The Counter-Riot Has Only Just Begun

Is Britain on the brink of another Civil War? Like the first, it would be between those who love Britain and those who hate it, like Starmer.

From The European Conservative

By Mick Hume

The UK establishment is interested not just in clearing the streets of rioters, but clearing the political battlefield of opposition views.

We have witnessed two types of rioting here in the UK since three little girls were murdered in the northern English town of Southport on July 29th by the son of Rwandan immigrants.

There have been physical riots in assorted towns and cities; local outbursts of brick-chucking violent unrest involving clashes with police, and some reprehensible attacks on hostels holding migrants or mosques. These riots pose an immediate problem of public order; they may have abated, at least for now.

And then there is the national counter-riot of political prejudice staged by the Labour government, the mainstream media, and the rest of the liberal establishment, left-handedly hurling brickbats at everybody from Nigel Farage to Elon Musk. 

Unlike the incoherent protests on the streets, this top-down political riot has a clear aim: exploiting the unrest to try to shift the blame for Britain’s problems onto “far-right thugs,” smear the white working class as racists, and justify a new crackdown on free speech and democracy. 

The British establishment’s political counter-riot looks set to have far more serious long-term consequences for the future of a free society than a few summer nights of localised trouble.

Nobody who supports democratic politics wants to see or support riots on the streets. Those fear-mongers who would exaggerate the rioting, however, also do a serious disservice to democratic debate. 

To judge by some of the hysterical media coverage about “Anarchy!”, and the wave of officially-backed panic that saw people warned to stay indoors this week, one might imagine that alien fascist hordes intent on a racist pogrom were descending on English towns by bus.

Veteran Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens added some much-needed perspective by contrasting Britain’s summer riots with the unrest in Bangladesh that had left 300 dead, including a dozen police officers, and forced the prime minister to flee the country.

Next to the bloody uprisings in Bangladesh and elsewhere, the mostly-performative confrontations with police across the North of England and elsewhere have been little more than handbags at [pub] chucking-out time.

I’ve seen worse outside boozers on the way home from Upton Park after the West Ham/Spurs derby. Most of the so-called ‘Far Right’ activists looked like extras from the football hooligan movie Green Street.

The ‘performative’ character of those riots was well-illustrated by the (non-) events of this week. Police circulated a long list of targets for “far-right” riots allegedly planned for the evening of Wednesday, August 7th,  and the Left swore to drive “fascist scum off our streets.” 

On Wednesday, in supposed target areas such as my part of London, doctors’ surgeries closed, pubs barred their doors, hospitals prepared for casualties and Labour MPs warned people to stay off the streets. In the event, there was no ‘far-right’ protest for the counter-protests to counter. The Left, mainstream media, and police then declared the non-appearance of these ghost riots to be an historic victory for anti-racists. Over whom, exactly?

There is also the question: when is a riot not a riot? Apparently when it involves crowds of armed Muslim men, many wrapped in Palestinian flags (apparently supporting Hamas is an important symbol of being tolerant and inclusive in Britain today), prowling the streets of an English city and attacking white drinkers at a pub. They, we are reassured, were not rioting but simply “defending their community against the threat of the far-right.” Let’s remember, however, that the idea of double standards or two-tier policing is simply a “far-right myth” invented on social media.

Some of those we watched causing short-lived havoc in British towns and cities did look like they were interested in violent beer-fuelled fun rather than serious political protest. But more sober establishment figures will have also been enjoying the spectacle of the riots from afar, and rewriting the news script to suit their purposes. They turned the objects thrown at police into a get-out-of-jail-free card—not for the rioters (who are going to jail for exemplary sentences), but for the political elite.

Look at how the first riot in Southport, following the brutal murder of three girls, took over the news. That unrest became a useful distraction from the events earlier in the day, when angry Southport residents heckled the new prime minister during Starmer’s very brief visit to the murder scene, with shouts of  “How many more children? Our kids are dead and you’re leaving already?” “Here’s your photo opportunity.” “Get the truth out.” 

The fact that Starmer, supposedly “the most popular Labour prime minister ever” was being booed and told to “Go away, you’re not wanted” less than a month after his ‘landslide’ election victory, in a constituency Labour had just won for the first time, should have been a huge story. It revealed the yawning gap between the political elites and the people. But why talk about any of that when you can simply blame the divisions in the town on “disinformation” spread by the “far right”?

What about the millions of British people who would not dream of throwing a brick at police, but are genuinely angry about everything from uncontrolled immigration and divisive multiculturalism to two-tier policing and attacks on free speech? They could now be dubbed as hapless dupes, whose minds were supposedly being manipulated by shady extremists online.  The media even cast loudmouth Tommy Robinson as some sort of “far-right” Svengali figure, masterminding unrest from his holiday sunbed, or alternatively accused Russian bots of pulling British people’s strings. As ever the message is: aren’t the plebs stupid?

