Riot Predicting And All That………..

In regard to the unrest (riots) that have rocked the UK recently. The proximate cause for the riots was the murder spree by the Welsh-born child of Rwandan immigrants, who – at present allegedly – knifed to death three young girls and badly wounded eight other individuals at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga party in Southport. In part due to the refusal of the UK police to initially identify the assailant, rumors soon spread (including on social media) that the murderer was a Muslim immigrant, leading in the first instance to violence against mosques, etc. The ruling class immediately jumped on the mistaken beliefs about the perpetrator to condemn the rioters as ignorant racists, which in their minds fully justified a crushing response by the state. This narrow interpretation of the cause of the riots that spread far beyond the site of the original crime was unsurprisingly opportunistic and self-serving. It permitted the complete decontextualisation of the riots in a way that denied a priori any legitimate justification and thereby rationalised the unleashing of a “standing army” (Starmer’s words) against these rioters – measures that were conspicuously absent in other violent civil disturbances – hence the subsequent bitter complaints about “two-tier policing.”

The brutal slayings in Southport were merely the last grain of sand dropped on a pile of grievances that has been accumulating for literally decades. The allegedly unreasoned and indiscriminate reaction to this single grain was just an example of the non-linearity inherent in such situations. In emergent orders – social orders particularly – a single event can set off a massive reaction that seems disproportionate and unrelated to it. This is often true in revolutions. A single event unleashes massive latent forces that have been building for extended periods. This is why authoritarian governments are so hell bent on suppressing any dissent no matter how seemingly minor. Small sparks can ignite social explosions.

The mountain of grievances clearly related to a single factor: mass immigration into the UK, and especially mass immigration from some of the most misgoverned and dysfunctional parts of the world with radically different cultures from the native inhabitants. In this environment, a mass murder by an individual only peripherally related to the underlying source of grievance could spark massive unrest. Further, given the recent history of the UK (consider, for example the 2017 bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester,  & other mass stabbings that have occurred in the UK in recent years, not the least at London Bridge) it is not at all surprising that many people would leap to the conclusion that a Muslim was the perpetrator in Southport.

The grievances have built inexorably precisely because any dissent from the ruling class view has been ruthlessly targeted and suppressed. When voice is denied, again and again, it will inevitably come to the point that the aggrieved will substitute violent deeds for words. But it is exactly these things that the British ruling class cannot admit, and is in fact at great pains to deny precisely because of its direct culpability for mass immigration, its malign effects, and the identity of those who have borne the economic, cultural, and psychic damage. It therefore has to deny vehemently the underlying cause and place full blame on the evil of the rioters. British classism is also on full, ugly display here. Indeed, it is worse than its historical antecedents (e.g., in the Victorian era) because there is not even the palliative of condescending paternalism: in 2024 it is merely vicious hatred, disdain, and disgust.

The sick irony is that those who refuse to look honestly at “root causes” here  (in no small part because they are the root cause) routinely invoke “root causes” to excuse, rationalise, and justify other social dysfunctions – including rioting far more destructive and violent than that that has occurred in the UK recently. Starmer represents a perfect example. He delivered vomit inducing remarks about the George Floyd rioting that explained them – and thereby excused them – as the understandable consequence of systemic racism. The British ruling class has been similarly disposed to excuse and rationalise Muslim violence as the product of legitimate grievance. Root causes for me, but not for thee, you awful people. & btw, your root causes are totally illegitimate.

