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When people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumours that justify their emotional states. (Photo by Ian Forsyth/Getty)
When Morgan McSweeney was hired by Barking and Dagenham to defeat the BNP, he entered a world of resentment, rumour and mistrust. Antagonism between locals and newcomers was at a high-pitch; rumours about two-tier treatment were being fanned by the extremists and the Labour council seemed entirely powerless to do anything about it. A little over a decade and a half later, McSweeney, now the Prime Minister’s most trusted aide, finds himself facing the same challenge — only this time across the whole country.
Until McSweeney arrived, the council had been fighting the problem by publishing “rebuttal” books for the residents. Facts and figures were being churned out to debunk the idea that the estates of Barking were getting dirtier and dangerous. In fact, according to the pamphlets, they were actually clean and tidy. The trouble was, no one took any notice. The leaflets were binned; the facts and figures disregarded. The BNP, meanwhile, was loudly blaming the state of the place on immigrants and their accusations had a receptive audience.
McSweeney knew the political response needed to change. The residents were right that their estates had deteriorated, but they were wrong about the immigrants — the council was to blame. The only way to defeat the BNP’s racism, therefore, was to change the leadership. It wasn’t just a question of what was being said but who was saying it, McSweeney concluded.
Influential in McSweeney’s strategy about how to tackle the BNP was the book by American behavioural economist Cass Sunstein, On Rumours: How falsehoods spread, Why we believe them, What can be done. “Terrible events produce outrage,” Sunstein writes, “and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumours that justify their emotional states.”
It’s unsettling reading the book in the wake of the riots, which were inflamed by false rumours about the horrific murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class. Shortly after the attack, social media accounts began spreading speculation that the murder was a muslim immigrant who arrived illegally. As Sunstein spells out, some rumours are particularly powerful because they both rationalise the incomprehensible and relieve our “primary emotional urges” of horror and fury by offering an explanation for why we feel as we do.
The inexplicable horror of the knifing of those children as they danced with their friends is so hard to reckon with that the urge to find something to explain it is understandably overwhelming. It is not only the far Right who are susceptible to rumours at such a moment, we all are. It’s just that different groups believe different rumours.
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SubscribeHuh? I thought I was halfway through the essay and it suddenly ended. The author makes a lot of broad claims, and some obvious statements about unconscious bias, but doesn’t back up anything with evidence, or even explanation.
McSweeney apparently utilized some new approach to quell the unrest in Barking and Dagenham, yet the author fails to explain anything about this approach. I really have no idea what McSweeney did in Barking and Dagenham because he didn’t bother to tell us.
I was also expecting some factual evidence to back up the assertion that there isn’t a two-tier justice system in Britain. Maybe comparing the convictions and jail time served by the people who injured 27 police officers in BLM riots, to the three year prison term for someone already convicted of punching a police officer two weeks ago.
We didn’t get any of this. Britain is facing some severe social issues, but instead of offering any insights, the author gives us a glorified book review of some text about falsehoods and rumors.
Yes, there was no proper explanation as to what McSweeney did in Barking and I had to google and read through various articles to discover that the Council’s strategy of putting out statistics to show how much they cleaned the area and saying mess in the streets was not the immigrants fault didn’t work to calm anti-immigrant feeling. In contrast McSweeney discovered that ensuring that the Council actually cleaned up the mess in the street promptly reduced inter-ethnic tension and undercut complaints about immigrants. A sensible approach. (Of course, tensions might have reduced because of white flight as suggested by Steven Carr above)
The problem is that I can’t see McSweeney persuading Labour that following the strategy of treating riots by minority ethnic groups softly softly by pandering to so called community leaders while cracking down on the majority white ethnic rioters comes across as two tier. Producing manipulated statistics to suggest all are treated equally is not going to cut it.
If McSweeney were to actually shift Labour away from pandering to communities and instead really treating everyone equally he would indeed have a great achievement to his name. However, I don’t see it happening given Labour’s devotion to DEI and Equity that requires people should be treated unequally to achieve some ideal equal outcome – although there is no attempt to have a workforce in the NHS that reflects the ethnicity of the population for example so it is all too plain that even equality of outcome is not the real objective.
Great comment.
Caution, oncoming controversial comment:
Back in 2018 a Hungarian far right politician came to the 10th district of Vienna where I (and tens of thousands of other migrants and refugees) live and made quite a controversial video where he warned against letting too many migrants in because – among other things – the streets here were dirtier, so it must be the foreigners. See: https://www.euronews.com/2018/03/07/facebook-bans-video-of-top-hungarian-politician-saying-migrants-make-vienna-filthy
When I got wind of this, I was furious that he’d insulted my ‘hood, where I was (and continue to be) very happy.
However, over the course of several months, The Other Half and I did observe that there is a marked difference in cleanliness on the street between areas where high numbers of migrants live (go out of my house and turn left) and areas where more Austrians live (go out of my house and turn right). It is a pattern which holds still. Does this observation make me far right and racist, or does it make me someone who simply lives in an area largely populated by immigrants who is quite open about what it’s like to be here?
There are no exceptions to this rule anywhere in the Western world.
In Europe, not only are they all dirty, tatty, and run down, but they are also cookie cutter identical – a sort of grey bland monotone.
What absolute rot! You have never been to New Malden then (SW London suburb) where there is a very large Korean (and Japanese, Sri Lankan etc) migrant community. Clean, law-abiding, vibrant etc etc.
I was waiting for someone to prove me ‘wrong’ using an area populated by high IQ, low crime ‘communities’ like South East Asians.
