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Sir Keir Starmer lays a floral tribute to the Southport stabbing victims. (Christopher Furlong/Getty)
We are witnessing a breakdown of order with few obvious parallels in recent British history. There have been moments of resemblance, of course: the London riots of 2011 or the “skinhead terror” of the early Seventies. The clashes between Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts and the coalitions of anti-fascists in the Thirties. Yet none of these comparisons feels quite right. What we are seeing here is something more modern and frightening.
A more apposite comparison, I think, is the period of state failure that marked the tumultuous period in British life between the imposition of direct rule in Northern Ireland in 1972 and the miners’ strike of 1984. This was a time when the state appeared to lose its authority to govern, and its willingness to do so, as war in the Middle East led to recession, political strife, international retreat and finally industrial confrontation. The trade unions entered into a war to the death first with James Callaghan and then Margaret Thatcher.
Too often Thatcher’s premiership is understood as a battle to curtail the state, rather than what it really was: the battle to reassert the state’s supremacy. In the years before her victory in 1979, the British state had repeatedly failed to impose its will, from the strikes which brought down Ted Heath in 1973-74 to the IMF bailout in 1976 and the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79. For all the u-turns and incoherence of Thatcher’s actual record as prime minister, the source of her political success was that she was willing to pay a higher price than anyone previously thought possible to reimpose the authority of the British state at home and abroad.
This is the political reality Starmer now faces. In such moments, the job of the prime minister is to play leviathan; to impose order so that civility can return. The state must reassert its authority and, crucially, its primacy. Little platoons are all well and good, but not when they have tooled up.
During the recession of the early Eighties, Thatcher doubled down on her programme of austerity, even as it drove unemployment to levels previously seen as morally unacceptable. In 1982, she went to war for a set of “small islands inhabited by three sheep”, as François Mitterand described the Falklands, not because they offered any real advantage to Britain but because of the principle that they were British. And then, in 1984, she used every means at her disposal — formal and otherwise — to break the miners’ power and take the war to the IRA after they tried to assassinate her and her entire cabinet; the most serious attack on the British state since 1945.
As David Edgerton notes in his sweeping account of post-war Britain, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, “the key difference in the politics of the Eighties from what went before was the preparedness of government to fight dissenters very hard and to exert the rights of elected authority very strongly”. What marked Thatcher out as something different, Edgerton argues, was her willingness to press on “in the face of odium” and in so doing transform the self-confidence of the British elites. “In the Seventies there emerged the idea that the United Kingdom was becoming ungovernable,” Edgerton writes. “The answer was, of course, ‘rolling back the state’, rhetorically speaking, but it also involved making the state more autonomous, more powerful.”
Today, there is a similar sense of British state failure; not quite that the United Kingdom is ungovernable but that it is slipping that way, with the state unable to impose its will or that of the people it serves. This is not just a question of this week’s explosion of racist thuggery and violent counter-rioting — important though this is — but the seeming inability to perform even the basic functions of a state: providing prison places, timely court hearings, adequate sentencing and enough police to patrol the streets. Even simply ensuring there is a functioning health service, uncorrupted police force, humane asylum regime and working borders seems out of reach today.
Too many areas of Britain today simply do not work. These mobs did not form in Tunbridge Wells and Cambridge, but the cities that have been failed for decades. Just as my colleague Aris Roussinos has argued we use euphemisms to hide the reality of what we can all see in front of our eyes, we also ignore our basic failures of government. No one can say that Birmingham, Belfast, Liverpool, Rotherham or Sunderland — the centres of violence in recent days — are beacons of good governance and prosperity. Few can say that of Britain more generally.
This is not a crisis that Starmer is responsible for. What we are witnessing is a breakdown of order which has exposed the anarchic ethnic strife hiding in plain sight. The past week stands as another appalling indictment of British state failure. How has it come to this? How have we allowed gangs of balaclava-clad (and Nazi tattooed) men to form pseudo-paramilitary mobs in our cities?
One of the most worrying aspects has not just been the breakdown of order, but the fact that the breakdown is seemingly between groups, neither of whom any longer trust, respect nor fear the police nor the law it seems — a scene more reminiscent of Northern Ireland than recent history of mainland Britain. An irony of Thatcher’s premiership, in fact, is that the one place where she was never able to fully reimpose the authority of the state was in Northern Ireland, whose uneasy communal truce was only reached after her departure.
As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher championed monetarism only to quietly abandon it, decried European integration while signing the Single European Act and portrayed herself as the Iron Lady while reducing defence spending from 4% of GDP to 3%.
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SubscribeOthers may disagree, but I think the single biggest failing of the Tories was they gave off a sense of drift. Take back control? It seemed no one was in control. Ministers appeared to be out of their depth. So yes, Tom is right, without the aura of authority, government becomes impossible.
Tom cites Roussinos’ excellent piece of how we got to be where we are. So whilst locking people up is the easy bit, removing the underlying causes of discontent will be devilishly hard.
They have to reverse 20 years’ worth of bad policy. They don’t know what to, and coming up with robust alternatives whilst in office is next to impossible.
Just as an addendum: those Tory MPs (both current and unseated) who thought Rishi Sunak had fired the election gun too soon must now be thanking their lucky stars he did so – just in time for the other lot, elected by default, to have to deal with this mess which as you rightly say is long in the making.
It’s likely postponing the election would have postponed the ‘mess’: not certainly, but likely, as the Tories were practiced in stasis.
Unfortunately the current government is globalist and metropolitan to its core – so there’s no prospect at all of them reversing the bad policies of the past twenty years.
The only hope is for the Tories to drive out their own globalists and neo-liberals and become the party of the heartland as the Republicans are doing.
Oh dear!
Much more than 20 years. The issue originated in the removal by Nixon of the final link from the dollar to gold in 1971. This led to the inevitable expansion of dollar money supply and then other currencies followed suit. This allowed governments to spend pretty much what they wanted for decades. Now the debt is too big and they can’t do it any more – the electorate will have to come off the financial heroin, and that hurts.
Wasn’t Nixon prompted by the French wanting their Gold back, after the US was running out of money, financing a war, a new social programme, and the space race.