Like Jan 6 in the US, alas, the riots are worse than a crime – they are a blunder. They have given the increasingly authoritarian British state the justification to engage in mass jailings – pour encourage les autres. Further, given the inevitable role of social media in disseminating information and opinion about the riots and the causes, the riots have provided a justification for the state to increase its power to control and censor it. Indeed, the head of London Metropolitan Police has even threatened those expressing their wrong think outside of the UK with arrest and extradition. Thus, this backlash against egregious mis-government has rebounded to the benefit of that dysfunctional government and the class that rules it. Which demonstrates the fundamental dilemma of the mis-governed. How can one resist malign authority without strengthening it, like sowing dragon’s teeth?  I confess I don’t have an answer, except to say that direct confrontation has exactly this effect. The US faces very similar issues, but I doubt it will play out there similarly to the way it has in the UK. The reason is quite simple. The white working and under classes are still present in numbers in UK cities where they live relatively cheek by jowl with recently arrived immigrants. That is not the case in the US, where white flight occurred long ago. Urban white rioting is a uniquely Anglo Saxon staple, there’s nothing like it in the US. However the severe discontent about UK mass immigration remains, as is the ruling class’s determination to crush any opposition to it.

Now, an interesting question. Would Tony Benn – the scion & poster boy of teh Left be in danger of be arrested today for his statement (posed in 1991, at the time of Maastricht)

‘Riot is an old-fashioned method of drawing the attention of the Government to what is wrong… Riot has historically played a much larger part in British politics than we are ever allowed to know.’

His point was that, deplorable though it might be, it would occur when ‘people lose the power to sack their Government’, as for example for countries subsumed into the EU. This has now happened here, despite Brexit. When both sides of Parliament conspire against the Electorate to agree on certain key policies, such as immigration, throwing out one party merely means getting the same from another. Not that the people turned from the Tories to Labour in July. Either they voted for anything except those two; or they simply stayed at home, hence the low level of electoral participation – another consequence noted by Benn: ‘when the turnout drops below 50 per cent., we are in danger.’   If the 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote had carried in favour, it might have been a different story because then each MP would have been validated by 50+% of votes cast, taking second and subsequent preferences into account. But the two main parties set their faces against that system. Now, thanks to the unreformed First Past The Post arrangement, Labour has swept in, overwhelming as the tide in Bridgewater Bay, yet shallowly supported, with its massive majority resting on the cast ballots of just 20.2% of registered voters.  If, as Tony Benn held, power belongs to the people, Starmer now has an enduring problem of legitimisation. How can he take the General Election result as a mandate to press on with his grand scheme of ‘change,’ one that retains the pro-EU and open-border themes that the vast majority of  people have clearly rejected ?  One can suppress dissent with the draconian use of law, but that tone deaf response begs the following questions

Is justice being applied impartially?

Do the punishments fit the crimes?

Does the Executive risk bringing the law into disrepute by over-reacting?

And not only the law. The historian David Starkey says that Labour has permanently lost the support of the working class. He fears that a ‘semi-revolutionary Left’ could eventually stimulate the creation of ‘a revolutionary Right:’  Surely Starkey is right when he observes that Westminster having codified ‘human rights’ and the creation of groups on the basis of ‘protected characteristics’ has tribalised the country and thereby threatened its cohesion. Unless the government clearly reasserts ‘one rule for all’, we face a future of multiple inter-ethnic conflicts. This nativism is akin to the third malign consequence of powerlessness that Benn listed:  Nationalism – and  ‘with Nationalism comes Repression.’  Starkey harks back to the historic success of our flexible, Burkean development of the Constitution:

What we’ve got to try to do… is that we revive…..conservative notion, that notion that the way we always did things…. the thing that enabled… Britain uniquely of any European country in the 19th century to modernize and to incorporate all these different social groups without vast unrest and Revolution. 

That vision is attractive, though it must be said that the UK was not always so responsive. The initial reaction of British authorities to popular unrest has often been sharp oppression: think for example of ‘Peterloo’, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Chartists. But our rulers, unlike those on the Continent, did at last bend with the wind when it seemed that their alternative was to be uprooted in a Great Storm.  Will Starmer remain ideologically dogmatic and rigidly authoritarian, or does he have the wisdom to sway ?

It is with regret that this commenter notes the portents are not in our favour.
 

© DJM 2024