Well done, so why do all the rest fail?
Good thought. Next time remember Korea and Japan are north pacific. Don’t know if north east or north west Asian is more accurate.
Well you did say “There are no exceptions to this rule anywhere in the Western world.” “High IQ” – what a racist comment!
Dullard.
I learned far more from your comment, and Steven Carr’s, than I did from the article. Good work
It’s not an uncommon occurrence, here.
To your point about the ethnic breakdown of the NHS workforce relative to the wider population, I recall reading a story (in the Guardian, though I’m afraid I can’t find the story now) a few years ago about the makeup of the Home Office staff. At this point it was already well past 20% BAME (using the approved language of the time) and yet the story also quoted a manager from within the Home Office as saying that although this was “a good thing” there still remained plenty of work to do. Of course, being the Guardian, the downright bizareness/twisted logic of this comment went unchallenged.
As the learned David Starkey reiterates if you have many laws (to cover minorities) you have no law.
Don’t forget that the Manchester Airport incident has yet to see an arrest!
Arrested, but not charged, and out giving press conferences claiming to be the victims
He did but very briefly and vaguely. he said “The only way to defeat the BNP’s racism, therefore, was to change the leadership.” It’s unclear what he means by this.
One day a government’s going to respond to criticisms that it’s incompetent by actually attempting to govern competently and it’s going to look revolutionary.
Reminds me of the final scene in the movie Brazil.
That would be absolutely glorious.
‘The danger is that a much wider cohort of people stops listening to him’ ie Sir Keir Starmer.
No, the danger is that Keir Starmer has stopped listening to ordinary people as his extraordinary performance at the vigil in Hart Street proved, where he enraged people there
Inside a minute he had whipped up hatred of himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIXOqpBxhN0
An amazing speech! 🙂
‘When Morgan McSweeney was hired by Barking and Dagenham to defeat the BNP, he entered a world of resentment, rumour and mistrust…’
How was resentment, rumour and mistrust solved in Barking and Dagenham?
White flight. People voted with their feet.
The white British population decreased from 49.5% in 2011 to 30.9% in 2021, the second largest decrease in England
In 2023, the overall crime rate in Barking and Dagenham was 123 crimes per 1,000 people, 18% higher than London’s overall crime rate of 105 per 1,000
I love evidence based comments because I learn more. Thank.you for your effort to make your argument – i feel lazy by comparison :). .
Why was a political strategist hired by a Council (supposedly an apolitical organisation) to defeat a political party?
Perhaps just a teeny misuse of public funds!
Excellent research – however depressing to read
Thank you for busting this ludicrous piece of myth-making.
Thanks.
I particularly enjoyed the author shoehorning in the obligatory condemnation of (putative) antisemitism.
Sunstein is a promoter of the “noble lie”, a veritable “fox”, and his (and the author’s) solutions are to kick the can down the road in the hope that the consequences of their policies fall upon the shoulders of the next cadre of foxes.
Well… we’re running out of road, a$$holes, and the piper wants his pay.
Thank you for the figures. I lived in that awful place for ten years till 2001, and my reaction on reading the article was just what you have supplied evidence for.
People moved out of Barking and Dagenham mainly as there was a generation of boomers ( I don’t mean that perjoratively ) who had good pensions from Fords, once the major local employer, and had got ‘Right to Buy’ on the vast council estate of the area, to move out into Essex and to the coast or futher. ‘White flight’ has always been somewhat of a myth in the UK where racism is not ingrained as it is in the USA.
The smartest guys in the room have no idea of what a paradox is.
Basically McSweeney observed that producing bogus statistics to pretend that the problem people complain about doesn’t exist is not effective whereas actually fixing the problem is.
Let us see if he can get Labour to fix the various problems that exist that resulted in the rioting.
Sadly I fear Labour’s whole strategy of treating different “communities” differently and assuaging and dealing with “community leaders” is at the root of the problem and is incapable of being fixed. Were we to cease to have “communities” and all were really treated equally much of the tensions and anger would be ameliorated, but that is not what Labour is about and McSweeney either can’t see the problem or can’t shift Labour from their community strategy.
Let us see if he can get Labour to fix the various problems that exist that resulted in the rioting.
To do that would require a lot of money. Now that the productive economy is tax-saturated the only way to get that money is to tap into the trillions of unearned property wealth that the metropolitan plutocracy has accumulated largely thanks to New Labour’s immigration and monetary policies. Ain’t gonna happen. The establishment media simply won’t allow it.
Wealth cannot be created nor destroyed during the course of a Property Transaction. It can only be made visible.
I never fail to be amazed by the excuses people make to justify keeping their unearned wealth.
Two-tier Keir’s problem is that the left is totally devoted to two-tierism.
Their rainson d’etre is to promote the interests of minorities over those of the majority. In Britain that means non-white over white. Women in the workplace over men. Homosexuals over heterosexuals. Transvestites over women. Even illegal immigrants over the natives!
When they are not doing that they are promoting the interests and beliefs of the urban upper class above those of the suburban and provincial working and middle classes with policies like net zero or their EUrophilia.
The Tories – if they can ever get their act together – could bury Starmer by defending the majority against Two-tier Keir.
Women aren’t a minority. They form 51% of the population. I don’t believe in women only short-lists. There’s a reason women are underrepresented in certain jobs and I don’t think it’s misogyny. Artificially promoting women to create equity often results in below par performance (eg Blair’s Babes) which undermines women’s standing in society.
