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The Politics of the UK Riots
Mark Gullick • Monday, August 12, 2024 • 3,000 Words
August is traditionally a quiet month in the United Kingdom. The British go on their summer holidays, perversely leaving the country during the hottest month of the year to seek sunshine in foreign climes. Parliament goes into recess, and so no new laws are passed. Even the media take a break, the lack of newsworthy stories earning the month the nickname “the silly season”, reflecting the inane stories the media have to find to fill their newspapers and TV news programs.
But the sleepy eighth month, named for Augustus Caesar, occasionally acts strangely on the English, a people once famed for their rather dull nature. In August 2011, rioting spread across the country after a Black man was shot dead by police in London. Somewhat earlier, in August 1641, the first battle of the English Civil War (three wars, technically, within a decade) was fought at Nottingham. Today, August 2024 can take its place in the British calendar of civil unrest. But where the mainstream media have concentrated on the visuals of the recent riots, it is the political back-story that needs watching. The question is a simple one; how has a tenderfoot British government made such fast and efficient use of the riots for authoritarian political ends?
The riots have been well-documented globally; they are a distraction from the real story, that of political manipulation and the use of civil disturbance to change the law of the land. And this Machiavellian program is aimed squarely at the White population. When British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer addressed the nation after Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, his tone was conciliatory and apologetic, praising what he claimed was the ongoing Black fight against racism. His speech after this month’s riots is markedly different, beginning as it does with the following;
“I utterly condemn the far-Right thuggery we’ve seen this weekend”.
The phrase “far Right” is Britain’s equivalent to the Biden administration’s use of “white supremacy”, a meaningless smear by association I wrote about here at The Occidental Observer over two years ago. The organization which has set itself up as the moral arbiter of supposed White racism is HOPE Not Hate (HNH), an equivalent to America’s Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League. It is HNH who have popularized the phrase “far Right”, one the government has run with. They are also agents provocateurs, groundlessly alleging that a Muslim woman had had acid thrown at her from a car in the town of Cleveland during the rioting, a claim the local police immediately debunked.
But the temptation is still to blame government ineptitude rather than malevolent design. Before the general election on July 4, it was assumed that as Labour had made no substantive policy announcements, they therefore had no policies. They seemed to be campaigning solely on the fact that they weren’t the Conservatives, and simply would not be equipped to govern. Now, that accusation of under-preparedness looks naïve.
There is a perception that Labour’s authoritarian response to the riots is a result of panic, that they getting tough in order to appear in command. But the government appearing to make policy on the hoof is a grand deception, and this sudden roll-out of zealous and ethnicity-specific strong-arm tactics was in place all along. The riots were engineered and the results both predicted and used in a pre-determined way. The White British working class have been goaded for decades with the effects of immigration and the plainly preferential treatment often given to undocumented men. As in Ireland, the government pushed them once too often, albeit deliberately so.
The initial rioting in Southport, a suburb of Liverpool, was sparked by the murder of three young girls at a dance party on July 29, but there had been something of a prequel in the Harehills city district of Leeds on July 18. The difference between the police response to the latter riot and that of the ensuing and far more serious violence shows patterns which are already beginning to define Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s fledgling government.
For once, the rumor on social media that the alleged killer was a newly arrived immigrant was genuine misinformation. The police withheld the attacker’s name for several days, by now a recognized signal that whoever the perpetrator was, he was not a white Englishman. The accused was in fact born in Wales — a fact endlessly repeated in the media — of Rwandan immigrant parents. But the fuse was lit, and a group which was composed of White Englishmen gathered outside a mosque in Southport, which they attacked. By Friday, riots had broken out in several major cities, and the weekend inevitably saw an escalation of hostilities. Then the police and the media came spectacularly to life in a way that had not accompanied the Harehills riot.
The Harehills disturbance began when an immigrant Romanian family became involved in a stand-off with social services officers who had come to take at least one of the family’s children into care. The ensuing riot attracted a crowd of mostly Muslim young men. The police have shown during pro-Palestine demonstrations that they are reluctant to police ethnic minorities, and when they finally arrived in Harehills, the crowd chased them out of the area. They did not return. When rioting subsequent to the Southport murders was instigated by White, English, working-class men, the style of policing changed completely. This represents a central pillar of what is already a new order; Two-tier policing.
The phrase “two-tier policing” was coined by ex-Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Her use of the phrase, in addition to using the term “invasion” to describe illegal immigration, led ultimately to her defenestration by her party. It used to require a sexual or financial scandal to end a politician’s career. Four words are sufficient today.
