Lessons from the English Riots

The rapid spread of the riots illustrates that this was not an isolated reaction to an isolated incident, but a guttural nationwide release of anger and frustration that has been building for decades.

Marshall Yeats • August 29, 2024

Lessons from the English Riots, by Marshall Yeats – The Unz Review

“The judge of today needs no such virtues. He is not the agent and exponent of justice, but its mere lackey.”
L. Mencken

At time of writing, more than 1,000 people have been arrested in England for participation in riots sparked by the brutal murder of three children by an African. The riots have been described variously as “anti-migrant” or “anti-Muslim,” causing journalists and politicians on the Left to offer weak analyses of the disorder as being the irrational product of online misinformation and Islamophobic prejudice since the Southport murderer was born in the United Kingdom and was not, they insist, from a Muslim background. This is, however, a paradox of the Left’s own making since the riots are best understood as an expression of White working-class exasperation at the increasing pace of demographic change, at the increasing marginalisation and demonisation of the White working class in culture, and of White working-class suffering at the hands of non-White violence more generally. In every meaningful respect, these were race riots with a class subtext. In the English context, Islam and migration, especially in northern England, are merely useful and appropriate bywords for the broader category of racial displacement and for the undeniable sense of a native people under threat. The widespread unrest is a watershed not only because it marked the first major instance of White violence since the 2001 Oldham riots, but also because of how quickly it spread across England, even reaching Northern Ireland. The rapid spread of the riots illustrates that this was not an isolated reaction to an isolated incident, but a guttural nationwide release of anger and frustration that has been building for decades. No less important is the government and police response, ruthless and astonishingly efficient given the suffocating lethargy with which it usually responds to ethnic crime. If anything, the slick response to the riots has all the hallmarks of something long in preparation. Both the riots and the response to them have the feel of a turning point, for better or worse. For those on our side, what lessons can be learned?

Public Shaming and Show Trials

The instinctive, impulsive, reactive nature of the riots gave them an open character not seen in organised Leftist violence with its face coverings and Black Bloc. On the one hand, this was one of the factors leading to their successful and rapid spread. There was a contagious fearlessness to thousands of Whites erupting in rage without shame. Careful preparation for public disorder and civil disobedience, however, was almost non-existent, with the result that the vast majority of rioters were not wearing face coverings or nondescript clothing. Some, including a man wearing a St. George’s flag shirt, wore clothing that actually attracted attention and singled them out for identification. Coupled with a dedicated and fanatically persistent police investigation, which included the use of drones at riot locations, and the fact most of the violence occurred in broad daylight, easy identification thus facilitated a much higher than normal arrest count than would be expected for such chaotic events. While some rioters were arrested at the scene of disorder, a great many more were arrested days later following a process of identification.

One of the more remarkable features of the aftermath of the riots is the way in which police forces across Britain used these arrests for propaganda purposes. Shortly after the riots began to subside, police forces appeared to follow a pre-existing and coordinated playbook by issuing sinister warnings and slick, live-action arrest videos complete with dramatic music. Everywhere the message was the same: “We are coming for you, and your punishment will be severe.” Rotherham’s police chief announced, “If you were there, we are coming for you.” Sussex Police issued a statement saying “We will make you regret your actions.” The head of the Metropolitan police said “We will come after you.”

The most sinister aspect of this intimidation campaign was the universal messaging. This wasn’t a warning to criminals, but to everyone who had attended or even just observed the protests. In other words, the propaganda campaign was directed at every White person who felt moved to take to the streets in outrage. White anger itself was criminalised and stigmatised. Hundreds of mug shots were displayed by regional police forces across multiple social media platforms with gloating, threatening captions, often with the arrested persons street address included. Leftist accounts spammed the comments, gleefully hoping that the arrested persons would face violent retribution from non-White criminals in prison. The BBC offered a searchable “Faces of the Riots” database, containing the photo, name, and other information of almost every convicted rioter, ensuring that they have a stigma, if not a target, attached to them for life.

The sentencing of the rioters was also manifestly excessive, especially in light of the fact the British justice system has been notoriously soft on ethnic crime for decades, not least in the category of sex crimes. Without any sense of shame, the authorities bragged of imprisoning a man for almost two years for “shouting at a police dog” while on the other hand releasing rapists and child molestors to make room for White rioters in Britain’s overcrowded prison system. In the perverse value system of the new Britain, a product of Jewish-designed “race relations” laws produced in the 1960s and steadily evolving since then, White anger is the bigger threat and the more dangerous and devastating crime.