I agree – policies to “positively” discriminate for a certain group are counter productive for the recipient as well as irritating for the group not benefitting. This is the definition of 2-tier. At my firm they made a big song-and-dance about a women’s management fast track but all it did was to put worse people in certain positions than would otherwise have been there by open competition. It was soon quietly abandoned.
Doesn’t do the economy any good either.
The Tories are part of the problem. Don’t forget we’ve had Conservative govts for the last 14 years and they’ve either left Blair’s laws in place or made their own two tier laws with the indigenous majority at the bottom. Vote Reform.
True but until all the people on the right are enthusiastic about voting for a single party, Labour will retain power.
That means either: 1. The Tories go right and make Reform unnecessary or 2. The Tories stay “one nation” and Reform replaces them.
Not sure why you get a down tick, your observation is entirely correct.
I suspect the down votes are from Reform supporters who believe that the Tories can never be trusted and that they will make a show of going right, crowd out Reform, win power and then return to their old ways. And so we should stick with Reform and bin the Conservatives.
And what’s more, they might not be wrong!
Don’t think so. Looks more like from our lurking resident socialist downvote fairies. Every good comment has a downvote or two from them, it’s a fact of life like pigeon turds on the windshield.
The maths are very simple. Tory vote dropped 7.2 million from 2019 to 2024. Reform/Brexit Party grew 3.5 million and did not vote increased 3.7 million.
Reasons immigration, cost of living, interest rates, NHS, incompetence across all areas, dishonesty, Brexit, Pandemic response and sleaze.
Tories are not going to get back in by getting Labour, LibDem or Green voters to switch. They have to convert Reform voters and get the Did Not Votes out!
For that they need: a credible platform, to get rid of who ever is pulling the strings in the back room and become actual conservatives again, a leader (who doesn’t get undermined by her/his own party) who has some charisma. Sunak had all the charisma as a cereal box
Let’s be accurate about years, please.
I agree with your post but Conservatives were in power only from 2015, then spent 3 years trying to implement Brexit against internal opposition from lefty parasites within the party and then constrained by covid.
Then they committed electoral suicide by removing Boris and electing WEF baby Sunak as leader.
Sunak was nothing by globalisers 5th columnist with plan to destroy Conservative party and flood country with 3rd world savages.
No, Andrew. It’s Boris Johnson who betrayed the country. He & the Leave Team led Brexit on the promise of reducing immigration and securing our borders. He then sacked his Leave team, did a 180 on immigration, dropped his plans to engage the navy to ‘stop the boats’, gave Carrie’s mates billions in cushy earners, ditched plans to leave the ECHR, changed the law on uk companies having to advertise to Brits before foreigners, blew the international student ponzi scheme wide open: allowing any of them to bring multiples of dependents too, etc etc.
https://youtu.be/C-HhIfpBdoQ?si=K4nwdCUqiGqJlC7X
The real issue is the civil service, the quangocracy, the charity industry and large parts of the media.
NGOs for a start should not receive any government funding.
Exactly! Clue’s in the fricking name.
Reform must join with the Conservatives to defeat this Marxist government. Unite the Right.
Let’s hope Reform hasn’t been outlawed by the next election. Two Tier Starmer (and his acolytes in the MSM) is doing his best to vilify them and Farage.
McTague makes an alarming statement that reveals quite a bit about the government’s response, too, when he writes:
‘The danger is not that the rioters have stopped listening to him — after all, they are criminals and should be in jail. ‘
What about due process? Isn’t this like Starmer’s clenched fist, steam-out-of-the-ears rant about the rioters facing ‘the full weight of the law’? There’s a bit of space between a perceived crime and a punishment and it’s called the justice system.
Unless you prefer Lynch-law or witch hunts, where people are already guilty and are beneath any justice system and can be treated just how you like. A bit like Streeting’s barely coherent threat that anyone who is racist towards NHS staff ‘can and should be turned away from care’. So that’s a really civilised, enlightened attitude and doesn’t belong, at all to the realm of shrieking mobs and frothing-at-the-mouth psychopaths. Oh, no.
So he would actually let people die for the crime of saying racist things? Well done, Wes Streeting. You have actually become far worse than the people about whom you are complaining. When can we vote these nutcases out of office?
the left is totally devoted to two-tierism
There is no better way to defeat the enemies of a parasitic metropolitan plutocracy than to get them to fight amongst themselves.
Never mind about “Two Tier Kier”, we have in essence been living in a political ‘Two Tier West’ since around the 1960s. The great irony and paradox of our age is that – contrary to the apparent victory of capitalist liberal democracy – a kind of Gramscian Leftist revolution has in fact won hands down. It has “not conquered the citizenry with bombs; they’ve hypnotised them with ex-cathedra incantations of pseudo-values so absurd that – only a few years ago – would have seemed like they must be just kidding. They have been groomed, at the West’s most prestigious schools and universities, to such pitch-perfect self-righteousness that it would never even occur to them that they might be imposing their ‘pseudo-values’ on a public with little realistic means of democratic resistance….” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Public over the private sector – benefit takers over net tax contributors.
Author’s counsel is right. Starmer though only been in power 5wks. And he’s shown he gets it by having McSweeney so close to him.
But what a mess the Right has left.
It’s Starmer’s problem now – too late to complain.
I suspect that Starmer & advisors have belatedly realised that being in & running government is significantly harder & more stressful than any of them ever imagined it would be.