I don’t know how negotiations over the timing went but, like any inexplicable move, there’s always an explanation. 🙂
Absolutely – there were more dollars than gold, at the fixed rate then in place. So the French, having stirred up a war in Vietnam, and watched the Americans step in and try and resolve it by throwing lots of lives and money at it, then decided they would just like their gold back – grateful, non?
So double down is the authors suggestions. Prove Elon Musk correct about ‘two tier Keir’…become emotional and attack the white dispossessed with anger and passion. Call them racist and by default also call racist the tens of millions who didn’t protest but understand where the anger comes from…who now understand the ‘two tier’ system they live in.
Why are they worried so much about Elon Musk if you have a winning argument? Lol. He’s one rich guy.
Oh right its because the Socialist Theory is that all who oppose them are automatically high on the Adorno F-Scale Authoritarian test.
Yes, they live in a very binary world. Either you are with them or you are literally a fascist – fascist being a synonym for ‘savage’, ‘sub-human’, ‘witch’, that sort of thing.
In other words, they are ‘fascists’ as well.
The author misses a number of vital points. Thatcher won 43+% of the votes in 1979 and and 42+% of the vote in the next election. Starmer only managed to garner 33+% of the vote and a still lower percentage of the public overall.
Secondly Starmer is open to the Two Tier Kier charge in that far right thugs (predominantly white working class) are to be targeted in a way that other ethnic thugs are not being targeted.
In addition the cause of the rioting, namely excessive immigration and the policies of giving favourable treatment to ethnic minorities over the majority population are policies that are widely depreciated whereas Thatcher’s fights were against sectional interests.
I am all in favour of crushing mindless violence, damage to property and arson but it has to be seen to be done in an evenhanded manner rather than the current lopsided approach and Labour need to address the underlying causes of the rioting which they I’ve no indication they intend to do. Indeed every indication is given that the policies will be pushed further.
Turning discord into harmony is not what Labour is all about.
Tom- OK so to be clear, you’re a supposed libertarian socialist that’s advocating Hobbsean State absolutism?
I’m an American, I’m not nearly as versed on Thatcher as you but I know that her goal was not to increase the role of the State. Just because she acted with conviction does not mean she had some authoritarian impulse. Her crime was saying No to Socialism with conviction. But alas, Socialists (even supposed libertarian types) actually love the use of State force so long as they politically oppose the antagonist.
The confusion arises from the two-faced nature of the neoliberal project. The rhetoric was about reducing state power and public spending. In practice the welfare state and monetary policies simply switched from supporting full-employment and the working class to supporting the upper class, their assets and hawkish geopolitics. The reason was simple: the upper class felt seriously threatened by the economic downturn of the mid 70s and the oil crisis after they already lost a lot of relative wealth to the middle class due to the postwar consensus. The world that was created afterwards was a world of offshoring, financialization, cheap labor etc. A world in which a part of the population was left behind, I think they are the protesters.
Perhaps the problem runs even deeper. The author suggests that “nothing works anymore”. Well yes, but that is not because of a weak state. That is because the state still prioritizes the protection of financialized capital over everything. They still think that as long as the City with its speculative financial sector is doing well things will somehow be okay. But that entire narrative seems to entail that the ‘left behind’ populations and their towns and cities will be crushed even further.
It’s Food, Manufacturing, (and Resources), and lastly, Finance, which controls the other two, but only while both exist in plenty.
And Britain is running out of both.
I think there’s some truth to that explanation although I think the term Neoliberalism needs refining.
I often hear the term used to lump the Austrian School advocates like Hayek, Von Mises and Friedman; who were anti-intervention Laissez-faire proponents with the Corporate Welfare State. They weren’t calling for Corporate Supremacy, they were calling for shareholder supremacy, competitive markets and low taxes. The Stakeholder Capitalism Model has been primary for at least 30 years now.
Well it was definitely inspired by the ‘monetarists’. Friedman advises both Reagan and Thatcher. However, theory is different than practice. Also, I suspect that especially Hayek would have said that the entire neoliberal endeavor is nothing of what he had in mind. Friedman was more interventionist.
That said, there are some researchers who claim – after investigating the ‘neoliberal’ think tanks – that the main objective was always to restore upper class wealth and power.
Yes, you understand Thatcher better than the author – he is merely wishing our loud.
While the violence of the riots should be condemned, I think the author is missing the point. If you refuse to enact policy (e.g. reduce immigration, change composition of immigrants) to reflect the will of the people, and continually do the OPPOSITE of what they have voted for, people will take it to the streets. As far as I can tell, people in the UK are absolutely fed up with the mass immigration experiment, and are sick of seeing their country turning into some sort of Sharia state. They have been saying this for a really long time, and every single government has ignored them, so this seems to be the only option left. Why isn’t anyone talking about that? I know why the politicians aren’t talking about it, but why aren’t UNHERD Journalists acknowledging this? Not a rhetorical question, really, I want to understand this.
Watch the interview between Freddie Sayers and Aris Roussinos. What you say is being ignored, isn’t.
I agree that Tom McTague completely misses the point in this article; actually, by an embarrassingly wide margin.
I do wonder if the failure of Unherd journalists to properly address the situation is fear of being accused of being complicit and inflaming the situation. Allegedly, the reason given for no police presence when Muslim men were on the street armed with knives, hammers and machetes was that community leaders had assured the government there would be no violence (and of course the armed Muslim males were afraid – no consideration for the growing number of brits who are afraid). Consulting with Muslim community leaders reinforces the idea of parallel societies: one of them governed by Muslim community leaders, the other subject to the law. Tommy Robinson could be considered a community leader for those subject to the law but the government response to his leadership is to silence and imprison, not to listen. I must admit, until very recently, I believed Tommy Robinson was just a racist thug, but I was aware of how violent and aggressive sections of the Muslim community are and how involved in criminality, particularly the drugs trade.
I attended the 90th birthday celebration Adjahn Sumedho last Sunday and was surprised he is aware the term white man is now a slur.
Adding to my comment, I strongly suspect, community leaders warned a police presence would inflame the situation and result in (armed) Muslim men rioting putting pressure on the police and government to allow (armed) Muslim men to maraud and intimidate without fear of consequences thereby demonstrating their (Muslim) power.
The Muslims have “community leaders” who advocate for them.
The English “community leaders” are the government, which despises and fears the English and believes they must be severely punished.
Get it, Tom?