And what of democratically-elected MP and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, the only political leader prepared, while condemning the violence, to ask questions about the underlying causes of the unrest and point the finger at migration policies? He found himself simply added to those The Times branded the “rogues’ gallery of figures fanning the flames of violence,” effectively turning its front page into a ‘Wanted’ poster. While Labour MPs demand that the Reform leader be investigated and potentially thrown out of Parliament, a left-wing radio host even called the unrest the “Farage riots”. Any smear or slander goes these days, once they can stick the ‘far right’ label on those they fear.

This is about much more than a few nights of unrest. The far-reaching political consequences of the establishment’s counter-riot should already be clear. They are interested in not just clearing the streets of rioters, but clearing the political battlefield of opposition views. 

If you even raise the problem of mass immigration in the aftermath of the riots, you can now be tarred with the ‘far-right’ brush and placed outside the limits of acceptable debate. When BBC radio’s flagship Today programme, morning voice of the chattering classes, interviewed Conservative leadership contender Robert Jenrick this week, presenter Mishal Husain suggested the “rhetoric” used by the previous Tory government was somehow responsible for the riots, “particularly the idea of putting forward ‘Stop the Boats’ as a slogan”. 

Other mainstream news media reported that protesters were not only waving “England football flags” (the horror!) but were using “racially-charged sayings including ‘Enough is enough’, ‘Stop the Boats’ and ‘Time to take our country back.’” The message is that the problem is not uncontrolled immigration, but those who protest about it. 

After all, if “Stop the Boats” is now a “far-right” and “racially-charged” slogan, how can even anybody talk about the problem of illegal immigrants landing on England’s beaches? Former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak desperately tried to win support by borrowing the slogan “Stop the Boats” last year. If even Sunak the wet pseudo-Tory technocrat is now considered “far-right,” then who isn’t?

More recently and powerfully, “Stop the Boats” was a leading demand of Reform UK in last month’s general election, a key factor in Farage’s party winning more than four million votes. By casting out that idea as illegitimate, the political and media elites are conspiring to deny those voters their democratic voice.

Meanwhile, in the shadow of the counter-riot, the Labour government hopes to get away with having no immigration policy at all. Having loudly dumped the Tories’ Rwanda scheme at the earliest opportunity, Labour’s only ‘alternative’ is to fast-track around 100,000 asylum seekers through the system. In other words, they want to deal with illegal immigration by making it legal. In addition, Labour’s “Operation Scatter” now plans to spread more migrants into houses, hotels, and centres around the country. That should certainly ease social tensions! But the Left can excuse all of this by chanting “Far right out!” at anybody who objects to millions more migrants being allowed into Britain.

The counter-riot has real consequences for our freedom, too. Starmer has seized upon the unrest as a pretext to introduce the sort of authoritarian measures that Labour’s lockdown-happy control freaks wanted to impose all along.

The prime minister has announced plans for wider use of facial recognition technology, more restrictions on movement for “far-right thugs,” and a permanent national “standing army” of police. The new Force’s priority, it seems, will be to keep Muslim communities and mosques safe. Listening to the government, one might almost think those three little girls had been butchered in an Islamic madrasa rather than a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. 

For those on the wrong end of the new regime, however, two-tier policing is as much about class as race or religion. Britain’s woke police chiefs will continue to treat white middle-class eco-lunatics with kid gloves when they block roads or disrupt public services. White working-class parents angry about the murder of children are a different matter altogether.

The counter-riot will also bring even more restrictions on free speech, especially online. The authorities blamed the Southport unrest on false rumours about the accused circulated via social media, and warned the Big Tech platforms they must move faster and harder to remove “disinformation.” How are Facebook, Instagram, or X/Twitter supposed to know what is “disinformation” when, as in Southport, the police refuse to release any facts? Presumably, they will be expected to remove anything that deviates from the official line. We will be left with social media platforms effectively edited by the police. Elon Musk has already faced the wrath of the UK establishment for refusing to censor his own tweets dubbing the prime minister “Two-tier Kier.”

The establishment and its leftist wing might claim that the country is now uniting behind the government and the police, against the ‘far right’ extremists. But recent terrible events have confirmed the deep divide between two Britains, and the contempt with which the snobbish elites look down upon the ‘yobbish’ masses who worry about mass immigration and law and order. 

In response to Labour’s political counter-riot, and at the risk of being branded “far right” (again), we should insist on our freedom to say that Enough is Enough.