From the election of victory just over 4 weeks ago to Cobra meetings daily – Surprisingly, the overseas big hitters – Biden, Scholtz, Macron, Von der Layan -all seem to have gone terribly quiet – indeed their friendship & deep support of Labour seems to have overtly ( at least) evaporated.
Maybe they’re a bit wiser than our own government – maybe they don’t wish to tempt fate with their own voters?
One has to say – it’s not the most salubrious start for a new government – oh for ‘ nu-labour ‘ & that things can only get better or worse
Given he’s run the CPS and dealt with the 2011 Riots I suspect he’s much better prepared than a Telegraph Journalist or a Hedge Fund manager put forward by the Tories
Inherited a disaster zone. It’ll take a few years, but Riots also showed the core of the Country with him and the Far Right and their supporters out on a limb.
If he didnt want the job he shouldn’t have applied for ir.
Who said he didn’t want it? I suspect dealing with the riots, not something he’d have wished for, but right up his street given his CPS background.
And he’s shown he gets it
We’ll see. Given that he himself is at least partly responsible for the current febrile situation due to his failures as DPP I think your view is optimistic at best, and deluded at worst.
It’s not just his failure as DPP, but his failure to unite the country after the atrocity. Rather than trying to calm the situation down, admitting that tensions were high, and (as in after the BLM riots over a foreign criminal) acknowledging the concerns or the protesters he poured petrol on the flames by calling everyone, protesters & rioters Far Right.
While sing the ‘don’t look back in anger’ is about as useless as it gets, his approach was a thousand times worse. He, and his acolytes in the MSM, has since doubled down by smearing Farage and the Reform Party and, by association, all of the 4,117,610 people who voted for them (more than for the LibDems).
A good, thoughtful essay. I’m too far away to know what is really motivating the riots, but social science over the last two decades keeps showing increasing sense of powerlessness across certain communities across western countries which drive distrust of government and institutions.
The riots need to be placed in a context of the emergence of politically privileged groups and privileged opinions that have emerged over the last few years. BLM protestors that can take down historic statues, pride events that no longer limit themselves to equality but want to parade sexual content in public, Just Stop Oil can close roads, and most recently pro-Palestine groups that attack Jews and vandalise war memorials. Parts of the public have a sense of attacks on cultural norms and history with the rise of these movements, and everyday experience (not necessarily online) of the flags and parades, combined with the cost of energy, rising rents means this isn’t just driven by mis-, dis- or cis- information where the public just need to be educated more by their betters.
So while the riots are episodes of moronic violence and racism, polls are showing latent sympathies. Woke policies have created a set of people who feel powerless, with no-one to vote for, and have left them feeling even more vulnerable.
And ironically, this is at the time when the UK has just had a Hindu prime minister, a black chancellor, two recent women prime ministers and a number of regional muslim political leaders. This is not a bullying majoritarian 1970s-BNP-style ‘kick-them-out’, but perhaps more of a cry of the wretches and journeymen who want their norms back and their history to be revered, and to feel they should have a voice. The recent election left people with no-one to vote for, or no seats if they did vote.
The murder of young girls also has a bitter history of creating public outrage and reaction. The sparks have detonated a confusion of fire crackers going off in all directions and if we see this as just about immigration or driven by mis- or dis- information, it will miss the deeper causes and public experiences of a state that, to many, no longer feels neutral, unbiased and fair, which is why the accusation of a two-tier state is having such a resonance.
The complexities of this situation call out for a Scarman-style inquiry, not a Stasi-style take-down, and a return to a more neutral state.
Your comment was excellent but assay itself was dishonest and misleading.
Schopenhauer, writing in 1851: “The majority of men…are not capable of thinking, but only believing, and …. are not accessible to reason, but only to authority”
173 years later, Sunstein, Haidt et al, claim that insight as their own as though newly discovered.
Find it hard to believe that this insight wasn’t noted by many before Schopenhauer.
Good luck with that. The.Labour “mass of contradictions” manifesto is.going to compound things further. Wait until those increased energy costs, food inflation, house building in the wrong locations, dispersed illegal immigrants, back door blasphemy laws, quiet but meaningful exodus of top tax payers, etc hit. Shortest honeymoon in politics. 67% of the voting electorate are ready to give.Labour a kicking. starting May 2025. Their legitimacy was thin, it’s now disappeared.
Yes. They’ve totally alienated working class voters by pandering to their middle class constituency. Now the only way they can fix the problems that they’ve created for themselves is to p1ss off the middle class by taxing their houses. Not enough popcorn.
But working class resentment in Dagenham was not based on false rumour but experience of the way that conditions in their community had declined and the pressure on resources, on which they depended, made worse by the large number of recent immigrants in the area. McSweeney was concerned with defeating the BNP, not solving the underlying problems that led to their rise.
I don’t think that the working class are allowed to have lived experiences only protected classes are
Pretty good article but the elephant in the room, a very large Halal elephant, is that after Oct 7th 2023, UK streets have been choked with large numbers of marches by Islamic folk & their secular green-haired Gays-For-Gaza supporters, deeply invested in a war in which UK has little to no geopolitical stake. These marches drove British Jews off streets as genocidal slogans were chanted in Arabic (من المية للمية / فلسطين عربية) & the flags of proscribed organisations were flown times beyond counting a few feet away from lines of indifferent policemen, over and over and over again.
Contrast that with the heavy handed treatment of the small sporadic counter-protests which flew Union flags or (gasp) Cross of St. George, things that only cause dyspepsia to those infused with high-status Guardian reading opinions.