Two-tier policing is undeniably taking place in the UK, although that has not stopped governmental mouthpieces denying it. With the advent of citizen journalism, ordinary people whose media information used to come solely from the state-sanctioned, legacy press, are now able to watch the different policing styles employed against Muslims and the White working class. Starmer flatly denied that there is any two-tier policing, claiming that the British police act “without fear or favor”. This phrase was first used in 1829 by the founder of the British police, Sir Robert Peel, and in Starmer’s mouth it is demonstrably untrue. Tempers frayed when Sir Mark Rowley, Chief Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police Force, was asked by a reporter whether he would end two-tier policing. Rowley angrily snatched the microphone from the offending reporter’s hand.
Below is a 12-minute video by Mark Collett, of British political organization Patriotic Alternative (PA, who have been blocked from registering as an official party). It explains two-tier policing succinctly, and PA have been watched forensically for years, meaning that government lawyers will certainly have watched this short exposé. In other words, you know it’s true because if there was one slip-up, Collett would already be in jail. His message is simple; Whites are policed very differently from non-Whites.
And so, while the rioting itself dominates the media, political machinations are clicking into place behind the smokescreen. Labour are determined not to let this crisis go to waste, and they are using methods of control honed by the political class over the last quarter of a century, which links Tony Blair’s Labour government to Sir Keir Starmer’s.
The rioting has been extensive, but it is the damage done to the liberty of the citizenry that is significant. Prime Minister Starmer and his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have, to use a phrase beloved of the political class, “been absolutely clear about this”. The current troubles are the fault of White, “far-Right” thugs. Starmer put into place instant retribution for rioters, 24-hour courts to process them despite a normally sluggish judicial process in Britain, and staggering prison sentences of up to ten years for involvement in disturbances, including online incitement. This is not a flustered government grasping at ad hoc policy. This has been a long time in the planning.
Central to this aggressive policy-making are arrest and punishment, and the weaker and more vulnerable those arrested, the better the deterrent. A 55-year-old woman was arrested on August 8 for posting a name believed to be that of the Southport killer, but which was in fact incorrect. Here is what Chief Superintendent Alison Ross of Cheshire Police had to say about the arrest:
It’s a stark reminder of the dangers of posting information on social media platforms without checking the accuracy. It also acts as a warning that we are all accountable for our actions, whether that be online or in person. [Italics added].
It looks as though Ms. Ross is saying that we are all responsible for our actions, but she is not. You won’t hear any mouthpiece of the British Left (which is what the police are) saying such a thing because a belief in personal agency is not in the ideological DNA of the Left, at least not when groups with protected characteristics are being arrested. What she is impressing on the specifically White British is that they are accountable, they can be held to account, even for repeating an inaccuracy. This is reminiscent of a government advertising poster during World War II, on which a fierce-looking army officer barks out the following; “Treat rumours like mistakes. Don’t repeat ‘em”.
Britain’s people are learning a political lesson. If government cannot control the narrative, and therefore the behavior (both physical and mental) of its citizens, it will increase its powers of detention and prime the judicial system towards heavier sentencing for the ethnic bloc of which it disapproves most, which is the White working class. People are already going to jail for their part in the rioting, the usually sluggish judicial system suddenly being given the equivalent of a jab with a cattle prod. There are similarities between what is happening to rioters in the UK and the so-called “insurrectionists” of the infamous January 6 walkabout in the US. But it ought to be pointed out that the British rioters really were rioting, whereas the Americans who still languish in jail over January 6 were guilty of little more than aggravated tourism.
While everyone is being distracted by the main events of the rioting, plus the government’s pulpit-pounding response, it is the activity off-stage and behind the scenes which gives genuine cause for concern. Aside from the flurry of legislation the government is implementing, consider what else Labour have done in their first month in power.
A Parliamentary Bill intended to restore free speech to university campuses has been abandoned, and not in its formative stages. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 received Royal assent in May of last year, and was therefore effectively law. It even had cross-party support. The Bill was summed up in a governmental report of June 1, 2023 as follows:
[The Act] delivers on the Government’s commitment to strengthen academic freedom and free speech in higher education, helping to protect the reputation of our universities as centres of academic freedom.
On July 26 this year, after three weeks of a Labour government, the Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, wrote to colleagues to announce the new government’s intention to proceed no further with the Bill. Her report even allows the Bill to be repealed if constitutionally required for its annulment. The reason she gives, with reference to the academic freedom of speech the original Bill guaranteed, is that “I am aware that the Act would be burdensome on providers”.
In just over a year, in a nation that once led the world in higher education, academic freedom of speech has gone from being a championed priority to being a burden. And Labour are only just getting started.
