As riots go, those still taking place in the United Kingdom have been unimpressive affairs. They certainly cannot be compared to the furious and enormously destructive ones that broke out in the United States a couple of years ago after a white policemen was caught on video throttling a black criminal he said he was trying to subdue or, for that matter, to what frequently happens next-door in France where fierce battles between the National Gendarmerie and protestors have long been routine. So far, no deaths have been reported and few people have been seriously injured. Despite this, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has taken to talking as though the multi-billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk had it right when he tweeted (or ‘Xd’) that civil war was fast approaching. He wants to crack down on the rioters with maximum force.
Many top people agree that very stern measures are called for. As far as most commentators in the media and the university professors they talk with are concerned, the rowdies who hurl bricks at coppers and want to torch mosques and hotels housing paperless immigrants are scum, yobs, thugs who deserve to be put behind bars in new high-security prisons and stay there for many years to come. Much is made of their alleged “right-wing” sympathies; some go so far as to suggest that the cunning Tories talked them into running amok.
What makes these disturbances different from the previous ones which, by and large, met with the approval of many who condemn what is going on right now, is that most of the perpetrators belong to the white working class and therefore are, in the identity-politics scheme of things, the lowest of the low. Were they members of an ethnic or even sexual minority, those who make their voices heard in the media, academic institutions and political circles would be asking themselves what made them take to the streets and what will have to be done to improve their lot, but seeing that they are “white trash,” they assume it would be useless to even try to understand what is riling them.
Such attitudes have done much to bring about the situation that the UK, along with the US and many countries in continental Europe, is in today. With few exceptions, Western governments have felt themselves obliged to ram “multiculturalism” down the throats of a reluctant population even though years ago eminent individuals such as Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and Nicolas Sarkozy pronounced it a failure and took it for granted that it would give rise to many social, economic and political problems.
Throughout the West, movements hostile to the unregulated immigration of millions of people, especially those from mainly Muslim countries, have continued to gain strength. In the US, Donald Trump has benefitted enormously from the inability of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to stem the flow of people coming across the notoriously porous southern border. In Europe, parties described by their opponents as “extreme right-wing” or “neo-fascist” because they are against the demographic and cultural changes that are transforming their countries, threaten to overwhelm the established order.
And while Labour recently won a landslide parliamentary majority in the UK, it did so on the basis of a mere third of the votes cast, far fewer than the proportion that went to Sergio Massa in last year’s presidential dust-up. In most parts of the world, where the British first-past-the-post electoral system is regarded as outlandishly weird, a party that had done so badly would now be plaintively licking its wounds and wondering why it had just suffered such a resounding defeat. It would certainly not be rejoicing because it had been returned to power.
Practitioners of identity politics have constructed in their minds an hierarchy in which the presumed victims of social evils committed by previous generations deserve a place at the top and those who, by their pallid skin colour or their boringly conventional sexual orientation, can be linked to people who once mistreated them, get consigned to the bottom. In both the US and the UK, those who found themselves demoted put up with this for many years by acquiescing to affirmative action programmes designed to give a leg up to “people of colour,” homosexuals, transsexuals and, as their numbers increased, and with it their political clout, Muslims.
For the comfortably off, this was all to the good because, as well as costing them nothing, it allowed to them to feel ethically superior to their nasty forebears, but members of the white working class, who do not feel they have been “privileged” by their ethnicity, have started to object strongly to being treated like what Hillary Clinton described as “deplorables” – an insult that may have cost her the presidency of the US – who should have the decency to keep their mouths shut and resign themselves to the fate their betters have in store for them in a world which does not need them.
To the alarm of many not just in the English-speaking countries but also in many others, hard-up whites have decided that they too can play at identity politics. If it is OK for blacks, Muslims and others to organise themselves and demand concessions from the government, why should it be wrong for them to do the same? The usual answer to such questions is that it is because whites are still a majority and, in any case, they have inherited full responsibility for the racism, hate, slavery, imperialism and a great many other ills that afflict the world.
Such charges strike many as ridiculous. After all, there is no particular reason to think that white working-class Brits are racist – for decades many have been marrying people of West Indian origin without anyone making a fuss about it – and they are well aware that their now remote ancestors were the first large group of people in human history to demand an end to slavery in their own country and then sent the Royal Navy out to stop it in other parts of the world by policing the seas, which it almost did at considerable cost, leaving only a few redoubts in Africa and the Middle East whose inhabitants remain able to defend their traditions in this area. Not surprisingly, working-class folk greatly dislike the way members of “the elite” keep telling them that their country is uniquely wicked and should humbly beg forgiveness for its many sins against humanity.
If the British government really does want to restore social harmony, it will have to do rather more than clap a few hundred violent rioters in prison. It will also have to start treating the predominantly white working class with more respect. This may seem a strange thing to ask of a government formed by a party that, for most of its existence, saw itself as a working-class outfit, but Labour – along with the Democratic Party in the US – has been taken over by middle-class professionals and their ilk, people who, like the members of the old bourgeoisie they resemble, want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the uncouth common herd that they so heartily despise.
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