I didn't think we were heading for civil war. Now I'm not so sure
I used to dismiss fears Britain was headed for open sectarian conflict, possibly even civil war, as overblown. Those expressing such unease were, I suspected, succumbing to their own subconscious cognitive bias and exaggerating the scale of the problem.
After all, does the UK really have the ingredients for such internal strife? We live in an inefficient and messed up society, but not a 'failed' one. Taxes are paid, people who want to be are employed, we have abundant food, clothing and energy – at least until Ed Miliband's climate fanaticism catches up with us. We don't have America's gun problem, even if gang violence has become a feature of British life. We have, relative to other developed nations, successfully integrated migrants in large numbers.
Now, however, I'm not so sure. The rule-abiding majority are nearing the end of their tether with illegal migration. They cannot tolerate the sheer lawlessness of it, how toddlers can be trampled to death in filthy dinghies only for the French authorities to wave the boats on their way. They are appalled when, on the rare occasion those piloting these boats are arrested, the jail time is just a few months. They are horrified that our shadow economy allows illegal migrants to work here, whilst their own taxes fund 'asylum' hotels at a cost of £5 million every day.
And they are tired of being gaslit by our political class, who keenly downplay many of the problems associated with what they deceitfully term 'irregular' migration. Of being labelled as 'bigoted' for wondering if the scale and pace of change is compatible with assimilation and social cohesion.
As the state loses control of our borders, with both legal and illegal in-flows reaching objectively unsustainable levels, it is going to ever more desperate lengths to keep the peace. So our officers throw a retired special constable into a police cell over a social media post, though not before sneering at his 'Brexity' bookshelves. Our authorities seem to think that rape gangs need to be covered up to protect 'community cohesion'. I write just days after The Telegraph revealed that concern over mass migration could be deemed a 'terrorist ideology' by the Prevent programme. Wish me luck.
But all this just paints over the mould. If the white working-class feel they are constantly being expected to sacrifice their culture, identity, their freedom of speech in order to celebrate and preserve those of immigrants, it may not be long before they revolt. As Prof David Betz of King's College London warns, when 'a formerly dominant social majority fears it is losing that dominance' it doesn't surrender its position quietly.
If you want to know how this plays out, glance at events unfolding in Northern Ireland and Los Angeles. Violence has erupted on the streets of Ballymena following the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by two 14-year old boys of Romanian descent. Riots have broken out across the city of angels in response to immigration enforcement operations. Some in the Donald Trump-hating media have dismissed the lawlessness as simply 'a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn'. California governor Gavin Newsom somehow blames not the mobs running amok, but rather 'deranged' and 'dictatorial' Trump for what is happening in LA.
What we are witnessing in these conflagrations 5,000 miles apart are worrying signs of what could become much more serious confrontations in the future. On the one hand, 'natives' could turn increasingly hostile to migrants. On the other, large migrant communities, now established for two or three generations, could defend newcomers to whom they may be related or with whom they have more in common than with white Brits.
To avoid the worst of this, white Brits and affluent migrants could leave cities to become dominated by poorer, more welfare-dependent migrant communities – deepening the rural and urban splits recent election results already tell us are emerging. In London, the White British population declined from 71 per cent in 1991 to 37 per cent in 2021. Birmingham has experienced similar ethnic change.
Nigel Farage wants to empower enforcement officers to detain and deport on a regular schedule, using charter flights to get the job done. Yet when Police Scotland attempted to remove two Indian illegal migrants in 2021, protestors surrounded their van, with the men eventually released following a stand-off lasting several hours. If the Government tried something similar in Tower Hamlets, there would be large-scale rioting with the authorities again, eventually, backing down. Reform will need a clear view about who exactly they would try to deport, the size of the problem and the means to do it. Even then, they may not be able to deport more than a few thousand.
The situation may seem almost intractable. But the solution cannot be to deny the problem exists.
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