On Monday, the town of Southport in Greater Manchester witnessed a horrific crime. A young Muslim broke into a children’s dance class and began to lay about him with a knife.
Three little girls died, eight others, along with two adults, were stabbed. Six of those victims are in a critical condition.
A reaction came within hours. A report appeared on Twitter/X saying that the murderer was an illegal migrant who had arrived in Britain by boat. He now sought asylum and was on an MI6 watch list. That report was as false as the criminal’s name it circulated.
Never mind. Two million people read the news, and hundreds of them, mostly in Manchester and Liverpool, got on Southport-bound trains. Many of those travellers were either members of the English Defence League or its supporters.
The EDL was co-founded in 2009 by Tommy Robinson, a thug with a long list of convictions for crimes ranging from mortgage fraud to football hooliganism and a drunken assault on a police officer. Since then, he has shown a knack for organisational activities, and the activities he organises are mostly riots.
Eventually Tommy decided the confines of the EDL could no longer contain his bubbling personality and struck out on his own. He is currently out on bail after showcasing his talents yet again in Folkestone and London.
A curious aside: Americans supporting Trump, those who regard him as the messiah and not just the lesser evil, see Tommy as their own. There are only two possible explanations there: one is that they are ignorant of British realities, the other is that there is indeed some kinship between Donald and Tommy. I sincerely hope it’s the former.
Anyway, Tommy had no hands-on involvement in the riots that broke out in Southport following the knife attack. He was there only in spirit, and it did what spirits are supposed to do: inspire.
So animated, the mob besieged the local mosque and the fun started. Yobs were pelting the mosque with stones, bricks and everything else they could get their hands on: privately owned wheelie bins, parts of the garden wall they tore apart, fireworks. Windows shattered, worshippers cowered inside, cars burned.
When the police arrived, the same weapons were turned against them, their vehicles and even their dogs. Eight cops suffered serious injuries, as fires broke out all over the town centre. To keep up with the fine tradition of such outbursts, many shops were looted.
Three police dogs were also injured, one of them supposedly bitten. If so, this shows that fair play isn’t alien even to our thugs. Eschewing indigenously human achievements, they chose to fight their canine enemies only with the same weapon the dogs had at their disposal.
The masked or hooded yobs were shouting “No surrender!” (a Unionist slogan popularised during the strife in Ulster), “Stop the boats!” and “English till I die!” That last one upset the pedant in me because it was a bowdlerisation of the football song England Till I Die, typically sung at international matches together with the immortal classic If It Wasn’t for England, You’d All Be Krauts.
The police issued their own report, denying the criminal had arrived by boat. In fact, they said, he was born in Britain, Wales to be exact. However, since they hadn’t denied he was Muslim, the mob felt that was a moot point, and they may be right.
Unlike some other ethnic and religious groups, Muslims, wherever they were born, have trouble assimilating, or even integrating, into British society. Many perceive themselves as strangers in a land they refuse to see as their own, and one can’t deny the accuracy of that observation.
Islam is incompatible with the West, even in its present secular incarnation. Individual Muslims can become perfectly British, but only if they are Muslims in name only, not ardently devout followers of Mohammed. That’s why I often say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.
As you may have gathered, I detest any violent mob, whether it’s described as far-Right, far-Left or far-anything. They are violent not in support of a cause, but in search of a cause.
The same people who scream “Stop the boats!” today may well use their mobiles to set up football brawls tomorrow. And the same ‘protesters’ who block motorways in defence of ‘our planet’ may the next day scream “From the river to the sea!” as they clash with police outside the Israeli embassy.
A civilised society is civilised partly because it offers its members many legal ways of venting their grievances and demanding restitution. We can write to our MPs, petition the whole government, demonstrate in an orderly fashion. If we feel the government isn’t listening, we can vote it out. And so on, so forth – I can keep spinning out truisms till the ministers come home.
Yet there may come a moment when people – and I mean civilised, law-abiding subjects of His Majesty – feel that an intolerable situation is getting worse, and licit protest isn’t making any impression on the government.
Such people then decide they have no recourse and try to put up with the situation as best they can. Yet there exist whole swathes of the population to whom such docility is alien.
They are the creepy-crawlies lurking in the woodwork and looking for any opportunity to come out. Anomic violence is boiling inside them and, given the right pretext, it blows the top off.
Such people then act as illegitimate catalysts of potentially legitimate protests, as they are in this case. For, while no decent person can treat Tommy Robinson types with anything other than squeamish contempt, the cause in the name of which they parade their feral tendencies has merit. They give it a bad name, but the cause is real.
The situation with Muslim immigration, legal or illegal, has become intolerable – and not just in cities or boroughs that have become predominantly Muslim. For example, Southport’s population is only about 5.5 per cent Muslim, which is the national average.
When hundreds of thousands feel that Sharia has precedence over the English Common Law, and when many children born in Britain honestly believe they live in a Muslim country, the rest of the population becomes restless.
