It’s brewing isn’t it? The mass civil disorder which is about to rent the streets of Britain asunder. You can feel it in the air, it’s palpable, touchable. And, when it comes, the blame will lie squarely at the feet of our contemptible, idiotic, spineless politicians and our dissembling, witless police forces – both of which conspire to mislead and lie to the British public and refuse to respond to the will of the mass of the populace.
The issue is different, but the tinderbox vulnerability and the deep fissures in the veneer of British civility mirror exactly those of the summer of the Poll Tax riots of 1990 which, as a junior reporter, I was caught up in. Back then an arrogant we-know-better-than-you bunch of politicians (led I’m afraid by Mrs Thatcher) refused to bow to the will of the people, whose votes and unspoken social contract granted them their power in the first place.
Sound depressingly familiar and contemporary?
Back then all it took was a few hot days to raise the temperature and create the spark which led to mayhem on London’s streets. Mayhem which shocked a nation, indeed shocked the world, and ultimately brought down a Government. But it was a nation whose famous patience and tolerance had been stretched to breaking point.
Sound depressingly familiar and contemporary? My only fear is the immigration riots which today feel an ace away will not be localised to London. “But you journalists are making it worse by reporting on it” is the hectoring age-old misguided cry of the witless. And they are out in force on social media.
But, unless I’ve had this wrong for 30-odd years, it is absolutely our job as journalists to work within the law (which by the way is more draconian in the UK than almost any other democratic country) to tell the truth and reflect the values of those people good enough to pay our wages.
It is not our job to hide the truth and ignore the values of the people who pay our wages. That, I’m afraid, appears very much to be the job of the police. Just this weekend our boys and girls in blue were accused of “covering up” an alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl by Afghan asylum seekers. One 23-year-old male was charged with the rape of the girl in Nuneaton, while another man, also 23, was charged with kidnap and strangulation.
We are told Warwickshire Police advised local councillors NOT to reveal the asylum-seeker background of the two suspects, for fear of “inflaming community tensions”. And this mendacious, gutless intervention led George Finch, Reform UK leader of the county council, to respond: “The continued cover-up of the true nature of [the alleged attacker’s] immigration status risks public disorder breaking out on the streets of Warwickshire.
“I am disgusted that one year on from the social unrest that we saw in parts of the UK in 2024, the Home Office and police have clearly not learnt any lessons from the handling of similar incidents last year. I strongly believe that the only risk to public order from this case in Warwickshire comes from the cover-up itself.”
He is of course spot on. Have they learned nothing from the Southport killings of those poor little girls? To add insult to injury by the way it is reported the two Afghan men lived in two tax-payer-funded rented houses about 70 yards from each other. One wonders whether they were among the 24,000 Afghans – some of whom had convictions for violent and sexual assaults – now being re-homed in Blighty at a cost to you of £7BILLION – because of mind-boggling ineptitude and a catastrophic data breach. But I guess we will have to wait until the court case.
Unless that data is withheld for our own good of course. Meanwhile this weekend the protests (remarkably polite so far if you ask me compared to the 1990 Poll tax debacle) continued to grow. On the back of unrest in Epping and Diss in Norfolk, there were angry protests at Canary Wharf, the Thistle Barbican in London, and the streets of Newcastle, Manchester, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Liverpool.
It’s not going to go away this. Today Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced £100m to boost border security (or somesuch wishy-washy plan). Well, she had to. She knew the news was breaking that more than 25,000 people have made the journey from France to the UK in small boats – a record for this point in the year – and she had to announce something.
That £100m is of course less than one fifth of the cash we have paid France to do absolutely nothing about the small boats crisis. And we start the one-out-one-in policy with our friends across the Channel today – which despite the fanfare does literally nothing to reduce numbers. Look, do I think immigration is the No1 catastrophe Starmer’s Government is foisting upon us?
No, that would be our dead-on-arrival economy and witless Chancellor who is overseeing the financial collapse of a nation. But do I think the ignoring of genuine public fears is the No1 issue threatening cohesion and stoking the understandable anger of the people of this once fabulous country?
By a country mile. As is oft repeated, if the liberals don’t sort out immigration the fascists will. They have been warned.