply to  B Emery

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.

Steven Carr
Steven Carr
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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?

B Emery
B Emery
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

.

Anna Clare Bryson
Anna Clare Bryson
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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.

Sean Lothmore
Sean Lothmore
4 months ago
Reply to  B Emery

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.

elaine chambers
elaine chambers
4 months ago
Reply to  B Emery

Dear B.Emery, “Words can only be better than bricks if people are allowed to use them.” Excellent statement . Thank you.

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
4 months ago
Reply to  B Emery

Or vice versa.

Brian Kneebone
Brian Kneebone
4 months ago

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).

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago
Reply to  Brian Kneebone

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.

elaine chambers
elaine chambers
4 months ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Absolutely.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
4 months ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Addendum for any new readers: the comments by J Watson have been removed.
Edit: Sunday am – and now they’ve been reinstated.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
4 months ago
Reply to  Brian Kneebone

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.

elaine chambers
elaine chambers
4 months ago
Reply to  Brian Kneebone

Goodness me Brian, you’re probabaly a relative!

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
4 months ago

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.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
4 months ago
Reply to  Brian Kneebone

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

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
4 months ago
Reply to  Brian Kneebone

Australin ?

Shouldn’t that be Austrayan ?

Corrie Mooney
Corrie Mooney
4 months ago
Reply to  Brian Kneebone

You are ethnically Australian. There is such a thing.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
4 months ago

How long until the BBC start to go after Badenoch for speaking the plain truths that they have long been complicit in hiding.

Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith
4 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

The Guardian has begun. Count the Badenoch articles just this week.

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
4 months ago
Reply to  Jonathan Smith

Well if she becomes Tory leader I’m voting for her. She’s an outstanding example of assimilation.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
4 months ago
Reply to  Dr. G Marzanna

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.

Andrew F
Andrew F
4 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

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.

elaine chambers
elaine chambers
4 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

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!

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
4 months ago

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” ?

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
4 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

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.

D Glover
D Glover
4 months ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

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.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
4 months ago
Reply to  D Glover

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.

j watson
j watson
4 months ago

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.

Michael Cazaly
Michael Cazaly
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

“Right wing government in power for fourteen years…”?
I rather think you’ve got your piece of straw on the wrong foot…

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
4 months ago
Reply to  j watson

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.

j watson
j watson
4 months ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

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

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
4 months ago

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.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
4 months ago

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.

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
4 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

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.

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
4 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

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.

Gordon Black
Gordon Black
4 months ago

“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.

D Glover
D Glover
4 months ago
Reply to  Gordon Black

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

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
4 months ago

Fantastic article.