You are Keir’s worst nightmare: a reasonable man radicalised by the government’s stupidity. I suspect there are millions more going through the same process.
I will go further. Our white representative in Parliament do not represent us and need to be replaced by people who do
You can see why people driven to the end of their tether conclude that until there is change what option do we have but to make the state ungovernable
One has to remember that the government is sending police to arrest people for “hate crimes” if they post anything online opposing mass immigration. That must weigh heavily on the minds of UnHerd writers.
Like you I used to assume Tommy Robinson was a racist thug because that is what the MSM constantly called him. A few years ago I started following him in Telegram and have not seen any racist comments or campaigns; nationalist ones yes but not racist and he seems to have plenty of supporters who are Sikhs, blacks, even Muslims so I have to assume that he sees people as individuals.
It is ‘ironic’ that despite his calls for peaceful protest, both as the violent type is counter productive and also just ‘wrong’, he is constantly being blamed for it by the Cruelites and their media lackeys. Surely they would not be trying to just pin the blame on a white working class lad from Luton! Let alone one who suffers so frequently and obviously from two-tier policing (why did he not receive compensation for his 6 months of restrictions on movement and pepper spraying when that charge was thrown out?)
We’ve reached the point where it is only safe to say these things when under the cloak of anonymity. Whether you agree with them or not, you have to be impressed by men like Nigel Farage and Douglas Murray, who are willing to come out and say the unsayable in the open.
There’s no such thing as “unsayable” and i wish people stopped believing there is. I was born into & grew up under the communist jackboot in the arse end of the iron curtain. We said out loud all the unsayables because not doing so would have been unspeakable defeatism.
Then again, we had nothing to lose. The communists stole everything to start with, including our future. So there’s that.
I sometimes wonder which is worse: the sudden onset of communist terror we had in the eastern bloc, or the slow-boiling of the frog the “West” idly volunteered to submit its collective self to.
I agree with ‘Unherd Reader’. The writer of this article has totally failed to recognise the deep underlying problem, namely 40 years of an uncontolled mass immigration experiment. During that period, the results of which we are now seeing playing out on the streets. It is easy, and comfortable just to condemn it as ‘right wing thuggery’, but that will not solve the underlying problem, – which has been created by both Conservative and Labour governments during the last 40 years.
Another disgraceful article by Unherd.
For a start Thatcher was against prevailing consensus of managed decline.
Starmer is consensus, so he is not a solution.
He is part of the problem.
I am against all riots but if population long expressed will to stop mass immigration from shite countries, especially after Brexit is ignores, what fo you expect?
If democratic means are exhausted people turn to other ways of expressing their anger at the state.
If you add unequal treatment under the law of different communities with preference given to invaders over natives, should you be surprised at the response.
Perhaps Starmer’s (TTK’s) biggest mistake was immediately to abandon the Ruanda Project (for want of a better shorthand way to describe it). He conveniently, and completely, overlooked Rishi Sunak’s repeated requests for an alternative plan. So now we have nothing. And resulting mayhem in the streets.
Spot on. Not so many people voted Labour for the PM to abandon a deterrence against people smugglers. He is so much out of touch. They also didn’t vote Labour for the PM to oppose introducing a more fair voting system. The troubles are caused by many people feeling that their voice is being ignored. The current voting system doesn’t help. If the PM cannot get behind a people smuggler deterrent and get behind electoral reform he should step aside…
Been always thus with Unherd, way back when i used to be a regular (before the paywall). Articles ranging from the downright contemptible to innocuous/insipid with a small number of good ones thrown in; it was the comments what made Unherd worth to read. Case in point, your comment.
The problem as I see it, is the state no longer has legitimacy for millions upon millions of people. The state can certainly impose its authority, but how does it regain that sense of legitimacy – that it is acting and developing policies that serve the interests of a broad spectrum of people? This is a much harder task IMO, and one the Tories and Labour don’t seem much interested in.
For demographic reasons, JV, both Labour and the Conservatives are now parties of the property owning class in the South East. Hence the rise of Reform which has split the vote and resulted in the election by a landslide of a government which is nevertheless largely illegitimate due to its tiny share of the vote.
We need the Conservative party to pivot to the heartland in the same way as the Republicans. That means getting rid of our version of RINOs and giving up the financialist economics that have done so much damage. It’s going to take time.
Good point. State employees no longer earn the respect of British people because too many are incompent and are not punished for their mistakes. During days of sail and until recently in the mines, make a mistake and people died.
Yes. With regard to the accusation of “two-tier policing”, I’m starting to wonder whether it’s less a case of policing different groups in different ways than simply giving up on policing certain groups/situations. Less a form of discrimination than an abdication of power and jurisdiction in certain environments. Which is much, much worse and far more dangerous than two-tier policing.
The police response to the Roma riot indicates it is the latter.
I fear
Two tier Keir
Won’t last a year.
His end is near.
Oh dear!
v good!
Be careful what you wish for!
I have predicted that we will get Angela Rayner as Prime Minister within a year. Sir IKEA was put in place to make Labour electable again, and now he has he doesn’t know what to do with it.
The trouble with Starmer is that while he looks good on paper – statesmen like appearance, KC, Knight of the Realm, ex-DPP, only became an MP in 2015 so no baggage – he is a proper dud politically. He speaks poorly, he is extremely slow on his feet and he walks into trouble constantly. This was all very well when all he had to do was to watch the exhausted Tories collapse. But now it is going to be a real problem.
Once the Tories have a new leader – assuming it is either Kemi or Robert Jenrick – they will hammer Starmer alongside Farage and the gang over Two-Tier everything. It is such a great slogan because it sums up the progressives attitude to almost all issues – the white, straight, working and lower middle classes get the elbow in favour of the “protected groups” and the urban upper class. It brings together immigration, law & order, wokery, net zero madness under one, easy to grasp attack line. I suspect Two-Tier Keir will be buried by it.
Time is nigh for a British Trump.
Problem is Tories are equally responsible for idiocy of net zero and mass immigration.
So this line of attack is unlikely to work.
Jenrick is worse than used toilet paper.
Badenoch will never have appeal required to bring enough votes to Conservatives.
Anyone believing this has not learned any lessons from Sunak disaster.
She’d be far worse, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
My own prediction is that there will be a vote of no confidence in this government within the first three years of their first term, that they will lose. Starmer will cling on – Rayner, the henna haired harridan, is basically too stupid for high office, but I’m sure there are others lurking in the wings.
