The Riots In Britain Are The Fault Of The Governing Class

The rioting breaking out all across Britain right now is what happens when a country’s political class tries to depoliticize mass immigration — smearing anyone who objects to it as “far-right” — and then impose a policy of mass immigration by force. At some point, the people revolt.

Britain’s liberal elites have latched onto “online misinformation” and racism as an explanation for the riots, but the real explanation is that Britain’s leaders have sold their countrymen out for decades, importing an unassimilated foreign population against the wishes of native Britons. That is a recipe for social unrest and civic strife, and that’s exactly what Britain’s ruling class has brought about.

Set aside the triggering incident — in this case, a horrifying knife attack that left three little girls dead in Southport, a town in northwest England. It doesn’t matter that the accused attacker, 17-year-old Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, is neither a Muslim nor an immigrant, but merely the son of Rwandan immigrants. What matters is that this attack was the latest in a long string of attacks by non-native Britons against the native population, and that it occurred in the context of ongoing mass immigration. The riots have been labeled “anti-Muslim” and “far-right” by the government and the corporate press, but they are really anti-immigrant. Demonstrators have been quite clear about this, chanting “stop the boats” and “we want our country back,” which are reasonable sentiments for ordinary citizens to express about their homeland, whatever Britain’s ruling elite might say.

For British Prime Minister Starmer, the only possible explanation is racism and Islamophobia, He believes those who harbor such sentiments must be treated as enemies of the nation, and he has acted accordingly. Starmer has responded to the unrest by vowing to throw the book at rioters, who will face “the full force of the law.” He’s created what he calls a “standing army” of police and prosecutors, and promises swift consequences not only for those taking part directly but also those “whipping up this action online.” (Recall that the U.K. jails thousands of social media users every year for expressing opinions online the government deems offensive or dangerous. One man has already been prosecuted for posting about the riots online, charged with “stirring up racial hatred,” according to the BBC.)

What’s more, immediately after rioting broke out last week, police were sent door-to-door to hunt down even those only peripherally connected to the disorder. Protesters and sympathetic voices on the right have accused Starmer and the government of “two-tier policing,” noting the leniency with which the police deal with violent Muslim and immigrant offenders in contrast to the harsh response they tend to have with native Britons.

Indeed, as video footage online has shown in recent days, large gangs of armed Muslim men have gathered in major cities in recent days to attack anyone perceived to be right-wing or simply white. A group of some 300 Muslim men attacked a pub in Birmingham after mobilizing to counter a  “far-right” protest that never materialized. 

In all of these videos, the police are nowhere to be seen — a fact that lends credence to the charge that Starmer’s government is engaged in two-tier policing, with one set of rules for white Britons and another for Muslim immigrants. Just consider the overwhelming police response to the “far-right” side of the unrest. At this point, what the British government is engaged in is best understood as counterinsurgency.

In this case, it’s a counterinsurgency directed at Britain’s own native population. Hundreds of Britons have already been arrested and more than a hundred have been charged. The entire British government is coming together to crush only the rioters on one side of the unrest. Thousands of police officers have been mobilized across the country. The director of public prosecutions in England and Wales said he was willing to consider terrorism charges for some rioters, and also promised to extradite any social media influencers who meet the threshold of incitement in connection to the unrest.

What can explain such a response from Britain’s rulers, a state set against its nation? One reason is that Britain leaders long ago discarded the notion of any distinct English ethnic identity in favor of a hazy notion of British-ness that really means “anyone who happens to be physically in Britain.” That is to say, they decided to ignore entirely the realities of ethnic conflict by denying its existence. As Aris Roussinos writes in a recent column for Unherd, “Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as ‘British values.’”

Roussinos goes on to note how ethnic groups are even considered too dangerous to name as such, and are instead termed “communities” by the ruling class, which prefers to obsess over the politics of race rather than deal with ethnic conflict: “Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force.”

This racial binary is of course nonsense in the context of modern Britain, totally artificial, and now fraying as it comes into contact with reality. The British state has painted itself into a corner and must engage in two-tier policing simply because it is unwilling to manage, or even acknowledge, the ethnic conflict that mass immigration and a lack of assimilation have brought about. Instead, it demonizes the native majority (albeit shrinking) ethnic group while treating immigrant enclaves with kid gloves.

What this means for Britain’s ethnic English is that the state is against them, and will give them the hard hand of the law. Also against them is the country’s fast-growing Muslim population, which has no interest in British ethnicity or identity, and knows that as things now stand its dominance in Britain is only a matter of time.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.