Legal Encroachment and Overreach

One development from the riots that has gained most attention is that Britain’s hate speech legislation seems to have entered a new phase of growth and expansion. No new laws have been passed, but the original legislation, especially the 1986 Public Order Act, was sufficiently vague that it has allowed for increasingly draconian interpretation as the culture evolves in a more anti-White direction and allows for stricter enforcement. Jonathan Bowden, speaking in the early 2000s, once said that speech was still relatively free in Britain provided that you didn’t use slurs and provided you didn’t advocate for anything criminal. And at the time he made these comments Bowden was broadly correct. It was perfectly possible to criticise immigration—and even races and racial characteristics—provided it was presented in an intellectual and reasonable manner. Convictions for hate speech were reserved either for movement figureheads such as John Tyndall or Nick Griffin, or else for skinhead groups printing provocative pamphlets.

The growth of social media, however, and its power in the realm of disseminating ideas, has made every White person a potential danger to the prevailing system. The response of the system has therefore been to regard every negative comment made by a White person as a dangerous act of “publishing,” therefore bringing that person under the 1986 Public Order Act which expressly targets anyone who “publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting” with the intent or likelihood of “stirring up” racial hatred. What exactly constitutes “threatening, abusive, or insulting” words is obviously open to interpretation, and as Western culture has moved in a direction in which ethnic populations are afforded more and more sympathy and special privileges and protections, the interpretation of judges has increasingly moved towards protecting them from all criticism. UK judges and prosecutors are also “trained” in part by the Council of Europe’s “HELP course on Combating Hate Speech,” originally developed in 2015. The course provides all the usual propaganda, stigmatising White self-affirmation as a fundamental danger to minority populations everywhere.

The cumulative result of these developments has been that many of those arrested and publicly shamed in Britain in the wake of the Southport atrocity did nothing more than make comments on social media or, still less, merely repost what someone else had written. One wonders if we are not all that far from being arrested in such a situation simply for “liking” an “illegal” status update. Special task forces were established specifically for the purpose of trawling social media for “illegal” posting. Aggressive police officers were banging on doors across England within days, with some social media posters rapidly receiving prison sentences of more than three years for calling for mass deportations and saying they didn’t want their money going to foreigners who “rape our kids and get priority.” Cheshire Constabulary boasted online of a 55-year-old woman arrested “in connection with an inaccurate social media post,” a move that drew the attention of Elon Musk.

Displaying a staggering degree of ethnic solipsism, Jewish Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, who once wrote a novel fantasising about the assassination of a Trump-like President, bleated hysterically that the riots were a re-run of anti-Jewish riots in 1144 following the murder of William of Norwich and demanded that Elon Musk be arrested and brought to trial by English authorities. Freedland worries that Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X has brought about a resurgence in the Right, fretting that “posts including “the word ‘Jew’ had increased fivefold since before the ownership transfer.” God forbid anyone should mention the Jews. Freedland’s solution is that “schools should be teaching information hygiene,” a descriptor equally banal and terrifying since the subtext is clearly a form of brainwashing. Freedland wants “online safety legislation with teeth … if that means toughening up laws so new they are yet to be fully implemented, so be it.” Jews, as always, remain at the forefront of censorship, and even the massive over-reach currently seen under Britain’s speech laws are clearly not enough to satisfy Jewish insecurity and paranoia.

The System Monopoly on ‘Safety and Security’

Another lesson from the riots is that the State will maintain its monopoly on ‘safety and security’ at all costs. Ostensibly the State is guarantor of the safety of its citizens, or at least this is the unstated agreement made in Western European states where citizens do not have gun rights and surrender certain of their capabilities of self-defence to the State in the expectation that the laws and law enforcement offered by the State are capable of substituting self-defense with adequate social protections. These social protections are assumed to be effective, so that police forces can be called upon in emergencies, the justice system will punish crime in an effective and fair manner, and, finally, that the State itself has some kind of notional integrity in the form of controlled borders.

The problem in Western Europe is that the State demands a monopoly on ‘safety and security’ but has utterly failed to fulfil its responsibilities in return. It has taken more and more freedoms, but catastrophically and even proudly neglects the basic safety of those whose freedoms it has taken. Whites everywhere have been robbed and betrayed by this bait and switch. Britons have lost much of their ability for self-defence, and thanks to Jewish-devised race legislation they are actively hindered from defending themselves. In fact, they can’t even speak openly about defending themselves. The British people have to endure compromised borders and constant ethnic violence. As a result, they to experience a form of second-class citizenship in their own justice system. As events in Southport show, they can’t even send their children to a dance class. Just days after the riots, presented in the media as the pinnacle of moral failings, a White man was stabbed in the neck on camera by an African while a motley of other ethnics joked and laughed. No sooner had the blood been washed from the street than eight stabbings occurred at the Notting Hill Carnival, Britain’s biggest festival of multiculturalism. Neither of these latter incidents were presented as a form of civilizational crisis. Instead they are tacitly assumed to be the necessary cost of living in a “vibrant”, “diverse”, multicultural society. Anyone protesting or speaking negatively about vibrancy and diversity must therefore be a monster, and should be silenced, put in prison, and tarnished for life.

