UK govt adviser calls for 'COVID measures' to quell riots
Where to start for a country in chaos amidst ethnic riots? How to define what went wrong? Did it begin with the decline of the British Empire, when citizens of former colonies immigrated to the UK? Did it start during the Labour government headed by Tony Blair when the floodgates were opened and illegal migrants started pouring in? No one really knows where it started, and no one knows where it will end.
That said, a tentative timeline can be drawn for recent weeks.
July 4 – The Labour party wins the UK general election in what has been called a landslide, with 63 percent of the seats in the House of Commons.
July 18 – The new Prime Minister Keir Starmer promises to address the “causes of migration” with an allocation of £84 million to support potential migrants in their countries of origin and encourage them to stay put.
July 22 – The Labour government adopts a new terminology for illegal immigration, calling it “irregular migration” instead.
July 27 – A massive, peaceful march takes place in the streets of central London by self-described patriotic British citizens, many carrying the Union Jack (British) flag and singing patriotic songs.
July 29 – A 17-year-old youth with a weapon described by mainstream media as a “curved kitchen knife” enters a dance center and slaughters three young girls, severely wounding many others.
July 30 onward – Rioting erupts across Britain, with white citizens described by the media and government as “far-right” and migrants described as “residents protecting their communities.”
Landslide?
Is the ballot really stronger than the bullet, as Lincoln said? Just 60 percent of eligible voters turned out for the UK general election on July 4, 2024. Just under 10 million of them voted for the Labour party, which received 34 percent of all votes cast. They gained 63 percent of seats in the House of Commons, despite the fact that only 1 in 5 eligible British voters selected them.
The Reform party, headed by MP Nigel Farage, was the chosen option for just over 4 million people. They won 4 seats in the House of Commons, just 1 percent of the seats there, despite receiving 14 percent of votes cast.
Reform campaigned on a ticket of achieving net zero migration. Labour’s contribution to the debate was a promise to address illegal migration by “smashing the gangs” of smugglers which help bring them into the country. They have yet to take any gang-smashing action. Meanwhile, the migrants continue to flood into the country. Around 1,000 have arrived since Labour took power.
While the bizarre UK voting system, known as First Past the Post, was responsible for the skewed election result, other skewed results in the country are due not to historical legal leftovers but present-day prejudices. There are many examples of what is increasingly being called “two-tier policing.” Weekly mass marches through central London of Hamas supporters, some brandishing the flags of terrorist organizations, some chanting support of terrorism, have been protected by a massive police presence with nary an arrest made.
Meanwhile, marches and demonstrations by white British citizens against migration have been labeled “far-right” with police officers often burnishing their woke credentials by clamping down hard on the slightest suggestion of disorderly behavior.
On June 1, thousands of people gathered in central London to march and listen to speeches. Many chanted, “We want our country back” and held banners proclaiming, “This is London, not Londonistan.”
A much larger rally was planned for July 27 and tens of thousands arrived for what was essentially a celebration of British culture and identity. Flags were everywhere — mostly the Union Jack, but also some Irish flags and even a few Israeli flags.
Meanwhile, a counter-protest featured PLO flags and banners from the Socialist Workers' Union, with no obvious Union Jack flags at all.
In what may have been a disappointment for the authorities, the mass patriotic rally passed almost entirely peacefully. Tommy Robinson, long an icon of those in the UK opposed to uncontrolled migration, had said on June 1,
This is what London should look like [filled with proud Britishers]. First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you, and you win.
On July 27 it may have seemed that he and millions of others, Reform voters who share his views, were winning — if not a electoral victory, then at least the ability to express their views openly, to parade peacefully through their own capital city, to be proud of their identity and show it.
Two days passed
A 17-year-old youth, armed with a scimitar (a “curved kitchen knife,” as the media call it, though no pictures have been published), took a taxi to a quiet residential street in the quiet town of Southport, entered a club where a dance class for little girls was in progress, and started to slaughter them. He succeeded in killing two girls and critically wounding several others (one of whom has since died) before he was tackled by two police officers and a civilian. The police were armed with nothing more than a baton and a taser gun.
The riots started the next day. Police, media, politicians, all labeled them “far-right.” Claims that the murderer was a Syrian migrant were denied by the authorities, who described him as a British-born son of Rwandan immigrants. Pictures of an innocent-looking 11-year-old boy were posted with no explanation provided as to why a more recent picture could not be unearthed. Court illustrations showed someone very different in appearance, with his face partially covered and long, unruly hair.
Mainstream media insisted that rumors notwithstanding, the family was Christian and could often be heard singing hymns, although very few neighbors admitted to knowing anything about them. Not a single classmate came forward to express shock that the youth had acted as he had. Not a teacher, not a friend, not a neighbor...
His lack of profile was explained by some as evidence that he was autistic, to the dismay of many autistic people who did not appreciate the slur on their community with the implication that autism predisposes to violence. Others suggested that he was an incel, and had chosen to take out his rage and frustration on little girls. Some wrote that he was a paranoid schizophrenic in the grip of psychosis, acting out a delusion that he had to slaughter children following in the immoral ways of Taylor Swift, whose dance moves they were learning.
The truth didn’t matter and may never be known. The rage that exploded on British streets was the rage of mainly white, mainly working-class people who saw in three young girls the reminder of the thousands of young, white, working-class girls who have been the victims of mass migration in the grooming scandals that have horrified the country. They saw in them the incarnation of the fears that have been growing over decades, and their total impotence in the face of authorities who seem determined to flood the country with migrants, many of whom appear to hate and despise its essence.
