How far away are we from another wave of mass violence in Britain? The answer, it seems, is closer than is comfortable. We live in a more febrile climate than even the oldest can remember, and even the best-read can find no precedent for. We are seeing ever-increasing amounts of open & outright ethnic and racial hostility in Britain – on all sides – and it’s increasingly hard to see a way through. We live with bated breath for the next spell of riots; will it be somewhere familiar to us, or somewhere we have never heard of before?
The latest round of disorder in Ballymena broke out on Monday after an alleged sexual assault on a girl in the area. Riots in Northern Ireland are so regular they can hardly be considered the harbinger of something new. But, as Aris Roussinos pointed out, something has changed:
The focus on mass migration as the proclaimed rationale, a process accelerated by the recent uptick in asylum seekers dispersed to Northern Ireland by the Westminster government to take advantage of the province’s low-cost housing.
The Ulster Loyalists, long the most steadfast defenders of the Union, are growing uneasy with their political settlement. As they slide with increasing speed into towards demographic minority status in Northern Ireland, they have become increasingly focused on new groups – and even the British state, who many now see as the machinery of their displacement.
The riots in Ballymena will burn out, but the forces behind them will not. These outbursts are no longer isolated. They are part of a deepening pattern: rival groups brought into the same civic space, living in closer proximity, fighting over the same territory and political space. The riot is now ambient; an atmospheric condition.
It brings to mind Lee Kuan Yew’s observation that, ‘in an ethnically mixed society, all political life devolves to ethnic loyalties’. Sadly, like so many quotes from famous political leaders, he didn’t actually say it. But it conveys a truism central to his political philosophy; that ethnic, linguistic and religious loyalties are deeply persistent forces in any multi-ethnic society.
In a 1968 speech, LKY put at least part of the success of the Singaporean project down to recognising the realities of difference. ‘One of the reasons for our relative success,’ he said, ‘is that we have not pretended that there are no differences in ethnic, linguistic or religious pulls and loyalties.’
Throughout his political life leading a diverse and often fractious electorate, he worked around these realities, recognising it as the only viable alternative to a descent into communalism. A situation where rival groups would compete endlessly for political dominance, tearing apart the newly-spun fabric of national unity, and deluge the rising nation in blood. The only other alternative would have been to outlaw them by decree; but, as warned, ‘kinship and feelings for one another cannot be legislated out by a political decision’.
LKY might have recognised the absurdity of flattening difference by fiat, but Britain is yet to. Far from erasing inherited ethnic factionalism, Britain has simply imported it, and as mass immigration radically transforms our demographics, the risks from deepening ethnic divisions grow ever more acute.
In the case of Ballymena – and Southport, whose conditions were remarkably similar – the spark was local, but it no longer needs to be. In 2020, a wave of protests swept the country in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by the death of George Floyd (an event that took place 4,000 miles away). Two years later, deep tensions between Pakistani and Indian communities erupted into riots in Leicester as the result of a cricket match that took place in the UAE (an event that took place 3,500 miles away). Last year, the fallout from October 7 and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza (an event that took place 2,400 miles away) saw marches on behalf of both sides, school walk-outs and antisemitic and Islamophobic violence on the streets. The prospect of a war between India and Pakistan (over 4,000 miles away) gave rise to serious concerns of violence spilling onto UK streets between the over 1.5 million members of the immigrant communities.
These are not a series of isolated incidents, but the slow and inexorable intensification of ethnic identification and political factionalism, the result of ethnic hostilities being transplanted to Britain; welcome to neocommunalism.
Communalism was a persistent threat to the new countries that sprang up in the wake of de-colonisation. As Lee Kuan Yew observed:
All new countries face the grave problem of identity. For they invariably embrace more than one race or tribe within their natural boundaries inherited from a colonial power.
Before, the threat of religious or ethnic identities being used to stir divisions between distinct communities – and provoking conflict along those lines – could largely be contained within the overarching hierarchy of a colonial administration, and what LKY called ‘the universal concepts which an imperial system establishes between heterogeneous ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious groups.’ Singapore’s transition to independence was managed by replacing the universal concepts with a stern Singaporean authority, creating a clear identity. The heterogeneous populations of the subcontinent, meanwhile, geographically separated during Partition.
Britain itself has done neither of these things. Groups that share deep ethnic hostilities now share a civic space without geographic buffers, and a meaningful sense of Britishness has been deliberately denigrated in order to assimilate as many incomers as possible as easily as possible. This did not usher in a post-racial Britain; it simply eroded any possible integrative frameworks.
As a result, Britain is increasingly seeing ethnic groups fall back on their own identities for solidarity and political leverage – a dynamic not confined to immigrant communities. Even some parts of the English majority are beginning to exhibit stronger ethnic solidarity, as seen in debate around Rishi Sunak’s identity. This is the result of a growing sense of ‘Englishness’ as a distinct ethnic identity, separate from a broader cultural identity of ‘Britishness’.
Ballymena – along with shameful incidents like the Southport riots and the anti-Muslim attacks in the wake of the murder of Lee Rigby – can be seen as examples of communal violence by would-be defenders of white British communities.
Neocommunalism is not limited to violence, however. Historically, Labour have won a large percentage of the ethnic minority vote, with Conservatives only occasionally winning support among British Hindus and Sikhs; but increasingly, communities who have grown large enough to deliver majorities in elections are no longer reliant on the extant political parties. While the Gaza issue has simply forced a clear separation between a large part of the Muslim vote and Labour, the reality is that the two groups have been diverging for a long time, driven by inter-clan dissatisfaction with how Biraderi networks deliver votes and distribute political favouritism – a trend first capitalised on by George Galloway.
The local elections saw further successes for the Gaza independents, many of whom had a less Gaza-specific and more Muslim-specific platform; one successful candidate in Burnley, for instance, wanted to end free mixing between the sexes. This is not exclusive to the Left; Bob Blackman has had tremendous success by appealing to and advancing the interests of the Indian voters of Harrow, while there are other Conservative politicians who have openly advocated communalist policies in the hope of prising away Bangladeshi voters from Labour.
The fabric of British society is being strained by the failure of multiculturalism. The idea that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ lends itself not to a shared national identity, but to competing ethnic factions, which are now actively carving out their own political spaces: neocommunalism. Britain is heading towards a future where politics will no longer be about the common good, but about which group can best mobilise its base, and where loyalty to your ethnic group outweighs loyalty to the nation. What will survive of Britain then?
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