Britain at the tipping point

Riots have a way of taking on a life of their own. There may be a trigger but they often come to represent something else entirely. At this point we can say that this is no longer about Southport as such. This has become the long overdue howl of protest over mass immigration.

This is what happens when you elect a government to bring down immigration and they open the floodgates. This is what happens when that government’s successor declares an effective amnesty for illegal immigration, and liberalises visa rules - with no mandate to speak of.

Politicians on all sides are lining up to say these demonstrations are "unacceptable". But they are wrong. The reason we bother to have elections is because the vote is a substitute for violent uprisings. But the politicians have not only ignored the people, they have routinely defied them. Our political class has rendered the vote meaningless. They tore up the contract. If the peaceful way of doing politics has been abandoned by politicians, the people are entitled and even obliged to reciprocate.

But of course with the internet being as chaotic as the streets, people will read into this whatever they want to read into it. Labour will almost certainly learn all the wrong lessons. We can expect a bump in funding for Hope Not Hate and any passing race grifter with their hand out, and more initiatives to censor social media.

Meanwhile, others are holding Nigel Farage responsible. The idiotic Robert Shrimsley, Chief UK political commentator and executive editor of the FT tweeted “Starmer can and should take the fight to Farage, Reform and others giving dog whistle succour to the rioting thugs. The ordinary Reform voter does not back rioting, looting and thuggery. Time to confront Faragism with its rhetoric”.

This goes to show how little they understand what's happening. Farage isn't leading public sentiment. As always, he is trailing it. Farage is significantly to the left of the party he leads on immigration. You can “confront” Farage and ban the Tommy Robinsons but it doesn't change the reality of how people feel about mass immigration because they have to live with the consequences. This outbreak of violence did not happen in a vacuum.

There will, of course, be the customary moral panic about the “far right”, and we’ve already seen calls to proscribe the EDL as a terrorist organisation despite it no longer existing. The far right that does exist, exists on a largely ad-hoc basis. There isn't an umbrella organisation like EDL that you can ban. It’s organic and its growth is largely a consequence of the government’s policy of secrecy surrounding the housing of migrants.

Until recently, it enjoyed little success. It revolves around a few crowdfunded activists. They've been active around the country monitoring accommodation of asylum seekers. They came to protest the migrant facility at RAF Linton on Ouse near to where I live.

As it happens, I'm glad they did because they had more of an idea of what was happening than the (very middle class) local residents action group, which (in fear of being branded racist) adopted the slogan "wrong plan, wrong place", and it turned out that one of the self-appointed leaders was a "refugees welcome" activist who had previously hosted a refugee in her large Ripon mansion.

Over a few weeks I got to know some of them. I even met Sam Melia of Patriotic Alternative, with whom I profoundly disagreed, but found him polite, articulate and almost persuasive. The most they could dig up on him locally was that he'd been in the village delivering "far right literature". ie. leaflets.

On reflection, it was unlikely that the asylum centre would have gone ahead. Linton is wealthy rural village in one of the safest Tory seats in the land. All the well-to-do people in the district got involved, with direct input from the local MP. I made it clear that I would stand against him at the election if it went ahead. That's partly why I re-joined Ukip.

Faced with such implacable opposition from all sides, the Home Office backed down, and migrants were instead distributed to Premier Inn type hotels close to Leeds, where less influential working class opposition could be ignored.

That same group of "far right" activists then moved on to fight the proposed centre at the recently closed RAF Scampton. Poorly attended protests were held in York and Lincoln, outnumbered by the rent-a-mob Stand Up To Racism branches. In the immediate aftermath I was then subject to a campaign of anonymous threatening far-leftist hate mail, making mention of immediate members of my family and their personal details. I believe was done by a member of the local SUTR branch. It was reported to the police, and to their credit, they took it seriously.

From discussions with "far right" activists, I got a reasonable picture of what goes on when migrants are plonked in hotels. They have nothing to do and loiter in the vicinity often harassing women and schoolgirls. There is evidence of this, but not everything they said could be entirely trusted because, like those who proliferated misinformation regarding Southport, they work on rumour and gossip. This is a concern for authorities who are alert to the very real possibility of vigilantism. There are links to voluntary "paedophile hunter" activists.