Problem is, you might end up with even worse creature of woke vermin.
The more egregious, the easier to dispose of.
The real danger is in ending up with a somewhat remotely reasonable-looking mob (like the last lot of tories, or indeed as Starmer looked as opposed to Corbyn), then you get a large enough segment of the electorate lulled into a false sense of ‘normality’ to play along.
Is that a Haiku?
“This is not a crisis that Starmer is responsible for”
No, but his very first response has sure poured gasoline on the fire. He has antagonised multiple large groups of people, such that there are now multiple magnifying glasses hanging over his government. Going forward he will be dogged by these types of reactions, some of them bursting into firestorms, to any and every homeland policy his government institutes around migration, culture-wars, money distribution, housing and so on.
Let’s not forget the constant voting down of any attempts to control immigration. He is fully responsible for all of it.
But earlier Blair governments most definitely are responsible.
Perhaps Kier could bring back Tone as an advisor on what to do when “rubbing the right’s nose in diversity” actually ends up affecting a load of your own voters?
How much state “strength, conviction and authority” does Tom McTague support Starmer using? When Starmer guarantees we will regret taking part in *this* disorder, who defines “disorder” and “taking part”? And why *this* disorder and no others?
If at 6.30am this morning police visited my house to discuss unspecified critical comments I’d written on Unherd, comments that Unherd moderators have found no issue with and are no way illegal and no one has asked to be removed, is that the type of “disorder” the state should be using its “strength, conviction and authority” to stop people “taking part” in?
This isn’t about riots. The rage Starmer has for Musk’s *words* and demands to drag Musk in front of Parliament for the act of writing down his interpretation of events in Britain, the sanctioned dawn visits by police to ordinary people merely writing their interpretation of events, this is a total assault on all those who disagree with the British state’s all-encompassing political orthodoxy.
And let’s be clear. The British state does have an all-encompassing political orthodoxy. We’ve had nearly two decades of elections where we’ve voted for a change of trajectory and got exactly the same trajectory. We’ve watched politicians and parties throw themselves on the rocks of unpopularity rather than challenge this orthodoxy. Anyone with a brain should be terrified by any state having an all-encompassing political orthodoxy.
Amnesty International have flagged that our right to protest is diminished. The state is deciding what dissent is permissible. The “two tier” moniker isn’t quite adequate. This is about more than two opposed groups in society, this is another big fall downwards towards everything in the state, nothing outside the state.
It’s in no one’s interests if Greggs is burned down so that commuters can’t purchase their breakfast.
With due respect, it’s later on in the day – say, around 6pm – that Greggs needs more heat applying to it’s fare, after they’ve switched their heaters off.
Very funny! 🙂
No one’s direct interests, but if it occurs in the course of a robust anti-mass-immigration riot, and makes complacent politicians sit up and take notice where they would happily have ignored a nice unobtrusive traditional demo with placards then all is not lost!
“Just as my colleague Aris Roussinos has argued we use euphemisms to hide the reality of what we can all see in front of our eyes, we also ignore our basic failures of government.”
Too right, the word “community” is now evoking the same negative Pavlovian reaction in me as “progressive”.
Good luck to Starmer with reinstating order, but I won’t hold my breath. I think his behaviour thus far has been enough to cement him into the “no trust to be given ever again” box. And that means bad things for his authority – which was never that great anyway.
Elon Musk goads Starmer because Starmer leaves him a wide open goal to do so. With the unrest in Birmingham – the videos of the pub attack and the harassment of LBC and Sky journalists by the mobs there – there was a clear chance to repel arguments about two-tier policing…but what happened simply confirmed what Musk is saying to his global platform of 193 million. The LBC journalist said: there were no police there to protect them.
And, right on cue, in marches Jess Phillips – who at this point I believe is suffering from some form of Stockholm Syndrome – to relativise and defend this behaviour! If the people thought the far right was coming, then they should have cleared off and gone inside their houses to wait for the police to come, not start threatening female hacks just trying to do their job!
Message to Labour: WHEN YOU ARE IN A HOLE, STOP DIGGING!
That reedy little voice of Starmer’s, going his customary shade of constipated puce, threatening to come down on “far right thuggery”. Fine, love – exactly right. But unless and until you can convincingly communicate that you intend to come down on ALL groups causing mayhem and harbour equal anger towards all thugs causing damage regardless of “community”, then the unrest will go on.
Whether it’s white nasties throwing bricks in Rotherham or Palestinian flag-waving mobs in Birmingham – they are two cheeks of the same fat, ugly bottom.
The Jess Phillips tweet was really bizarre and worrying. Not only did she claim the Muslims were justified but she indicated that they were deliberately fed misinformation (presumably by the “far right”) in order for their atrocious behaviour to be captured on camera.
Quite simple. She’s terrified of them. Just like the rest of the cowards in charge.
Let them dig. The sooner they dig themselves into oblivion the better.
Back in early July i said i see a snap election coming in ~2 years’ time, give or take. Now i narrowed it down to less than one.
No, don’t let them dig! If they keep digging, sooner or later they’ll come out in Australia (where I live)!
Fair point well made.
Still, you could set the spiders or the box jellyfish upon them for the greater good. Here in defenceless Blighty the fauna doesn’t extend much beyond the mild-mannered potato blight or the E Coli in terms of natural defences.
I would suggest that his orders from above are to deepen and widen the disorder.
Starmer’s strategy is to stay in office for 5 years while allowing another 5 million adults to enter the country and vote in the next election presumably for Labour. He also wants to regain the Muslim vote.
And then move on to bigger things in world government.
“Westminster or Davos?”
“Davos”
Every time.
Hopefully he’ll meet the same fate as the leftists who went into partnership with Islam in Iran. Don’t these idiots know any history?
Hopefully he will – but the danger is that he drags us all down with him in the same way that the Iranian leftists did to the wider population of Iran.
They only know their own contorted version of “history”, the Klass Shtruggle. It’s a wiIIy-measuring contest in the Victimhood Olympics, of the “my kampf is bigger than your kampf” hierarchy.