Some feel new arrivals put severe pressures on jobs and public services. Others justifiably fear the ensuing increase in crime rates. Still others cast a glance at Bradford, Leeds or Leicester and see something that resembles a kasbah more than the Britain they used to know.
Most deplore the collapse of legality and HMG’s failure to protect the country’s borders, which is after all one of the few fundamental functions of any government. Yet all such civilised people justifiably feel helpless to do anything about it.
They may not know the details, but they sense they are up against not just an ineffective policy or an incompetent ministry, but what’s called ‘the establishment’. That term used to stand for an upper-class elite, predominantly Tory, who saw themselves and were seen around the world as the quintessence of Englishness.
Today’s establishment is different. It’s a nomenklatura of Left-wing, internationalist apparatchiks who seek to incorporate Britain into some pan-European socialist utopia. They correctly see any vestiges of genuine Englishness as obstacles to overcome. Diluting such oases with an influx of cultural aliens is an effective way of eliminating them – and any mass resistance to the creeping subversion.
Lord Mandelson, cabinet minister in the Blair and Brown governments, openly admitted that some 10 years ago, when he said Labour had sent out “search parties” to get immigrants to come to Britain.
This outrage isn’t party-specific. During their 14 years in power, the mock-Tories did nothing to stem the influx.
Hence Britons have a legitimate grievance, which is unresolved by the government and taken advantage of by illegitimate thugs like Robinson and other EDL types. When civilisation fails, barbarians come out in force.
My own view is that thuggery can’t and shouldn’t triumph. Any victory won by them is defeat simply because they are the ones who have won it. The cause of controlling our borders is just, but we should still deplore the thugs who champion it. If they are our only hope, the hope is already forlorn.
A Britain more Islamised than it is already will be nightmarish, but then so will be a Britain run by Tommy Robinson types. If our civilisation can’t avoid such extremes, it’s no longer civilised.
Why do you give Francisco Franco a pass but not old Tommy? Surely the former caused more carnage than the latter?
That’s like saying that Field-Marshal Mongomery killed more men than Dr Shipman. True, but not a valid comparison. Apples and oranges. Franco saved Spain from Stalin and therefore from becoming like Romania, at best. Tommy, given half the chance, would turn England into a fascist chaos. Franco, like him or hate him, was a significant historical figure. Tommy is just scum with violent tendencies.
You’re obviously above the fray Mr Boot , but can you tell me at what point can we say we’ve had enough ? We can’t vote our way out of this civilizational threat , any pushback is greeted with labels of “Far rightism” by the MsM and most of the political class , and nominal conservatives such as yourself . The term is so often thrown about (Oh , Hitler! ) , it’s becoming meaningless as an insult , just like it’s identical twin term , “Racism” , used by the media and elites to keep us in our places – “Docile” as you say . Well , it’s the “Far right” supporting Israel , not the left , it’s the “Far right ” supporting Christianity, The “Far right” espousing conservative values re sexuality and public behaviour . I guess one could label me “Far right” , if employed , law abiding , happily married , and dismayed at what the media/left/political classes are doing to us renders me so , then let me have it . Hope that fence you’re sitting on doesn’t have spikes .
I must confess to being somewhat baffled by our host’s position regarding conquest and violence.
It’s a-okay for Charles Martel, a warlord, to engage in all manner of civil wars and invasions, in order to secure the supremacy of his dynasty. But if in the present day, a crowd of common folk, distraught to the point of frenzy at the brutal murder of three children, decide to smash up some police cars, well, that’s beyond the pale.
Now as far as I know, Tommy Robinson, who is admittedly rather thuggish, has never actually killed a Muslim, or anyone else for that matter. Well, Charles Martel did, in droves. But because he’s a ‘significant historical figure’ -it’s fine. Are we sure this isn’t an aesthetic issue, rather than a moral one?
All aesthetic issues are at base moral — and I’m almost tempted to say vice versa. Whatever Charles Martel’s motives were, above all he stopped the Muslim adavance into Europe. Partly thanks to him, we are conversing in English and not in Arabic. Mentioning figures like Martel or Franco in the same breath, never mind sentence, as Tommy Robinson is bizarre. And my attitude to violence is simple: in a civilised society it’s exercised by the state, not by a mob. If a mob takes on that function and society can’t stop it, it’s no longer civilised, or getting there fast.
It doesn’t, I’m sitting quite comfortably, thank you. And from that height I can see that, if mob violence is our last resort, we don’t really have a last resort.
To put it another way: we are Christians, not Anabaptists. We admire the peaceful Non-Jurors more than the Jacobite rebels. Like St Maximus the Confessor, we are disgusted by the Emperor’s antics, but we don’t want to kill him or even break his windows and throw bricks at his guards.
To put it yet another way: we are sane, rational people, not fanatics or yobs.
Do you agree, Mr Boot? And if you disagree, Messrs Thompson and Anthrope: why?
I’d be less unimpressed by these rioters’ (or any other rioters’) proclaimed reasons for rioting if they rioted when the weather was wet or cold.