The recent riots were an angry, messy attempt by elements of the British working class to grasp at some semblance of safety and security. And, as has happened so often in multiethnic contexts, this involved an attempt at “cleansing” certain areas occupied by a rival ethnic group or groups. The riots, to the extent that some of the violence was directed against the police, were also a form of retribution by the White working class against authorities which had failed and betrayed them. Leftists made much fun of videos of Britons throwing bins and other objects at police, but these were not just random acts of chaotic violence but the expression of genuine hurt and rage at an overwhelmingly White police force that had betrayed its own kind and turned its back in every meaningful way. White safety isn’t a concern in modern, multicultural Britain, and Whites have no right to protest when their own children are butchered by the imported tools of our hidden elites.

The Class Element and the Incentivization of the Left

Another lesson from the riots is that the White population in Britain is diverging strongly along class lines, with trendy metropolitan middle classes and those largely safe in the suburbs unable and unwilling to empathise with their ethnic kin swamped by migrants in Britain’s larger towns and slums. A common theme in social media commentary on the riots was a sneering condescension displayed by liberal, university-educated types against a class of Whites they view as ignorant, tasteless, boorish, and uncultured. This is summed up in the coining of the word “Gammon,” an even more sneering slur than ‘cracker,’ to describe a typical person from the White working class—gammon referring not only to the pale-pink complexion of those being scorned, but also in the assumption that gammon is a cheap, bland, and fatty meat that a “better” sort of person wouldn’t go for. For this kind of White liberal, “racism” is the resort of beer-swilling Little Englanders who enjoy an artery-clogging diet and whose antipathy to migrants is assumed to be irrational, primitive, piggish, and animalistic. The liberal middle classes have the luxury of thinking of themselves as enlightened, superior moral beings because the foreigners they tend to live and work alongside are at the higher end of the IQ and cultural scale.

In England’s post-industrial north, however, entire towns that once hosted the mining, cotton and linen industries have fallen first into decrepitude and then into mass swamping by millions of Pakistanis and other South Asians. Areas that once thrived with an industrious English working-class culture are now displaced by often predatory Asian communities and their gangs. Whites in these areas are scorned by the immigrant populations, and also by those Whites higher in the socio-economic scale, turning to a life on social welfare benefits, television and a mongrelised pop culture, and the petty amusements of cheap alcohol and football. The White working class is thus a despised caste in Britain, which explains in large part why the mass grooming and rape of girls from this group by Muslims went on for so long without a reaction, and why the stabbing of children from this group of “gammons” was not permitted to be protested, or even for the anger resulting from it to be understood. It has become fashionable to loathe the White working class, even in the midst of its suffering and its grief.

Deportation Discourse

The picture painted thus far is a depressing one indeed. It would seem that only negative lessons, and causes for despair, can be found in the aftermath of the riots. And yet, despite the overwhelming cultural and legal force brought against the riots, I believe there are enough glowing embers in the ashes to give rise to some positivity. The harsh penalties given to the rioters, far out of proportion to the weak justice handed out to ethnic criminals, did not go unnoticed. The hashtag #TwoTierKier quickly went viral, a reference to the fact Britain under Keir Starmer now has a two-tier justice system in which the English are punished far more harshly than those of foreign background. While snuffed out on social media, and forced into more convoluted expressions, there is also a palpable underground discourse which is moving more radically to the Right. Halfway solutions and considerations of moderate approaches are increasingly being abandoned. There is a real sense that “no-one is coming to help us,” and that sense of desperation and abandonment is itself liberating. Just a few days ago, The Telegraph posted an article titled “Britain needs a shock and awe campaign of mass deportations to tackle the illegal migrant crisis,” something that would have been unheard of a year ago. The phrase “mass deportations” taps into a growing discourse in Britain in which limiting immigration is acknowledged as being insufficient to rescue the nation from destruction. Only “mass deportations,” the removal of many millions of people of foreign origin, will restore Britain to a position of relative peace, security, and prosperity.

In a sense, Britain could be described as in a pre-revolutionary state of the kind witnessed in former Soviet countries before the “fall of the wall.” There is a superficial culture in which everyone knows what they should say and think, and there is a nervousness with new acquaintances about how much one can say to the other until one is sure that they aren’t “politically correct.” These social rules remain endemic in the workplace, under the watchful eyes of “human resources” apparatchiks who are incentivised to teach and enforce their “diversity and inclusion” dogmas. But underneath all this is the real Britain—astute, aware, and angry. They can’t imprison everyone, and the Saxon is beginning to hate.

(Republished from The Occidental Observer by permission of author or representative)

Martin comments: Seems Enock Powell was right: