UK Riots Expose Divide Between People and Government Class

The horrors of Rotherham, ignored by politicians for decades, explain the rage gripping parts of Britain this week

When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life. 

Unless, that is, you happen to arrive during a full-blown anti-Israel demonstration by masked Hamas demonstrators. 

Then London begins to look a lot like Damascus or Beirut.

I visit the UK regularly.  Ever since I was 19, I’ve been coming to London.  It’s one of the most magical places on earth. I’m an unrepentant Anglophile despite being half Irish.

Yet the UK has changed dramatically since I first started coming decades ago. 

Gone are the friendly bobbies with their traditional custodian helmets, walking their beats unarmed. 

In their place are groups of cowering Met Police in neon green vests and blue riot helmets, plastic shields raised as Muslim gangs and pro-Palestine demonstrators throw bricks and glass bottles in their direction.

In recent days, it’s the British working class who are also throwing things.

For a week now, cities across the UK have seen an explosion of violent demonstrations and protests by groups that state media, in both the U.S. and the U.K., have denounced as “far right” and “thugs.” 

The violence exploded following a vicious knife attack July 29 against a children’s dance school in the normally peaceful, seaside town of Southport that left three young girls dead and eight other children injured. 

The attacker, a 17-year-old boy named Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the child of Rwandan migrants, was at first wrongly identified as a Muslim.  

The vicious murders have sparked anti-immigration and anti-Muslim riots in Liverpool, Bristol, Hull and Belfast. In response, gangs of Muslim men, some with machetes, have attacked groups of protesters.

What is striking, however, has been the response by Britain’s government class, full of contempt, as usual, for the people it purports to govern.

It is a contempt that now seems tragically reciprocated.

According to news accounts, when the UK’s new far-left prime minister, Labour Party leader and former prosecutor Keir Starmer, attempted to lay flowers at the site of the Southport attack on July 30, he was met by angry crowds of local citizens who yelled at him, "How many more, Starmer? When are you going to do something?"

The demographic replacement of the native British people has accelerated in recent years 

Mass migration is a hot button issue in the UK as it is in the U.S. and throughout much of Europe.

According to Migration Watch UK, the foreign-born population of the UK has fully doubled in the past 20 years, from about 4.5 million in 2001 to 9 million in 2020. 

And in many cities and London suburbs, foreign nationals, many of them Muslims, outnumber the native British population, including in places such as Slough (69%), Leicester (58%) and Luton (57%). The population of London, the British capital, is now 66% foreign-born or their children.

This is a situation that seems ready-made to create full-scale ethnic conflict.  As Politico puts it, anti-Muslim resentment has been growing in the U.K. for decades.