Little of what is happening regarding the housing of migrants is reported by local media, and if an incident occurs, local media will offer no description or make any link to the housing of migrants. All we are told (if anything) is that an incident took place, without reference to nearby migrant accommodation. Local "journalists", reliant on the local police for stories, cooperate fully with local "reporting guidelines". My name popped up once or twice in local and national media, where in The Times, I learned that I had "regularly attended far right rallies", which was news to me. I made a press complaint but that was a total waste of time.

Though the "far right protest" in Linton on Ouse did not exceed a dozen people, (outnumbered by journalists) it was written as though it was a branch of the Volkssturm.

Essentially, on this issue, there is a formal and informal information blackout and the media is not only cooperative, it actively smears anyone who dares to speak up, while writing glowing full page spreads about people who house refugees, eliding dinghy migrants with Ukrainian refugees. Home Office operations are essentially conducted under a veil of secrecy. Parents are not entitled to know if feral male migrants are loitering in their communities.

As such, it is not a huge stretch of the imagination to believe the authorities would withhold pertinent information about the Southport suspect if they had something to hide. They have form for managing media narratives, and they have ways of discouraging people from asking questions. They certainly have concealed information about the housing of migrants because they knew there'd be local protests. We have seen protests popping up more frequently, and they are getting bigger all the time.

The bottom line is that locals do not want feral Muslim men of fighting age in their communities, the government won't lift a finger to stop more arriving, and they're dumped in places where local opposition has no political influence. This was going to explode eventually.

Ultimately, the authorities create the information vacuum, when such things are very much a matter of public interest. It is then safe to say that if there was a terror angle to Southport, that the police would sit on it as long as they could, and we may yet discover why there's been such an information drought - a drought which is still leading to wild speculation.

Thus, in declaring his intention to crack down on “far right” activity, Starmer is saying that public communication policy will not change, and authorities will continue to operate in secrecy, managing media narratives in the hope of containing public anger. As we have seen, not only does it not work, it's only going to make things worse from now on.

In this, it helps to measure Stamer's speech in terms of stated intent versus real world application. Leaving aside that the police were responsible for the riot in Southport by way of rationing information, Starmer announced a series of measures to detect and deter coordinated "far right" activity. Superficially, there's not much wrong with that as a matter of public policy. But if scenes in London are anything to go by, the actual intention is to come down heavy on any protest if it pertains to Southport, the collapse of law and order, and mass immigration. As such, this is an attack on the right to protest.

Of course, we've heard the "attack on the right to protest" shtick from the left because they believe they have a god given right to shut down London without consequences. But this is something different. Police are now operating on the presumption that anyone who turns out in protest is by definition, far right, which somehow justifies the application of unrestrained force. Force which has been completely absent in recent times when ethnic minorities have taken to the streets, and when hate marchers camp outside synagogues. We‘ve seen that this is absolutely not tolerated in France or Germany but the far left and their Islamist bedfellows get a free pass in Britain.

That, of itself, is reason enough to protest. While few condone a lynch mob turning up to Southport (which then set upon a local mosque), the public are well within their rights to take to the streets over this. If the PM thinks the public are going to look the other way while foreigners turn our country into a blood-soaked third world slum, he has another think coming.

What makes this a turning point is that today we learned there are what amounts armed Islamist militias on UK soil ready to deploy from their mosques within hours. Muslims have formed their own version of the EDL. This follows a general election where Islamist sectarianism came to the fore, scoring as many parliamentary seats as Farage’s Reform, but without a peep of protest.

Against a backdrop of periodic Islamist terror atrocities and a scores of dead teenagers fallen victim to knife crime, the public is finally saying enough is enough. An intelligent leader might take this as an opportunity to rethink mass immigration and integration policies, but instead Labour will double down on its culture war against the natives. As such, it is safe to say that this is very far from over, and the worst is yet to come.

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In other news, there an article by me over on Brussels Signal.