The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby was on Radio 4 this morning to pour oil on our troubled waters. With a national insurrection flaring into life in parts of England and police struggling to contain intercommunal violence, his words were unsurprising. Hate cannot win, the criminals assaulting police defile the flag they wrap themselves in, we must recover a moral vision. So far, so Anglican. But it was his personal insight into losing his baby daughter, who he has talked about so movingly in the past, that hit home with me.
It is easy to forget that this latest horrific spasm of social unrest occurred after three children were brutally murdered in an attack on a dance class in Southport, and that but for the heroism of two adults who confronted the assailant it would have been a massacre. That the inconceivable grief of bereaved parents could be hijacked by people who, whatever they say in public, wanted angry people on the streets on the basis of lies about the perpetrator, ought to haunt those who stoked the flames for the rest of their days. But it won’t. Far right social media warriors operating from safe zones, including from a sun lounger in Greece in the case of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, won’t have our national trauma on what passes for their conscience.
And yet it would be a mistake for the state to see the civil unrest as only or even primarily due to social media radicalisation. Or to seek new laws to further hobble free expression beyond current legal limits. This is because of an uncomfortable truth not readily acknowledged by those in positions of power and influence. Fear over uncontrolled migration, the touch paper of recent rioting, is widely held in places our political class have largely forgotten about or dare not speak to for fear of being accused of bigotry or – worse still – for electoral calculation. Where it seems greatest is manifest in new ‘interface’ areas springing up in Northern mill towns where demographic shifts have led to communities becoming unknown to each other and leading parallel lives. Or in the Eastern seaboard towns that voted in huge numbers for Brexit after legal and illegal migration had transformed the character of places they grew up in with no thought given by those in power to additional infrastructure or psychological impact. We now hear that the Home Secretary is planning to disperse asylum seekers from large sites and hotels across the country. Given the violent thuggery of the last few days in communities as far apart as Plymouth and Sunderland this seems like a dubious and unfortunately timed announcement.
Moreover, the answer cannot be to further censor public opinion through social media controls. There are two reasons this is a bad idea, whatever its seductive charm to Government as a silver bullet. The first is a lesson from Northern Ireland – a different era and platform but the same result. Authorities on both sides of the border introduced airwave bans on Sinn Fein politicians in the Eighties because of their support for violent extremism. Sinn Fein is now running the Government in Northern Ireland and is the main opposition party in the south. Suppressing ideas does not make them go away and in many cases only makes them more potent. The second reason is related. Instead of closing down the discourse, Government needs to lean in with better arguments and a better comms strategy. Migrants make this country work. Our multi-ethnic country provides us with citizens from minorities who have hugely benefited the economy, arts, culture, national security. Equally, we must never allow de facto or de jure blasphemy to undermine freedom of expression or pollute the political process. From messaging on to strategy: many of the places seeing violent protests – including those preceding the Southport atrocity which were incidents of minority disorder perceived as being policed differently to the riots – have also been undermined for years by socioeconomic failure. Many of those blighted areas are Labour heartlands. We need a mini Marshall plan to drive people away from extremism with jobs and regeneration as much as we must punish those practicing it with exemplary prison sentences.
The vast majority of people who are legitimately concerned about the impact of migration on their communities will not have been on the streets. Even those who were will not have participated in the orgy of destruction and extreme violence against the police. I imagine they would be horrified at attempts by nakedly racist criminals to hurt or even incinerate terrified human beings in hotels. But all the same they represent a bridgehead for extreme right wing agitation. It is too easy though, perhaps too cosy, to imagine that the civil unrest we have seen is orchestrated by hidden hands. What we have more accurately observed are a section of the crowds exulting in a common cause to do what they want, subsuming their individuality. These people will feel their doors coming in during the course of the next few weeks and be stunned that the state has finally reacted to shut down a nascent culture of criminal impunity that threatens the social fabric. I have not the slightest sympathy for any of them. Severe sentences are called for – leaving aside the problem of full prisons for a moment – because the priority is to restore order.
That being done, hopefully very soon, we need a proper, honest, national conversation about who we are and how we live together. People of any colour and ethnicity or religion are profoundly lucky to live here and now in the United Kingdom for all its many problems. Whether through the accident of birth or the ambition for a better future, the people on these shores can make Britain the successful multi-ethnic democracy we keep being told it already is. These riots have seriously undermined such simplistic bromides but they should not deter that ambition. Fundamentally, it is built on a simple idea – that the rights you enjoy as a citizen, including the right to protest and to tolerate the views, beliefs and religions or others within the law, cannot operate without the duties and obligations owed by each to the other that underpin all liberal democracies. We have to be clear, this contract is under threat. When the broken glass and rubble is cleared away, this indigestible truth remains.
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