Can Starmer & Co Head Off a Summer of Unrest? Fat Chance

 

BRUCE NEWSOME

PROTESTS which began last Thursday outside a hotel in Epping, Essex, after a guest asylum-seeker was arrested on allegations of sexually assaulting 14- and 16-year-old girls, spread on Tuesday to Diss, Norfolk, and Canary Wharf, London, on news of plans to house male asylum-seekers in hotels there.

Protests have been planned for the weekend at hotels elsewhere.

How widely could the unrest spread? The government says about 200 hotels are in use to accommodate asylum-seekers. It refuses to identify the premises for fear of reprisals (and, implicitly, accountability). Until Wednesday this week it refused to co-operate even with the delivery companies for whom illegal immigrants work within days of arrival at the hotels.

Private security and police officers are based at asylum hotels to prevent trespassers from confirming their use. Locals discover asylum hotels by leaks, social media, or mainstream media reports of a crime. The lack of transparency adds to the resentment.

The protesters are neither violent nor organised by any political party, contrary to the government’s traditional line that all protesters are far-right thugs. Aimee Keteca, a Reform councillor, wrote on her placard ‘I’m not far right – I’m worried about my kids’.

The legacy narrative encourages biased and heavy-handed policing. A video shows a policeman using a riot shield to knock out the false teeth of a stationary protester in Epping.

Wherever locals protest against immigration, ‘anti-racist’ agitators confront them, as Niall McCrae reported for TCW yesterday. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/sinister-rise-of-the-counter-protesters/ Essex police on Tuesday escorted and bussed ‘anti-racists’ between the railway station and the hotel in Epping. Locals say the arrivals instigated clashes. The video evidence for bussing and violence appeared incontrovertible.

On Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner warned the Cabinet that Britain could explode into another season of protest against immigrant crime and privilege, like last summer.

Next week marks the anniversary of the murder of three children in Southport by second-generation immigrant and Jihadi-wannabe Axel Rudakubana. At the time Sir Keir Starmer described Rudakubana as a ‘Welsh choirboy’ and protesters as ‘right-wing thugs’. He’s not going to do that again, at least not in public. On Tuesday, he told the cabinet that Britain’s ‘social fabric’ must be repaired – at least, this is the line his office conveniently shared with journalists.

Is Starmer’s administration the one to repair Britain’s social fabric, and head off a longer, wider summer of unrest?

His political opponents are sceptical. Sir James Cleverly, the newly-appointed shadow housing secretary, told Times Radio that the Labour Party have refused to acknowledge the ‘polarisation’ and ‘frustration’ in Britain.

Nigel Farage, Reform UK leader, said: ‘I don’t think anybody in London can understand just how close we are to civil disobedience on a vast scale in this country . . . We’re actually facing, in many parts of our country, nothing short of societal collapse.’

What’s the non-partisan answer to the question: Is this government the one to calm the unrest?

First off, the official semantics don’t inspire confidence. ‘Social fabric’ is a bad metaphor. Such poorly defined concepts are attractive to politicians who don’t want accountability.

By ‘social fabric’, Starmer probably had in mind what Liz Lloyd, his executive director of policy and delivery, told the Cabinet in June: that society is ‘fraying at the edges’ due to immigration.

Tony Blair warned of fraying ‘social cohesion’ 21 years ago, but he never fulfilled his promises to restore either our borders or ‘social cohesion’. On that precedent, New-New Labour also will fail.

Since we’re on the theme of precedents, Britons should hardly trust a party that for decades covered up the organised rape of white and Hindu girls by mostly Pakistani and Afghani immigrants.

And Britons should hardly trust the government as a whole, under either Labour or Conservative administrations, which spent decades promising net zero immigration, yet spent the last three years covering up the secret resettlement of tens of thousands of Afghans, after the MoD leaked their personal details. (The cost of the resettlement and the compensation will hit £10billion by my estimates.)

Even if illegal immigrants were not using free hotels as bases for crime, Britons have grounds to resent their official treatment. Illegal immigrants have privileges, for example homeless Brits must wait longer for inferior accommodation.

In 2023, at least 400 hotels were in use to accommodate asylum seekers. The cost was at least £8million per day, £3billion per year. That’s the cost to taxpayers. Britons pay also in inflated housing costs – indeed all costs. Immigration is one cause of inflation, the housing shortage and the worst cost-of-living crisis since the 1970s.

Earlier this month, the Ministry of Justice confirmed an increase in legal aid for immigrants contesting their right to remain in the UK. This is supposed to ‘clear the backlog’ of claims, but it seems perverse to taxpayers who are paying for both the government’s and the immigrants’ lawyers.

Immigrant legal privileges add to the perception of institutionalised two-tier justice, in favour of non-white ethnicity, non-Christian religion and left-wing politics. Remember that a family court transferred Sara Sharif from her white Christian mother to her immigrant Pakistani Muslim father, even though he had abused her before, and would abuse her to death.

Are immigrants worth their privileges? Idleness and criminality (particularly sexual) are over-represented in immigrants. Welfare dependency is likelier for immigrants than multi-generational Britons (even though immigrants are overwhelmingly young and male). Every month, Britain is paying £1billion in welfare benefits to foreign migrants. This cost has more than doubled in three years. Even if immigrants work, they tend to be low-skilled and low-wage. Immigrants rarely return in revenues what they receive in welfare and benefits.

And even if immigrants were more entrepreneurial, less criminal, and harder working than Britons (as the government pretended for decades), we should be concerned about immigrants arriving more rapidly than homes, school places, hospital beds and doctor appointments can be added.

And even if immigrants could be materially accommodated at their rate of arrival, Britons should still be concerned about rapid social change. More than 40 per cent of babies born in England in 2024 had at least one foreign-born parent.

So Britons have many legitimate reasons to protest about illegal immigration. Smearing and policing the protesters will certainly curb them, but cannot change their reasons.

To alleviate their reasons, the government would need to curb immigration and immigrant privileges, restore social cohesion, and restore the economy too. Precedents of recent decades suggest that a British government will fail to achieve any of these things.

But perhaps Starmer’s government has the policies to succeed?

Alas, no. This government has no plans to leave the European Convention of Human Rights. The ECHR prevents the government from transferring claimants to another country where there is a real risk of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. This is a low bar: bad prison food has been categorised as a risk.

The government has just signed an agreement for France to accept as many illegal immigrants as Britain accepts asylum-seekers from France. But that’s not reducing immigration. In any case, France can’t be trusted: its local authorities facilitate migration across France to the northern coast, and it failed to honour prior agreements to stop the boats leaving. Starmer’s motivation for the latest agreement seems to be more about promoting continental relations than controlling immigration.

The British government has no plans to follow the US in deporting illegal immigrants to their country of origin or an intermediate country of transit. Its plan to house asylum-seekers in Rwanda until adjudication is still on ice.

The adjudication system is backlogged. The policing of illegal work, visa overstays, welfare abuse, and false family is trivial. The government’s plans to invest in more asylum-processing and immigration enforcement are trivial.

The government’s plans to criminalise ‘Islamophobia’ will only further stifle the policing of illegal immigration and immigrant crime.

And the British government has no plans to stop welfare, free hotels, free recreation, free healthcare, or anything else that materially pulls immigrants.

So, yes, clearly, by every dimension, unrest over immigration is going to get worse. For now, the only predictable dampener will be winter weather.

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This article (Can Starmer & Co head off a summer of unrest? Fat chance) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome