Britain is falling apart – Washington Examiner

“Laws,” wrote F.A. Hayek, “must be general, equal, and certain.” An open society rests on public confidence in the impartiality of police and courts.

Sometimes that impartiality buckles under pressure. It happened during the pandemic, when anti-lockdown protesters were suppressed while Black Lives Matter protesters were pampered, and when 1,200 public health professionals went so far as to claim that BLM protests were justified because racism was more dangerous than COVID.

As so often, Britain followed the US lead and imported the same double standard. Sir Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition, blamed then-president Donald Trump for BLM violence in the US. When copycat protests began here, chief constables who had previously been arresting people for the slightest lockdown violations asked activists to demonstrate with respect.

Since then, climate extremists and anti-Israel protesters have been tolerated in a way that, say, football hooligans would never be tolerated. In March, a woman in Cambridge slashed a portrait of Lord Balfour by the artist Philip Alexius de László, angry that the Balfour Declaration had paved the way for a Jewish homeland. Although she made a point of having her vandalism filmed, she has not been arrested or charged.

This is the backdrop to the unrest sweeping through some British cities, prompting Elon Musk to describe the Labour prime minister as “Two-Tier Keir.”

The chain of events does no one justice. On July 29, in the seaside town of Southport, a deranged 17-year-old named Axel Rudakubana attacked a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance class with a knife. He killed three little girls, aged 9, 7 and 6, and injured eight others, as well as the teacher, who had shielded the girls with her body, and a neighbour who had tried to help.

Within hours, claims were flying online that the killer was an illegal Muslim immigrant. In fact, he was the British-born child of Rwandans. But because it is not normally legal to name suspects under 18 (the embargo was later lifted in this case, as Rudakubana was just a week shy of his 18th birthday), because broadcasters have a history of downplaying crime by illegal immigrants, and because there had been a cover-up of the manipulation of white girls in northern cities by men of Pakistani origin, people believed the rumours – which, it turned out, had originated with Russian disinformation sites.

Expressions of sympathy for the victims were hijacked by anti-immigrant thugs. Hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked and mosques were threatened. The looting was, not surprisingly, led by people with criminal records. Perhaps they were encouraged by Labour’s theatrical declaration when they came to power that prisons were overcrowded, necessitating a series of early releases.

The news that the killer was neither Muslim nor an immigrant did nothing to deter the idiots, not that their behavior would be justified regardless of the killer’s origins. Soon, similar gangs of masked Muslim youths gathered to defend mosques, wave Palestinian flags, and engage in their own noisy actions.

It was Starmer’s first big test, and he failed. He could have presented himself unequivocally as the King’s defender of the peace, making it clear that any vandalism or disorder, regardless of the motives of the perpetrators, would be dealt with with the full force of the law. Instead, he harped on about the “far right” and the need to “defend communities” and proposed a crackdown on social media.

In other words, he seemed to be taking sides. Instead of pushing even-handedly for the restoration of order, he fitted events into the comfortable narrative of “Right-wing attacks innocent minorities.” While some of the perpetrators fit that description, their motives should have been irrelevant. The point is that all acts of violence, intimidation, and vandalism should be treated equally, whether they are carried out by racist idiots or pro-Hamas thugs.

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The idea that Britain is an unusually orderly society dates only from the late 19th century. Before that, mob violence, including attacks on places of worship, was commonplace. Our civility, what George Orwell called the gentleness of England, has come under attack, partly because high immigration is eroding social capital, and partly because of the atomisation caused by social media.

But without social media, we would have had Starmer’s approved narrative, that everything was caused by racism and Islamophobia. When an announcer pushing this narrative was threatened by a masked man shouting “Free Palestine”, the camera went away and the presenter cleared his throat in shame. Social media has exposed as much as it has exacerbated. And what it has exposed is not pretty.