The Disunited Kingdom
6th August 2024
On July 29, 2024, three children were stabbed to death by a second-generation Rwandan immigrant in Southport, a seaside town in northwest of England previously of note for nothing more or less exceptional than being home to Britain’s only lawnmower museum. From the outset, the elements of the atrocity – migration, slaughtered children, and the evil of the crime – combined to provoke an explosive upsurge of popular anger. The scale and scope of that anger has since spread across Britain in the most serious outbreak of white working-class mass protest since the Chartist Riots of the 1830s and 40s.
Signs of the approaching storm were already visible the day after the murders, when Britain’s new Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Southport to lay the obligatory wreath and was met by vocal hostility from locals. This time the public wasn’t willing to go along with the British state’s choreographed rites of candlelit vigils and the hollow “anti-hate” messaging from state-sponsored community leaders mechanically deployed in the aftermath of now-increasingly frequent atrocities.
By August 2, protests composed almost entirely of the white working class and involving acts of violence had spread beyond Southport to other post-industrial towns in impoverished corners of the country, including Rotherham, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Tamworth. There seem to have been some instances of mosques being attacked, despite the fact the killer of the three children in Southport does not appear to have been a Muslim, and hotels being used to warehouse newly arrived migrants being set alight. In response, with curious readiness, gangs of Muslim men took to the streets and reciprocated.
UPDATE: “Operation Scatter”: UK Labour Government to Disperse More Migrants Across the Country