However, the war in Ukraine, where the UK geopolitical interest is manifest to anyone not a fan of Putin & Imperial Russia’s Z-fascism, did not produce constant street level responses beyond some shouting at the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. Why? It’s not a divisive issue, so Ukraine’s supporters didn’t really feel the need to. Few in UK want to see Europe to be destabilised by allowing Russia to once again bordering with Romania & Slovakia with interior supply lines.
So, the war in Ukraine has not induced British Ukrainians to run for office in Westminster or (more bizarrely) local councils based entirely on their views about a foreign war & appealing to a sectarian/ethnic vote.
Yet that is exactly what has happened since Oct 7th on the issue of Gaza.
To understand the pent-up resentment without looking at that is to miss a huge element of how we ended up where we are.
The Labour Government (nor indeed the entirely pointless Tories) do not even understand the problem let alone have a solution, well, other than to just dial up the repression against online words and to dish out more riot gear to hammer some gammon. Instead of actually thinking about this, we saw assorted MPs & various worthies muttering darkly about the “EDL”, an organisation that doesn’t even exist anymore, making this a bit like when Royalists dug up Oliver Cromwell after the Restoration to “execute” him post-mortem.
when Royalists dug up Oliver Cromwell after the Restoration to “execute” him post-mortem.
Lovely. And that’s not the only way in which these sanctimonious authoritarians resemble the Roundheads.
A shallow and tendentious, partially-formed screed.
Bear in mind only 20% of the overall electorate voted for Starmer. He polled far fewer votes even than Corbyn.
He only won because the Tories were far worse.
And now he is surrounded by people who echo chamber each other. Good leaders choose advisors who challenge and test. None of the Labour group do that. They just think they alone are holy. The idea of actually looking at statistics and hard data to understand what is going on is not part of their tool kit.
Everything is seen through two lenses- is it part of our belief?” “How does it look in the press” ? . Real people can be disregarded if it passes those two tests.
“according to the [council] pamphlets, [the streets] were actually clean and tidy” then “McSweeney knew the political response needed to change. The residents were right that their estates had deteriorated”
Make your mind up, was it clean and tidy or had it deteriorated? Jeez.
3rd world people should not be allowed in the UK
I am less concerned about 3rd world people than I am about 3rd world ideologies.
Which is exactly why sensible immigration policies, allowing for assimilation and integration, are far preferable to mass migration and “multiculturalism.”
I’ve learned from this that politicians will go to inordinate lengths to manage the message. That there is a science to this and that they employ people who are “experts” in manipulation instead of actually trying to be sensible and honest and try to fix things. Ideology gets in the way of that. And no .. nothing Starmer says will convince me otherwise. I’m too old now and too sensible.
Sunstein Is interesting but not for the reasons that McTague argues. Sunstein Has argued for polluting the online discourse with absurdities so that the kind of people who believe in all conspiracies will follow stupid conspiracy theories, but also other theories which have more merit, thus discrediting the latter.
An example is the conspiracy that Hollywood is extracting drugs from tortured children and Tom Hanks is involved. Tom is the least likely guy in Hollywood to do this of course, having been married for decades. So that’s nonsense (yes it is) – but the general idea that there is child abuse in Hollywood, isn’t. However the whole thing sounds crazy now.
Why is it far right to not want violent honor cultures immigrating into your country?
It isn’t.
Has Tom McTague not yet realised that Morgan McSweeney’s ‘plan’ and Morgan McSweeney himself have been ‘exiled’ to a small office in the farthest recesses of No 10 Downing St by Sue Gray, whose own ‘plan’ to close down democracy – Citizens’ Assemblies a la her own Irish ones – is now fully ready to go via Demos, a think tank emanating from Common Purpose, and propaganda campaigns on BBC, Sky News and the Financial Times to name but a few.
Do keep up, Tom, do keep up.
Perhaps McTague’s articles are designed to distract us from what’s really going on.
“The most important lesson McSweeney took away from Barking, though, and the most difficult for Starmer, is to prove that the state works for everyone, even when there’s no money.”
It doesn’t take money.
It takes the consistent application of law enforcement.
What fosters resentment is not the perception that not all crime is solved. It is the perception that some people will be prosecuted while others won’t – mainly on account of their political views, ethnicity or race.
Equal application of the law is not a budget problem; it’s the foundation of the rule-of-law; and ultimately the legitimacy of the state.
Yes, but the legitimacy of the state also relates to how it taxes people and then uses the money. Welfare is out of control as is public sector spending. The people who are net tax contributors are those most reviled by this government. All of us “right wing” private sector workers and pensioners. Paying for all of this nonsense.
“the apparent “two-tier” justice in the UK.”
I might agree with the analysis up until this point, however, I am afraid that there is not very much “apparent” about double standards in policing or indeed justice, the evidence and data are there for any who choose to look.
BLM riots in the UK with police taking the knee. Statutes toppled and thrown in rivers, police stand by and no nothing and then, even better, the four are acquitted in court. Endless antics by just stop oil where again the police stood by, or better brought tea to the protesters, whilst the general public – the majority, are massively inconvenienced by their antics. Or the instance of the “free gaza” protests where balaclava and keffiyeh clad hoodlums chant racist slogans, throw nazi salutes, and terrify jewish communities and the police once again stand by and spend their time explaining that Allahu Akbar can mean, many things… The rioting in Harehills where the police just retreat, The list, literally, goes on and on.
