Is Britain sleepwalking toward civil unrest?

By Pete North - March 26, 2021

Following the Bristol riots there was another disturbance in Bristol. A squat camp on College Green was cleared by riot police. It didn’t make the news – and there’s no particular reason why it should. For the most part, it was kids looking for the thrill of squaring off with the man. It’s harmless. And it’s not news.

We’ve also seen tedious lefty protests and vigils by lefty posers and wannabe class warriors can climate activists. No cares. They’re not authentic and the majority don’t particularly mind if the plod give em what for – and with the plod grovelling for any outraged mob that comes along, nobody especially minds if the plod take a pasting either. They’re welcome to each other.

In a sense, it’s become tribal warfare. The police are just another “tribe”. They don’t represent me and don’t protect me and mine. So when they go to war with another tribe, we’re left in the role of detached observers, with no dog in the fight. I do not automatically take the side of the police.

Over the summer months we are likely to see more protests and riots and I won’t be surprised to see BLM on the march again, largely because race riots work. If you want local authorities to throw cash at you, that is. It’s not about addressing burning injustices. Not that there are any to speak of. There is no systemic racism. Black and Asian people who work hard and stay within the law can do just as well as anyone else. Perhaps better. Race politics is the politics of pathological losers. That’s why they’re always left wing.

There are, of course, burning injustices that affect everyone. Council tax is one of those issues bubbling away in the background, sustaining a massive industry of private bailiffs, and the system has ways of forcing conformity. The techniques of repression have never been stronger, and communities weaker.

In the past, there was such a thing as working class solidarity. Local communities would organise against the bailiffs and prevent evictions, and the mobs had real power. The elites were scared of them. But, these days, everyone is an individual. If the bailiffs call, you are on your own. If you riot, the cameras will be watching, they’ll identify you and then pick you up later, when they turn up mob-handed at your home.

In this, ethnic minorities have the advantage. If they riot they get a free pass and “community funding” thrown at them while the rioters get a slap on the wrist. If the white working class attempted the same, or attempts to protest, they are quickly shut down and they have the book thrown at them. Meanwhile, we have no rights. We never did. We don’t have a justice system. It’s just there to keep the plebs in check.

The question, therefore, is how will the have-nots respond as the real economy contracts and the little they have is taken away from them? Poverty alone does not trigger rioting or protesting. Protesting tends to be a middle class occupation while those at the bottom simply adapt to worsening conditions be it drugs, crime, poor housing, or eyewatering rents.

Ever since Thatcher, economic policy has been geared largely to safeguard house prices and the incomes of property owners, preventing any kind of correction – and this is a policy that increasingly see the young frozen out of the housing market in perpetuity, creating a mass of people only one or two paycheques away from homelessness.

I’ve long felt that we were sitting on a time bomb and I keep wondering when the point of contact will be. The culmination of Brexit and Covid can’t not have an effect. Within a few years (or sooner) there will be a white hot resentment.

The thing about British society is it rewards conformity and punishes poverty. Everything is more expensive when you’re poor, especially with no access to credit, no secure work, and when you have the courts and the bailiffs after you, everything is then done off the record meaning you’ll never again have a credit rating. We have a formal bureaucratic class system, and after a certain point you become a second class citizen.

What then happens when you have a mass of young people with no future, no prospects, and nothing to lose? We’re already seeing the emergence of American style gang culture and not just in London. South Yorkshire and Manchester have manifestations of it, adopting the slang of black street “culture”. They have nothing of their own. We then see entire districts destroyed by crime.

This is when there is fertile ground for an actual far right party. Notwithstanding Brexit, there is still about 14% of the electorate willing to vote for a BNP/Ukip style party and if we see race riots and more police pandering to it then we’ll see the ugly politics of 2008 on steroids.

For the moment we are in a phoney war. Public morale has collapsed and politics has never been this devoid of energy. Lockdown has had a corrosive effect on discourse and people are switching off in droves. And I don’t blame them. The media would struggle to be more asinine, the BBC has lost it completely, the police have lost the respect of taxpayers – particularly by pandering to the LGBT lobby and BLM, and the less said about the government the better.

There is a vacuum at the heart of our politics and too many disturbing trends that simply cannot be sustained. This is dry tinder just waiting for a spark. Brexit was something of a safety valve that realised some of the growing pressure on the right, but it should have dawned on the right by now that they’ve been had and the Johnson administration is even wetter than May’s.

For the establishment it’s business as usual – more climate dogma, more political correctness, nothing approaching immigration control, no affordable houses built, more pandering to wokeism, while an indolent and cosseted middle class prattles about non-issues .

I don’t know what it will take for the silently oppressed to organise. Covid measures are a good way of preventing new parties from mobilising, but that can’t go on forever. But if our votes are meaningless, only reinforcing the undemocratic and unaccountable dunghills created by devolution, then the anger will find some other channel. Perhaps even terrorism? It seems to work for the Irish.

The thing that could spark unrest is something we’ve been warning about for some time. Our national grid is still an antiquated mess and the culmination of virtue signalling climate policies have created a number of vulnerabilities. If the government can’t keep the lights and the internet on, the public will find something other than Netflix for entertainment.

When it does kick off, the government cannot call on the army, not least because we no longer have an army capable of such a deployment. Nor can they count on the loyalty of the police. Too much is broken, and the courts can’t keep order, and too many bridges have been burnt. If the establishment starts to fall, who will be there to defend it?