The author claims that none of what is going on is Starmer’s fault. Perhaps. But it’s certainly the fault of his party. Blair launched the mass influx without making any investment in the infrastructure needed, and Brown broke the link between housing costs and interest rates that’s given us the largest upward transfer of wealth in our history.
Every time anyone loosely uses far right racists to open a political speech, they mean white working classes.
That Starmer used that first, then said he would defend our Muslim community, he told all working whites that they did not matter, that his Muslim community was his priority.
Hopefully there will be an early test in a by election.
Note that the ‘whites’ are a class, not a community.
A community can have leaders, but a class cannot. Is that the beginning of a two-tier? A class, as the Left has shown, can (unfortunately) have ‘warriors’.
Furthermore, as Mr Roussinos observed in an earlier article, ‘white’ was a designation given such people by the establishment as a counterpart to BAME. As he says, it is devoid of any definite culture or historical features.
The U.K. Government is over stretched and clearly failing in its core mission (maintain national defence, the rule of law and necessary national infrastructure – both social and physical). Margaret Thatcher was not seeking to extend the role of the State . She was not a Socialist. She sought to rebuild self reliance and self respect both at the individual and national level. Furthermore she would certainly not have allowed a million immigrants per year to enter and cause the obvious tensions which this population explosion is giving rise to in towns and cities right across the U.K.
We had just had the Winter of Discontent.
Starmer has zero authority with the white working classes sympathetic to the cause of the riots for three reasons:
1) Somewhat unfairly, he was head of the prosecutions during the Rotherham scandal. Do not underestimate just how poisonous this was for race relations. I don’t think Starmer was even aware of what was going on, but media and police soft pedalling investigating serious crimes to avoid offending non white people stirred up an incredible amount of resentment. I don’t think the governing and chattering classes realise how big a deal this was.
2) Starmer and Labour has been consistently pro immigration, despite the wishes of the working classes they’re supposed to represent.
3) Starmer can condemn rioting all he likes, the “Two Tier Keir” tag is going to stick. The reason is that when white people riot he calls them far right racists, when black people riot he takes the knee in support. Again, you might argue it’s unfair but people remember those images.
It all adds up to an image of a government and political class that values people of different skin colours very differently.
I don’t think Starmer was even aware of what was going on
I find that almost impossible to believe – just as I find it almost impossible to believe that he had nothing to do with letting Savile off the hook or the hounding of Cliff Richard. But, even if it’s true, the explosion of this abuse on his watch is still his responsibility. He should have made it his business to know what was going on on his watch.
A good leader requires a good team, not only as competent individuals, but also as a team, providing overlapping expertise, experience, thought and information gathering, to start addressing issues before they become public.
Does TTK have any of this?
He was also responsible for the inversion of the presumption of innocence in sexual abuse and rape cases. His successor reaped the whirlwind of this particular idiocy. Done with a noble aim, for sure, but the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ exists for a very good reason.
Ludicrous! Starmer is an avowed diehard progressive whose sectarian ideology no longer recognises nor wants a Union Jack nation of equals. Rather he sees a hierarchy of different communities with EQA legally elevated privileged minority groups at the top and the subconsciously raycist white majority and patriarchy at the bottom. His governments core credo is hardwired to antagonise communal unity. On entering Downing Street this BLM knee bending human rights fanatic immediately destroyed the idea of deterrence to the illegal border crossing – a de facto alliance of the leftist state with the people smuggling mafia. As the boats unloaded, we were witnessing non stop horrors of lawlessness at Leeds, Southend, Manchester. Yet he has acted as if we had not seen the DEI-Met backing off the intimidating Gaza and BLM marches – nor the spectre of sectarian politics flare so alarmingly in the Election. But he is blinded by his faith. As a figurehead of the EU Rejoiner campaign, he undermined faith in our democracy and helped to stoke Elitist and Remainer hatred toward the thick gammon raycist working class North scum. Now they talk of deploying terror laws and the idiot Streeting proposes that white rioters not treated by the NHS. Harmony?? Even handedness? These are impossible when scarily inadequate progressive MPs link up with the existing stale Blairite/EU Progressive Administrative State with its supposedly ‘institutionally racist’ police forces and twisted laws.
“This is the political reality Starmer now faces. In such moments, the job of the prime minister is to play leviathan; to impose order so that civility can return. The state must reassert its authority and, crucially, its primacy.”
That would seem to be the obvious thing. But what exactly is a Prime Minister today and what is it’s authority? He’s the leader of a party that won an election because it had reached a point that change was inevitable, the previous government lost. That makes him an astute politician with support in his party. But 33% of the vote is hardly popularity or leadership. So what is this authority over 67% of people who voted against the party. And primacy? Just who or what is the state here? This is a mess from the top down. It’s worldwide. As if our political system has exhausted itself. And public discourse is so bad, shut down so often, that no one has been able to contribute to improvement. The left us no more the answer than the right.
There is no way I can see Starmer dealing with this in an effective way. He might surprise us, but the machine is still there and still the real authority. How do you beat that?
Let’s count properly the last election votes.
If you add Reform to Tory votes it is still minority.
Labour, (un)Liberal (Un)Democrats and Green nutters etc were majority.
Unfortunately majority of people of this country voted for economic, cultural and ethnic suicide.
Voters were warned that Starmer was poor material for Prime Minister. Weak at politics with no real ideas of his own. Divisive too, as the last week has proven.
So they staged their ill-advised mass anti-Tory vote but still managed to smuggle in a new representation for this Reform party on the nationalist Right.
In that vein, Farage seems to be sneaking slowly towards the position of an independent PM leading a Government of National Unity.
If there is a revolutionary moment, it will be if conventional parliamentary democracy is bypassed (no PM from the majority party). That for me is the first step on the road to a republic.
“If there is a revolutionary moment, it will be if conventional parliamentary democracy is bypassed (no PM from the majority party). That for me is the first step on the road to a republic.”
Thats interesting. What form of republic do you envisage? Does that mean only a President? And elected by who?
Someone who got 4 million votes and you think they should be PM – madness.
He has even less legitimacy as PM.
What’s the alternative?
It’s whether he has support in the Commons, and the country. And it looks like we might be that desperate.
A Republic he says! Presumably the day Mr Farage gets in and lays his steady hand on the tiller, the civil servants get in line and the ship of state answers like yacht off Cowes.
With respect, mass democracy true-believers remind me of the poor chaps who keep returning to the Three Cup Trick table on Westminster Bridge thinking that ‘this time i’ve finally got it’.
There is no easier game to rig than one-man-one-vote.
I sincerely feel that the only answer is generational, it is civil, it is spiritual. There is no top-down ballot box solution any more, if there ever was one.
Starmer has said that an emergency force will be formed to defend mosques. Mosques are already defended by vigilantes. What will the emergency force do? Act as a buffer between ‘far right’ groups and the vigilantes? Replace the vigilantes with ‘authorised’ force? Good luck with either of those tasks.
The British State seems to lack sufficient forces or willpower to take on the ‘far right’ and the vigilantes at the same time. Yet the State must take them both on simultaneously or lose the last of its authority.
The British State is in danger of losing its monopoly on force. That monopoly is the base for the State’s existence. Without order there is no law. Justice is a secondary effect.
If there is no order civil war or, worse, the war of all against all ensues.
The basis for the state’s existence is not its monopoly on force if it is a state with a social contract, governing by consent, and not an autocracy.
The state’s function is to collect taxes to provide public goods that cannot adequately be provided by private enterprise, such as schools, roads, hospitals and – we can but dream – clean water and adequate sewers to prevent disease. Its function is not to monitor, beat and imprison any citizen unless he poses a threat to other citizens which is deemed unnacceptable by general consensus, for example, murder, GBH or arson.
Schools used to be run locally, with several examination boards, often run by universities.
Hospitals also used to be run locally, mostly by charities, and were stolen for use by the newly created NHS.
National organisations aren’t mandatory, but it would mean local people having to talk to each other! 🙂
There can be no contract without the prior existence of order. Now, if as you say ‘we can but dream’, the grimy underpinnings of the state are on view, whereas, while the contract worked (to a greater extent than today), its foundation on force was hidden by delicate folds of rhetoric.
The reaction of the present government to the unrest is not the stuff of consent and listening. They talk of the safety of ‘communities’, not of the country or of citizens. Some ‘communities’ I might suspect will be safer than others. Even if this approach succeeds it is the government of the ‘Prince’ not of the people.
“the key difference in the politics of the Eighties from what went before was the preparedness of government to fight dissenters very hard and to exert the rights of elected authority very strongly”. …
….. the problem is that the likes of Starmer have handed over “the rights of elected authority” to the unelected quangos , judges and lawyers
The likes of Starmer?
You mean Blair! 🙂
There were extensive riots in 1911, the Year of Unrest. Asquith’s government responded with custodial sentences and deployment of the army. Several rioters were shot in Liverpool by Hussars. This was at the beginning of the ‘modern’, that is, democratic era.
After the Tottenham Outrage in 1909 there was widespread alarm over the number of undocumented foreigners coming into Britain. One contribution to a newspaper described the foreign perpetrators of the Tottenham murders as being ‘hell-spawned’.
In 1938 a newspaper published an account entitled, The Foreign Bits of Britain. An early example of managing the narrative in respect of the concern about refugees entering the country from Europe at that time.
The theme of this article is instructive. It described these ‘bits’ as small, industrious, peaceful and self-financing. Chinatown was just one street, Limehouse Causeway (and in fact the census of England and Wales of 1911 records the number of people with the surname Patel as just 8).
Other ‘bits’ were portrayed as quaintly part of Britain’s ancient, settled history and traditions; a sort of quasi-integration. Such as the still-existing community descended from Huguenots who held services in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.
The industry of these people was represented by a community of German speakers. In 1900 a German count had purchased a small country house called Libury Hall and its estate near Ware, Hertfordshire. Using it as a German ‘farm colony’ (Ordnance Survey maps show it had large orchards, and even a small gauge railway), it gave work and accommodation to German speakers who had fallen on hard times.
A place that featured in postcards and admiring newspaper articles before 1914 where men could earn enough money to set themselves up again in Britain or to return home. The bishop of the diocese even setting aside ground in a local country church where the deceased from the Hall could be laid to rest. Despite the admiration, this ‘colony’ was attacked by locals in 1914, and was used as an internment camp during the Great War.
In the task of turning discord to harmony there is one thing that is guaranteed to fail: They have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace. (Jeremiah vi.14).
There are various factors which are being ignored. Since the late 1960s bad behaviour has been acceptable, if one does not get one’s way. The CND marches of the 1950s were peaceful; the anti Vietnam demonstrations were violent. The football matches of the 1930s were peaceful in the Depression; from the late 1960s, various football clubs had fans who were violent thugs. The Government should have fined or closed down football clubs until they eradicated football violence. Discipline and control of one’s emotions became dirty words for the middle class Left.
The Police no longer recruit tough ex sergeants with combat experience and who are not intimidated by violence; who get to know an area by patrolling from a police station. The middle class have become terrified of violence ; compared with the officers in WW2 who served in combat: they were brought up with boxing, usually rugby and corporal punishment.
As Orwell pointed out The Left middle class despise physical courage, patriotism, would rather steal from the Poor Box than stand
up for national Anthem, take their politics from Moscow, have contempt for British Culture, have a shallow self righteousness and have little contact with physical reality.
Enoch Powell was emotionally unstable hence his ” Rivers of Blood ” speech. However no thought has been given to immigration. Post WW2, employers wanted poorly paid unskilled immigrant workers rather than investing in more technologically advanced machinery using more skilled people, which is what Germany did.
After WW2 , Britain became run by suburban clerks who had no experience of running jobs in foreign countries and understanding that people from different parts of the World had a different Worldview.
Up to the 1960s, the social values of immigrants from West Indies, Africa and Indian sub-continent were not much different from the British. In addition, people of all backgrounds learnt to work alongside each other. The divergence in social values occurs in the late 1960s plus a collapse in un and semi-skilled labour in factories. Consequently there is less inter action at work and more divergent social values in 2024 than 1964.
The lack of discipline, respect for elders, consumption of alcohol and drugs, sexually promiscuous behaviour, especially of women compared to 1964 combined with Left Wing Middle Class ( most teachers and academics are Left Wing ) contempt Britain and British History ,means there is now a chasm in social attitudes between white working class and working class Muslims and to a lesser extent thise from West Africa and Hindus.