Who are the most vulnerable?
In Weymouth, protests broke out near a controversial barge housing around 500 “asylum” seekers, who are all men aged between 18 and 65. In Rotherham, a hotel housing migrants came under attack.
Standing nearby, the mayor of South Yorkshire told a reporter from the BBC that a “violent far-right mob” had attacked “240 of the most vulnerable people in our society.”
The hotel that came under attack has been used to house migrants for three years already, after the period it was set aside for this purpose was extended twice, without the community being consulted. Protests against having hotels taken over by the government for the housing of migrants have erupted from time to time in other parts of the country and ended with locals being arrested.
The Holiday Inn hotel in Rotherham that was attacked is now housing 240 foreign males. Vulnerability is clearly in the eye of the beholder:
Rotherham is also one of the epicenters of Britain’s grooming scandal, a city where thousands of young white English girls were groomed, exploited, and severely abused by mostly Pakistani Muslim men over decades, with no one in authority lifting a finger to intervene. As early as 2002, Adele Gladman, a Home Office investigator turned whistleblower, attempted to expose the grooming scheme. She says that rather than saving the young exploited women, Rotherham Council "sent her on race awareness training and effectively suppressed her report."
Only recently did one journalist succeed in breaking the story, resulting in dozens of arrests, even though the police know that hundreds of men were involved.
Other cities have seen similar protests, sometimes descending into confrontations between police and protesters.
In London, Times Radio reporters described several hundred people protesting outside Downing Street with “the odd pocket of violence” consisting of thrown beer bottles, and “skirmishes” between police and protesters, who were chanting, “Save our children.” Dozens of arrests were made — including of a 73-year-old woman.
Surrounded by five police officers in riot helmets, this elderly lady was arrested and handcuffed. It is not clear why she was being detained. She told officers, “I’ve never been arrested in my life. I’m 73 years old and I’m come here because of them babies that has died and I’m being arrested.”
In other cities, protesters doing nothing more than shouting at police officers were attacked by police dogs, tackled to the ground and punched in the face:
Two-tier policing
Around 400 people have been arrested so far at “far-right” protests. Many have been refused bail. Meanwhile, on the streets of Bolton, “counter-protests” are underway and, curiously, there are no police in sight.
In Middlesbrough, a town of around 150,000, Muslims comprise only around 10 percent of the population but Muslim youth have essentially taken over the streets nonetheless.
Also in Middlebrough, "Asian" youth can be seen chasing a white youth and beating him. No police are in sight.
In another town, "counter-protesters" are being addressed by police attempting to calm the situation only to be rebuffed and told that we can “take care of ourselves.”
In Birmingham, mobs appear to be attempting to attack cars driven by white people:
In Hanley, a small town with a large Muslim presence, police didn't just absent themselves or stand by idly. They were actually complicit in what was transpiring, or at least, one officer was, captured on film telling Muslims to stash their weapons inside the mosque:
If there is any weapons or anything like that, then what I would do is discard them at the mosque.
Causes and consequences
Donna Jones, chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners in the UK, made a statement which critics claimed was an attempt to justify violence perpetrated by rioters.
Whilst the devastating attacks in Southport were a catalyst, the commonality amongst the protest groups appears to be focused on three key areas: the desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty; the need to uphold British values, and, in order to do this, stop illegal immigration.
Jones added that the emphasis by police on arresting patrots was “treating the symptom and not the cause” and that the Prime Minister had questions to answer about how his government would tackle immigration and uphold British values.
But hers was a lone police voice presented in the mainstream media. Even right-wing “anti-establishment” figures such as Douglas Murray blurred the lines of the real issue at the heart of the protests, writing that,
Mass illegal immigration turns high-trust societies into low-trust ones. It turns coherent societies into incoherent ones. You can’t just address the backlash to that. You have to address the cause. Unless our leaders do that this will get infinitely worse.
As many responses pointed out, the issue is not illegal immigration — it’s migration of all kinds, and the illegal form is actually a small percentage of the total.
Prime Minister Starmer’s response, meanwhile, has focused exclusively on the actions of what he calls “far-right thugs” and his promise to ensure that they will “face the full force of the law”:
The police will be making arrests. Individuals will be held on remand. Charges will follow and convictions will follow. I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder.
He also vowed that police resources would be boosted to deal with the “far-right” threat:
We must have a policing response that [uses] shared intelligence, wider deployment of facial recognition technology and preventative action, criminal behavior orders to restrict their movements before they can even board a train, in just the same way that we do with football hooligans.
Justification for lockdown?
Starmer added that enhanced protection would henceforth be provided to members of the Muslim community, because,
People in this country have a right to be safe, and yet we’ve seen Muslim communities targeted, attacks on mosques, other minority communities singled out, Nazi salutes in the street, attacks on the police, wanton violence alongside racist rhetoric...
The former First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, appealed to Starmer to send in the army to restore order to Britain’s streets:
How much worse does it have to get before the army is sent in, Keir Starmer The police clearly do not have a handle on this situation.
Lord Walney, the government’s adviser on political violence and disruption, went a step further and suggested that lawmakers should "cast their minds back to the days of COVID where the public accepted an emergency situation." What he seemed to be proposing was anti-riot lockdowns, as his words implied:
In COVID, [the public] was prepared to back measures that were needed ... I think they would take a similar approach to keeping rioters off the streets now, given the scale of damage which has been done to communities."
Are commentators correct that this is “all part of the elite’s plan to seize more power” and implement their “Great Replacement Scheme”?