One would have to have chutzpah of Trumpian proportions (or just be a total liar) to simply deny this. But that is what the mainstream media and our glorious politicians seem content to do. Including a certain keir starmer, who is happy enough to get down on his knees in support of rioting, violence and killing in the US, but adopts a different tone when the action is closer to home and committed by a group of whom he does not approve.
Frankly, if McSweeney took away the message from Barking that the State has to work for everyone, it seems he has done a rather poor job of communicating it to those he has sided with to win power.
“Statutes toppled and thrown in rivers…”
I know that was a typo, but it was scarily apropos in view of the current status quo in the UK. Possibly Freudian.
May I also add to the list of grievances: beaming “from the river to the sea” onto Big Ben during the free Gaza protests. Even if that was quickly stopped, on the part of the perpetrators, it spoke of an attitude and a belief that you can do whatever you want without consequence.
And for many secular Brits who were taught that your democracy was the most important thing you have and that it must be defended, I guess that seeing that was just as offensive as seeing a place of worship attacked. Certainly made me see red.
It seems some are so absorbed by their viewpoint that they forget what really happened. For example, in one weekend during the BLM protests some 135 people were arrested (none of whom were trying to burn down hotels with people inside). Many went to court, some found not guilty by a jury of their peers.
And then Just Stop Oil – recently a number have ended up with longer jail sentences than many of those rioting last week.
I appreciate many have magically built a new mythology around two tier policing over the last week, but they really need to look back and see what really happened – not what they perceived as happening or were told by GBeebies and the Daily Mail.
If I want mythology I read Robert Graves. If I require reminding of labour’s hypocrisy and the double standards of the police I simply have to look at the picture of starmer and rayner on their knees or re-read the Hyde report on child sexual exploitation in Bradford. The daily mail and Gbeebies (whatever that is) I leave to you.
It wasn’t what Starmer said about two-tier policing that made me think that this did (and does) actually exist. I don’t take Starmer seriously.
It was what I observed from the outside and whether that indicated a) the existence of a conventional police force (ie all people treated the same without fear or favour) OR b) a system where groups are intentionally treated differently/where control over certain groups has simply been lost or given up.
I saw b).
This has zero to do with anything Tommy Robinson or Farage or Putin has said and everything to do with the fact that I can observe and think for myself.
If that makes me far right, then I guess I’ll just take that label. The term has been so overused as to become as a drop of water running off a duck’s back.
I also see the riots less as a reaction to the knife attack itself – as awful as that was – and more as an explosion of frustration that has been building for 20 years. That frustration just needed a spark, and Southport was it. I guess there might be a drive to see Southport as the source event, as it then seems easier and less complicated in terms of comprehending and remedying it. But it’s a blind alley, the coward’s route out. To get Britain truly back on an even footing, you have to address the whole messy complicated situation, going back at least 2 decades if not more.
It definitely makes you far right. It also makes you a racist and a fool, easily manipulated by the likes of Farage, Yaxley-Lennon and Musk.
I doubt whether the Prime Minister cares too much whether you take him seriously or not.
Every time I think that nothing you write can possibly cause me to hold you in more contempt, you go that extra mile and prove me wrong. You are the proverbial next Tuesday.
All she’s saying, in a nutshell, is that the fundamental problem in this country is the greed and hypocrisy of champagne socialists. Hard to argue with that, really.
What the hell is BNP?? Google was no help.
Very unprofessional writing. Very godam annoying. Is there something wrong with your fingers?
It seems like some of our our American friends don’t understand the big words!
British National Party. Ignore the idiot who thinks that being unpleasant is clever. Even his parents hate him.
His parents? Nobody with a present father behaves like that.
I’ve often thought it would be helpful to have glossary of abbreviations here. There are readers and writers from many places who use abbreviations that are not obvious to outsiders. Remember BTL? It certainly took me a while to realize that it means “below the line” and refers to the comments below an article. How about a glossary tab on the page somewhere with BNL, BTL, DNC, RNC, SNP and so on?
The usual way to deal is to write out the words the first time (with the abbreviation in parenthesis) then use the abbreviation for subsequent mentions.
Not difficult for anyone with rudimentary typing skills.
Thanks
Though not mentioned neither does EDL exist.
I gave up reading this as it quickly became clear that it never entered McSweeny’s head that any problems were actually caused by immigration levels rather than simply the faulty views of the plebs. If this guy is Starmer’s top advisor then heaven help us. No wonder the PM seems so tone deaf and can only come up with law enforcement solutions.
Why must ‘terrible events’ produce outrage?
How many such events produce them?
Why shouldn’t the response to murders of little children produce pity? Pity for the children.
Pity for murdered infants means following them to death. Death stills the body and the passions.
Pity does not produce fear today, forgot tomorrow. ‘Anaesthetic for the community’ is a counterfeit of death. Wholly false in its effect on both pity and grief.
If McSweeney is devising a plan to deal with the far-right he is bound to fail as the problem is not the far-right but the policy of creating a multi-cultural instead of an integrated state. Tensions were clearly rising and if the ghastly events at Southport hadn’t triggered them something else would have.
If the Far Right is the big threat to Britain, why is it the Taylor Swift concerts this week that will see armed police deployed , sniffer dogs, bag searches etc etc?
I’d like to think that it’s because there’s a recognition that Islamism is Far Right, too, but somehow I doubt it.
A recognition that has not escaped my attention. All its credos being in complete opposition to the luvvy lefties who would support those who propound them.
Islamism is allied with the far left, in a marriage of convenience. The far left is too naive to see that radical Islam is far more oppressive than the worst of the “far right.”