The Welfare state was created because of the horrific poverty created in the mass urban growth and industrialisation of the 19th century. Consequently, many men were found to be in poor health when they were medically assessed for fighting in WW1; hence L George ” Homes fit for heroes “. Up to late 1960s council homes were for hard working honest families. From the late 1960s council house was based upon need, hence pregnant teenage girls were given homes. From the 1970s immigrants were given homes ahead of hard working honest British families based upon need and there was selling of keys to properties by council staff. Massive corruption by council staff resulted in one block of flats being knocked down because it was cheaper than evicting illegal dwellers.
For middle class people who own or rent their homes social housing is not important, but for the working class it is vital.
A simple solution to house immigrants is to use the containers which have been converted into bedroom, sitting room, bathroom with a communal kitchen. These are used to house British workers in oil installations in Middle East. The containers can be situated on Brown Field sites as there will be utilities at hand.
There is needs to be a public apology by politicians, Police social services, doctors, teachers for allowing the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs to operate for so long. The British civil service, Police and politicians are happy to prosecute British soldiers, so it is time to brings charges of malfeasance against all those employed by tax payers who have not done their jobs in the last 50 years.
A captain of ship is responsible all decisions made and not made by the crew . We need to apply this procedure to all those employed by the State.
The inability to appoint competent people to position of authority coupled with the incompetent being not being punished for their mistakes has resulted in massive contempt for many institutions.
The people of Britain are sovereign; for this the Civil War was fought; not the employees of the State. If we say the employees of the state are more powerful than the people, we have dictatorship.
“These mobs did not form in Tunbridge Wells and Cambridge”
This is not quite true, at least of Cambridge. There have been multiple pro-Gaza demonstrations and marches, occupations, student vandalisms etc this year. I know Cambridge well. While there won’t be riots of the type we have seen in the north and midland cities, the difference in the city and surrounding areas from what it was just a few years ago (never mind the early nineties) is marked – there has been a big increase in various ethnic populations, especially Indians, dwarfing the eastern European influx of 2000-2015 into that part of Cambridgeshire. A similar sort of thing can be seen in Milton Keynes, which I also know well.
Never one to miss a great photo opp
Kerr Starmer is a lawyer, has spent most of his adult life working in the law and rising to near to the top of the profession. He is therefore professionally cautious and not rhetorically gifted. Even when he was making his reputation as a human rights barrister, he was more a backroom analyst and theoretician, a drafter of intricate opinions rather than a courtroom performer. He is clearly a good and hard nosed manager but he is not an inspiring leader. Furthermore, he is an Islington human rights lawyer, surrounded by his own kind. It is most unlikely that he and his government will even try to deal with the scale and type of immigration that lies behind the disgruntlement of so much of the population.
Starmer has the strength of Thatcher?
Don’t make me laugh.
He spent two minutes in Hart Street in Southport.
He got heckled by the public and he ran away as quickly as he could, after he had had his picture taken.
You can’t imagine Thatcher not giving as good as she got when she got into an argument.
Starmer needs to wake up and realise who the real enemies of British democracy are. Currently, he is deeply steeped in vote-bank politics to recognise the true intentions of enemies among his supporters.
I was thinking of an analogy, which in my opinion shows the root of the problem-
CHURCH BELLS:
In a little village in the Netherlands, a newcomer complained about the noise made by the church bells every 1/2 hour, 24/7. She was ignored and the bells continued to ring as they did since the 17th Century.
In another slightly bigger town the same complaint was made by a newcomer. Out came the decibel meters and sure enough it was louder than the legal background noise, so the Church bells stopped ringing to the dismay of the people of the town.
Now this is not something to organise a mass protest about, but people resent the decision.
In our current day and age we have plenty of ‘Church bell’ incidents. The majority having to give way or change because someone in authority deems it a good idea or to pander to a minority.
Add this to the lack of mandate the current government has and you have a problem.
People not being heard, decisions made against common sense and values and norms as we know it.
I don’t doubt that Starmer will reinvigorate the State…as a weapon to deploy against the White Working Class, and all other dissenters against the views, values and beliefs of the Metropolitan political/media class to which he is loyal. We can expect to see people like Farage, not just debanked but imprisoned quite soon…
Interesting view, no word about the reason and repeating the mainstream media. Do I need UnHerd for it. No
Ridiculous. Starmer is no Thatcher, whose re-assertion of British state “supremacy” was a campaign to rid the country of exactly the Leftist political philosophies that have caused the present immigration crisis.
and by caving into the unions, literally within days of assuming power, Starmer & co are well on the way to completely undermining what Thatcher achieved in “imposing the state’s authority” (as the author puts it) over bolshie trade unionists!
In arguing that this is essentially a ‘coms’ issue the writer exposes how little he understands the seriousness of the crisis and how late the hour is.
We are beyond the powers of spin now. Mrs Thatcher, whom the writer lauds and whom he desires Sir Keir should emulate, initiated the very culture of manipulation which has turned the political commons into the noisome mephtiic swamp it is today.
Blair cynically refined it and and Cameron lamely exhausted it. Such that we are now beyond all remedy of such ‘dark arts’. Timothy Bell, Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Andy Coulson – They are responsible for this explosion as much as anyone else. They debased the coinage of political authority, they mortgaged truth to expediency and now the hour of redemption has come.
“What tale shall server me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?”
In his message to the public, Starmer offered a similar line, condemning the “far-Right thuggery” while warning anyone who had participated in the violence: “I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder.”
A PM who attacks a citizenry that has complained about unfettered immigration for years, to no avail, is not the stuff of Mrs. Thatcher. He’s not the stuff of Mr. Thatcher. Immigration has been talked about, written about, and debated about; the one thing it has NOT been is addressed. Unless turning a blind eye to the endless waves of illegals is typical of how govt addresses its duties today.
Perhaps Mr. Starmer could take a breath and ponder how this situation was reached. It occurred because govt failed in one of its core jobs. And it continues to fail while telling the taxpayer to not just accept the failure, but underwrite it.
Completely missed the point in this article. That is people don’t want the state reasserting itself by coming down heavily – on one side only. They don’t want a two-tier justice system. Starmer is doing exactly that. That’s why people are protesting, they’re sick of being treated as second class citizens in their own country and having their society and culture ravaged by an ideology. What’s so complicated about that.