Shortly before this eruption of dissidence, Starmer announced that there were “too many prisoners” in British jails, and began a program of early release. Once again, the line from Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange echoes. A British MP is discussing early release with a prison governor, and informs him that “soon we will be needing all our prison space for political prisoners”. Starmer had already announced that he will step up early release. But the British prison system has been described as on the brink of collapse in the media for as long as I can remember. Why the sudden desperate need for prison space?
Then there is legislation which was already draconian and which is now under review to increase the powers it grants government.
The Online Safety Bill (OSB) was controversial when it first passed into British law last year. It was marked by an almost total lack of a working definition for key operative phrases and terms such as “harm”, “hate speech”, “offence”, “racism”, and others. This lack of definition is a political tactic I called “usable ambiguity” in a piece on the Bill here. Lack of precise definition should be totally unacceptable where crime and punishment are concerned, but there are already moves to make rigid definition in the law a thing of the past, and we will see a lot more usable ambiguity as the truth is tinkered with. This is civil war at an epistemological level.
Now, the Muslim Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has stated that the OSB needs reviewing in the wake of the rioting specifically to address the confected problem of “misinformation”. Khan is an arrogant man but he has every right to be. As the highest-profile Muslim politician in the UK, he is relishing his new influence over the government. Keir Starmer has already made it clear that when Khan shouts “Jump!” Starmer merely needs to ask “how high?” Why else would a PM newly swept into power with a record-breaking mandate allow a bumptious London Mayor to inform big tech companies that, concerning online misinformation, “if they don’t sort their own house out, regulation is coming”.
Misinformation is what has exercised the Mayor, Elon Musk having taken a keen interest in the disturbances. Musk’s use of his platform, X, as a base from which to troll British politicians has incensed the political class. Musk has attacked Starmer from early in the rioting, and Starmer has responded rather bafflingly by having his Chief Commissioner of Police imply that Musk “will face the full force of the law” and possible subsequent arrest for his online comments. Whatever this government might lack, it is not braggadocio.
“England and Wales have long had very broad criminal offences that make it illegal to say something online that would often be legal offline,” says Michael Veale, associate professor in technology law at University College London. “Those communications offences are the tools that law enforcement usually reach for when dealing with specific cases like Musk’s, prosecuting thousands a year.” And some of those rules have been bolstered by the new Online Safety Act, which was passed into law in the last few months. But there’s a catch. “Even in the new act, these do not extend outside of the jurisdiction, meaning it would be hard to see how they could be used to target Musk,” says Veale. Independent
Before leading the Labour Party to victory, Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), a powerful figure in the estate of the British judiciary. Strange that he and his Chief of Police should neglect to inform Mr. Musk which law he has broken, and what extradition agreements are in place with whatever country the world’s richest man is in today. The exchange offers a clue to wider ideological concerns. For the Left, criticism of Left-wing ideology is increasingly becoming equivalent to breaking the law. And Starmer genuinely is a creature of the Left.
The only MSM journalist to have spoken about Starmer’s past as a Pabloite (a hard-Left branch of Trotskyism) is the veteran Peter Hitchens, whose late brother Christopher was probably better known in the USA. Hitchens may be a gloomy curmudgeon, but he holds onto stories tenaciously, and is a lone voice in the wilderness of the British media for forewarning an unheeding nation about Starmer’s hard-Left provenance. But we are not seeing the triumph of the Left, but that of the political class.
I recently reviewed Peter Oborne’s seminal book on modern British politics, The Triumph of the Political Class, here at The Occidental Observer. The book was written in 2007 and describes the formation of a separate political class acting in their own self-interest, and to the ultimate detriment of the citizenry. A key point Oborne makes is that, in 2007, the political class was still learning how to control the people in an age of mass communication. In the interim, it has got a lot better at it. Starmer and his party were famously seen as having no policies going into the general election, leading critics to claim Labour in power would be inventing policy as they went along, merely improvising government. This isn’t credible. Five weeks into their new government, the Labour Party certainly has got policies, and I suspect they had them long before their election victory, when they were deemed unpalatable for public consumption. Now, with a huge mandate and a five-year-plan, a Labour Party supposedly unprepared for government looks very prepared indeed.
So, if this government is coming across as panicky and unprepared for power, I suggest that is something of a psy-op. Gross incompetence leading to the exacerbation of a problem is often metaphorically referred to as “putting out the fire with gasoline”. But what if you weren’t trying to put the fire out? What if your intention all along was to make it blaze ever hotter, even if it burns the house down? If the UK is going to hell in a handcart, the handcart doesn’t need to be built from scratch. It was finished long ago.