Both sides care only for overthrowing the West. The apparently minor details of antisemitism, murderous homophobia and misogyny, and religious theocracy versus utopian atheism would, presumably, be hashed out at a later date, when free market capitalism and constitutional democracy have been obliterated.
“… we are now likely to see a hardening of attitudes in the UK among on the one side, those who believe multiculturalism is some kind of threat and on the other those who believe it is those who oppose multiculturalism who are the threat.” Personally, I believe BOTH that multiculturalism has failed AND that a minority of those opposing it are a threat. I guess a large proportion of the population – those that Starmer is ignoring and who are perhaps likely to consider a vote for Reform at the next opportunity – feel pretty much the same way.
Never mind about “Two Tier Kier”, we have in essence been living in a political ‘Two Tier West’ since around the !960s. The great irony and paradox of our age is that – contrary to the apparent victory of capitalist liberal democracy – a kind of Gramscian communism has, in important respects, won hands down. It has “not conquered the citizenry with bombs; they’ve hypnotised them with ex-cathedra incantations of pseudo-values so absurd that – only a few years ago – would have seemed like they must be just kidding. They have been groomed, at the West’s most prestigious schools and universities, to such pitch-perfect self-righteousness that it would never even occur to them that they might be imposing their ‘pseudo-values’ on a public with little realistic means of democratic resistance….” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Focusing on one wrongly identified horrific attack was unfortunate but understandable because the author of this piece seems to forget the years of previous horrific attacks and violence from the adherents of the religion of peace, and their concentration in ghettos which is undermining the very fabric of Society in the UK.
Another useless article from Unheard.
Idea that two tier policing and government policy is just imagined by the so called right is disproved by Two Tier Kier kneeling in front of BLM racist.
Then doing nothing against gangs of Muslim ropers.
Then doing nothing against Muslim Manchester Airport attackers but quickly convicting recent rioters.
Then dropping freedom of speech bill.
This disgusting creature is human rights lawyer.
Just slightly above pedophile I’m my view.
McSweeney is a party apparatchik focused narrowly on winning elections, for which there is of course room in every political party, but he is not some kind of guru to whom the party or Starmer should look for wise policy counsel. But are policies contingent on what will win elections and appease Labour’s vested interests, and not what is best for the country or the 78% of the electorate who did not vote for the party.
Who decides the categorisation of people into “unreasonables” and “sensibles”?
The writer has clearly decided he can make that judgement and he, McSweeney and Starmer are leading lights of the “Sensibles”. I wonder if the voters will agree in 5 years time,
“the fact that Starmer has denied the charge has only served to confirm it for many people.” In reality the severity of the sentences over the last week is the fact that has confirmed “it”.
Will we be allowed to vote in 5 years time? Democracy is a fragile thing, and it’s not unheard of for demagogues to ”suspend it” in the interest of civil “harmony”
Starmer and the Met seem anxious to constantly talk to community leaders from a certain group. But I’ve never seen any women from this group involved in their dialogue. I wonder why?
The term far right is so broadly applied it now represents the Everyman of British politics. The man on the Clapham omnibus would now be described as far right. It’s far left politicians like Starmer who fail to understand what is going on because they can’t pull their head out of their own backsides.
McSweeney’s tactic is impression management. If people believed these killings were caused by an immigrant, couldn’t that be, not because of Tommy Robinson, but because of the sorry record of nearly all these mass casualty events being caused by migrants from Muslim countries?
The killings were perpetrated by the son of immigrants, who both hailed from a country where macheting people is less uncommon than here, shall we say.
Due process seems to be something this writer does not believe in. Rather than lock them up wouldn’t it be better to hang them. White working class trash
Where are all these anti multiculturalism people? I see only anti mass immigration people. Stop harping on about right wing thugs and violent yobbos. It really isn’t the point.
I think the two are tied. Anti-multiculturalism is a result of mass migration; if you have a small manageable number of people coming in, they tend to be absorbed into the whole. If you have mass (or unfettered) immigration then the people form their own communities, parallel communities, that exist separately from the host community. You can see that in Birmingham(?) where the police asked the “community” leaders what type of policing they wanted (Yes, there is a video up of this).
What I meant to say that pre Blair multiculturalism worked fine. Our identity wasn’t under threat. Mass immigration is a total disaster but elites don’t care, they have a “higher” agenda. Something about evening up the whole world. I abhor two tier policing, DEI, progressive discrimination and the whole lot of it. Social engineering on a grand scale, so naturally against our consent. The unspeakable murders of the innocent little girls was lighting the touch paper. The thugs and yobs, I believe, had no particular political association, too young and too thick. A handful of real “right wingers” only. It has set up a chain reaction which has turned Starmer into a virtual dictator. He does not want to unite the country, easier to quash the bits that don’t serve his purpose.
The people of Dagenham knew from lived experience that their environment has been degraded under a Labour-controlled council for decades. The Becontree estate, and others, were models of council housing and a ‘respectable’ working class community. Dudley Moore, the musician and comedian, had been raised there and via the 11+ attended Dagenham County High School from which he won an organ scholarship to Magdalene College Oxford. The grammar school has ceased to exist, and the Becontree estate is a pale reminder of what it once was. It wasn’t immigration that degraded the opportunities and quality of life for the white working class in such places, although it has put enormous pressure on them, but a Labour council and national governments of different hues, misplaced ideology, and neglect.