You misread the public mood. This isn’t just racist thugs, it’s ordinary people from those downtrodden cities, who’ve born the brunt of mass immigration. We’ve had 13 million since early 90s – that’s the same as the population of Ireland, Scotland and Wales combined. House building and infrastructure hasn’t kept up with it. British workers at the bottom of the heap think they’re being undercut by foreign Labour. Aldershot is in one of the most affluent parts of the country, yet disorder is apparently planned. Get real Mr McTague.
Covid, resulting labour and goods shortages, and the energy price crisis brought on by the Ukraine War, all lead to relatively high inflation and interest rates – the latter after a decade or more of artificially low interest rates following the Global Financial Crisis. People are understandably fed up. That’s why Brexit happened.
I’m absolutely certain that Labour wouldn’t have done any better – and it would’ve cost even more. There’s no indication or evidence that Starmer or his front bench are any good at actually Governing. They made promises, they didn’t actually make any actionable plans, and now they’re found wanting – partly because they’re not listening.
oh for God’s sake. The state has failed , let’s have more state.
Decades ago Enoch Powell foresaw “rivers of blood” if the UK pursued liberal immigration policies. Maybe he was right.
Powell went on:
I think our revered leader has the willpower to impose the authority of the state. What he lacks is an understanding of how ordinary mortals feel. He knows how they *ought*to feel because, like the rest of the self-righteous elite, he knows best. Unfortunately, the actions of multiple governments have been at complete odds with the dreams of ordinary people. Two things will correct that: stop illegal immigration and stop telling people they are racist thickos when they don’t conform to your own perfection.
Thatcher was right because she had a walloping majority mandate to enact the will of the people.
Starmer has no mandate, not really. The Tories were booted out because the refused to enact the will of the people – Labour have been elected by default, and are likewise totally ignoring the vast majority of people in the country.
Starmer foolishly labeled legitimately concerned native English as far right. They will never listen to him again.
What a very disappointing article that totally misses the point of the current unrest. Whilst maintaining law and order is vital in itself it is insufficient. If he ignores the underlying reasons for the outbreak he will be finished – and far sooner than most people realise.
One things for sure. Labour have lost the red wall forever.
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A shame. I’ll miss your input.
Yeah. “UnHerd Reader” was a prolific commenter.
It comes to this in the end.
Starmer is an elitist, Metropolitan left wing liberal/ socialist. He knows nothing at all about life for normal people, and has shown signs of being perplexed, even repulsed by them when he has had to meet them.
He, and his type are the principal architects of the current problems, which are only beginning. His only response will be to blame those normal people whose lives are so badly impacted by mass, uncontrolled immigration.
It doesn’t affect him. It doesn’t affect any of them. They are insulated from the consequences of their extreme ideologies.
‘How have we allowed gangs of balaclava-clad (and Nazi tattooed) men to form pseudo-paramilitary mobs in our cities?’ Well, we allowed masked gangs to incite murder and beheadings on the streets in 1989, when the UK based Union of Islamic Students Associations offered to commit murder for Khomeini. We allowed gangs of Asian men to drug, abduct and abuse white girls for years. And we have no trouble blaming the ‘far right’ with no evidence that far right ideology is behind the demos, while labelling the Manchester Arena perpetrator as a ‘suicide bomber’, not what he was, a Muslim bomber.
Oh but it is. It very much is. Starmer’s whole career since he left the education system (or likely even preceding that) was devoted to bring this very crisis upon the nation. What part of “hooman rights lawyer” do you not understand?
The author misunderstands the cause of the riots.
More authority trying to stamp out the riots will only cause more resentment and riots.
The PM should, instead, listen to the people and their problems and attempt to fix the problems, the actual cause of the riots.
But nothing is going wrong. Everything is going gloriously to plan. Starmer hasnt got to do ANYTHING but say meaningless platitudes and explain the authoritarian regulations his masters in the shadows want put in place.
His “Masters in the Shadows”?
The rioting gives a government with an evangelical authoritarian streak and absolute conviction in it’s own moral goodness all the excuses it needs to set up the full apparatus of a surveillance state.
Major disagreement with the hypothesis. Thatcher imposed government will in its lane and she got government out of the lanes of the people.
Interesting catching up with this a day later and after the evening where anti-racist demos way outweighed Far Right equivalents. I was on one myself.
Now there were some ‘anarchist’ types who would have welcomed a confrontation, but v small minority. The evening had a remarkable feel, and yes much to the dislike of many on UnHerd, a v diverse but brotherly unity. Maybe the Far Right just tactically backed off for an evening, but what it probably shows is the response from the ordinary person to threats and violence remains something us Brits can be highly proud of. The great grandchildren of Moseley may have stepped forward but so have those of Churchill & Atlee. We have an issue with migration but it is not going to drive our best values into the ground.
Agree with author though that Starmer needs to further find his voice here. Language and rhetoric counts and we are in need of it.
The Guardian has a YouTube video of a middle aged white man driving a crowd into a frenzy of rage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIXOqpBxhN0
Of course I don’t support idiots smashing up Greggs or people’s cars or attaching random immigrants on the street but, as others have noted, all previous requests to the Govt (Cons and Labour) to stop immigration have been ignored so you can see why they feel ‘smashing things up’ is their only course of action.
I would like to join one of the protests both to see what they are actually like (and whether the media reporting is fair) and to show my support for their concerns and demands for action on immigration and two-tier policing (and governance) but have been unable to find out where the protests are happening.
I don’t see why you lot are so upset. You won. You turned the party of socialism into tories.
And do what?
Starmer has been re-active to the crisis not pro-active, deferring to due legal processes and lazily ascribing the riots to the far right, visiting and giving assurances to mosques, instead of finding solutions to the deep resentments of so many of the left behind white working class. Cooper and the Home Office have also been asleep as usual, with no initiatives and just moral disapproval.
The most important point of the demonstrations the author disparages is not the subset of demonstrators who were violent, but the majority of them who represent ordinary, non-violent, *very* frustrated citizens protesting successive governments’ failure to perform what is surely one of the most “basic functions of a state”: control of borders to ensure that the people who reside in the country are citizens or non-citizens whose presence is broadly supported by the citizens.
Another basic function is law enforcement and courts which do not discriminate for or against particular sub-groups – which is a concern raised by the protesters who the author disparages.
“Starmer needs the strength of Thatcher”
You having a laugh!