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.
The response by British politicians has been to censor and de-platform any voices that are critical of official government policies — and to regularly arrest British citizens who make social media posts that are deemed “offensive.”
In the past year, British police have even raided the homes of politicians, such as the popular actor Laurence Fox, who are critical of the UK’s open door immigration policies.
The anti-immigrant resentment reached a boiling point in the mid-2010s
That’s when it was revealed that British police units had knowingly allowed gangs of Pakistani men to “groom,” molest, rape and on a few occasions murder British school girls in the town of Rotherham, from the late 1980s until 2013, rather than risk retaliation by the Muslim community.
Subsequent investigations revealed that police officials had deliberately turned a blind eye to the systemic sexual abuse because they didn’t want to be accused of “racism” or of targeting the British-Pakistani men who were involved.
Being politically correct was far more important to these British police officials and politicians, apparently, than doing their jobs or protecting young girls.
An official government commission found that at least 1,400 British school children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, primarily by Pakistani men.
According to its report, children as young as 11 were "raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated."
Girls were sometimes doused with gasoline and then threatened with being set on fire if they did not comply with their captors’ demands.
This is the context of the new wave of anti-immigration riots that has erupted in the past week – context that is deliberately ignored or covered up by the tightly-controlled state media organizations in the U.S. and Britain, such as the BBC and CNN.
Of course, violence against any group of people based on their ethnicity is never justified. Racism of any kind is abhorrent.
And despite the horrors of Rotherham and the cowardly failure of British politicians and police to stop it, sexual crime is not limited to people of immigrant backgrounds.
But at the same time, the rage that some members of the British public feel, after a new group of British school children has been murdered in cold blood, should not be ignored.
Their anger seemed directed more at the police and politicians who let such atrocities happen… than at migrants themselves.
For decades, British citizens have watched as their streets have become more and more violent, their children subjected to sexual abuse and trafficking, and their demands for justice continually ignored by politicians and police alike.
As is true in the U.S., British politicians often think the answer to a social crisis is to threaten their own people.
Starmer, himself a former prosecutor, exemplifies this naked contempt.
“Those who have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law,” he announced in a hastily called press conference. “The police will be making arrests … I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder.”
We’ll see what happens. History shows that when politicians feel the need to threaten their own people, it’s a sign they are losing control. They are usually not in office for long.
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