Have people actually been listening to Starmer in the first place? His election campaign studiously avoided controversy or his plans beyond platitudes. Therein the problem, a man who thinks that he represents the country and yet the vast majority of the electorate didn’t want him in government. Its a recipe for chaos in the current circumstances.
So, it appears we must censor dissent, in order to ensure that the public only hears “balanced information.”
Is characterizing one’s political opposition as “extremists” a balanced approach?
Also, when a second generation immigrant from a radically different and largely unassimilated “community” murders little girls, should our fears be allayed, because he was a “native Briton?”
Should we rest easily, knowing that there are few actual crime or unrest problems in these “communities,” other than the occasional terror attack targeting actual native Britons?
Should we merely continue to let unfettered immigration go on, and perhaps arrest those who are “visibly Jewish” for provoking these “communities” by their presence in the UK?
It’s all about narratives, you see. Large swathes of the public simply aren’t understanding which narrative is correct, hence the apparent necessity of threatening them (as well as other countrys’ citizens, even the occasional American billionaire) with arrest.
This, it seems, is easier and far more desirable than enforcing sensible immigration policies, or containing “anti Zionists” when they’re inflicting their narratives upon us.
We can then achieve what Chamberlain called, unironically, “peace with honor, and peace in our time.” Perhaps the appeasement of today will work with “communities” of the far left, and of the supporters of violent, fundamentalist Islam.
Who are, apparently, no longer “extremists.”
The stabbings lit a fire.
If there was no fuel there, there would have been no fire.
In other words, there were reasons that people got so upset.
Maybe people are upset with high immigration and seeing the face of their country being changed without their consen?
What an absolute load of nonsense. Politicians who use people as tools along ethnic lines know exactly what they are doing – be it Yaxley-Lennon, Starmer, Farage or some nut in Serbia or Rwanda it’s the same. Only an equal or greater opposing force can stop them, and the longer they are left to brew hate the more grief will be caused when the grown-ups arrive to stop the party – 23% (tops) of the vote?? ffs even John Major did better IIRC?
I’ve been far away. What facts have been presented telling us who actually did the stabbings? Including name, age, and neighbourhood? This info would go a long way in dispelling rumors. The rest is blah blah Cass Sunstein blah blah.
The deliberate mystification tactics of the Left as they twist and turn, trying to create poetry about the human condition out of crimes that are horrific, preventable, and, given the engineered, systematic culture clashes we’re living through, basically inevitable, is something to behold:
‘The inexplicable horror of the knifing of those children as they danced with their friends is so hard to reckon with that the urge to find something to explain it is understandably overwhelming’.
I just wish some of these humanities grads would look at some actual data.
The reason why people may have believed that a Muslim immigrant may have murdered three girls are muslim attackson non- military targets.
Salman Rushdie,
Bataclan Theatre- 31 Murdered .
November 2015 Paris attacks – Wikipedia
A Grande Manchester Attack 22 murdered. The singer is popular with young girls. ,
Manchester Arena bombing – Wikipedia
Recent attacks by Hamas on a rave in Israel.To murder youngs girls only makes sense to an Islamic terrorist.
The Chief constable and local Police Inspector should have been outside the scene of the murders within minutes. There is an Indian saying ” What could have been stopped by 300 in the morning could not have been stopped by 3000 in the afternoon “.
Noone one believed the murders were by PIRA, INLA, ETA, PLO, Sikh Terrorists, Hindu Terrorists Tamil Tigers, Red Army Faction.
The question which has not been answered is why were the Russians were so quick to spread lies- did they know of the planned attack?Have any Russian Agent Provocateurs been involved ? Bearing in mind the expertise of Putin and the KGB is subversion. There is an alliance between Russia, Hamas, Iran, China and N korea. Iran grooming vulnerable young men and then Russia ready with disinformation would produce subversion in the UK with little cost.
Having lived in an area where a riot started one could feel the tension build up over four days. The Police responded within minutes of the riot by driving a van into the crowd, swinging it through 180 degrees to knock over rioters and then police leaping out with batons and clobbering the trouble makers. The Special Patrol Group were very effective at stopping rioters. A combination of local Police with an ear to the ground comprising ex sergeants from the Armed Forces , 6ft plus and tough with the support of SPG would be very good at preventing violence. Thugs do start fights with a Police officer if they know they will lose. The sight of Police running away from BLM rioters only encourages violence by thugs.
If the Police did not notice there was tension which was likely to lead to violence, then it shows they do not have their ear to the ground.
Way back when the BNP was at it most robust in its celebration od racism and antisemitism
Way back when the BNP was its most robust in its celebration of racism and anti semitism, it was the only group prepared to expose the grooming gangs. No one from the Left or the Right was prepared to address this filthy disgrace. It has festered, and it’s probably the strongest reason that many abandoned the Labour Party as they witnessed its reluctance to challange this abomination and leave this fact to a racist organ to hold together a dispicable truth about the abuse of young white girls. It remains very hard for any thinking female to trust the Labour Party.
Different cultures have different attitudes to the area outside of their homes. In Britain people used to clean the front step and the pavement outside of their homes. If people had a front garden it was kept tidy. Other cultures did not care about how the outside of their home looked. When living in rural France I was horrified how tatty were many of the fronts of houses and the gardens.
‘he defeated them in Barking’ – I thought that being a TERF, Reform voter, or someone who though mass immigration was a problem, or thought rape-grooming gangs, or watched GB News …..was ‘far right’. Did he defeat all these people in Barking?
What “Far Right” ? -an invention of Starmer to justify his failed immigration organisation.