In his 1977 book The Break-Up of Britain, the socialist and Scottish nationalist writer Tom Nairn titled his chapter on the United Kingdom’s then-most restive province “Northern Ireland: Relic or Portent?”On this, as with so much else, Nairn may have been prescient. A year ago, it was natural to speculate on whether anti-migrant disturbances would become a feature of the English summer, as those deriving from the province’s traditional, and now largely ceremonial, ethnic conflict are in Northern Ireland. Today, it appears that “rioting season” has become England’s new routine. Rather than a freak occurrence, to be dealt with by harsh sentencing, the mixed protests and clashes in Epping, like the demonstrations in Diss and now Canary Wharf, still seem like only tremors before a greater earthquake. When Nigel Farage warned this week that “nobody in London understands how close we are to civil disobedience”, the response from Left-liberals, confused and frightened by a predictable course of events nevertheless incomprehensible to their worldview, was to cast him as a sort of English Ian Paisley, threatening violence at a safe remove for political gain.
A more apposite analogy, perhaps, would be with the last-ditch attempt, in 1968, to wrest the province from societal breakdown delivered by Northern Irish Prime Minister Captain Terence O’Neill in his famous “Ulster stands at the Crossroads” broadcast. “What kind of Ulster do you want?” O’Neill asked, “A happy and respected province… or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations?” O’Neill, a brave, perceptive and forward-thinking reformer, proved unequal to the task before him. It must be said that neither Keir Starmer nor Nigel Farage approach his calibre.
Is it going too far to declare a creeping Ulsterisation of English politics? In a response to their demographic decline, currently mostly focusing on the British state’s loss of control of the nation’s borders, one would have expected the English to adopt a similar siege mentality to that of Ulster’s Protestants, whose “conditional loyalty” to the British state has always been dependent on the sense that it was safeguarding their ethnic interests. It now appears that they have. Like the PSNI, the English police is being criticised for its handling of disorder by a mobilising ethnic community, with the latter enjoying the tentative support of two political parties. One of those, Reform, increasingly appears to be poised to swap roles with what was famously dubbed, until Cameron, “Britain’s natural party of government”. As with the SDLP and UUP in Northern Ireland, respectively replaced by the more radical Sinn Fein and the DUP through a process of what analysts of such conflicts call “ethnic outbidding”, the dynamics in mainland Britain are adopting uncanny echoes of Ulster’s once-unique dynamics. The DUP is now being threatened from its Right by an even more explicitly ethnic party, Traditional Unionist Voice, though this has not happened in Britain or England. The dynamics of the next decade — what remains of Labour’s capacity to govern the country, and the unknowable, but not immediately reassuring possibilities, of a Farage-led Britain — will surely determine this question.
As in most ethnically divided polities, Northern Irish politics is a dispiriting gridlock of low-quality politicians uneasily managing the ethnic rivalries of their voter bases, placating them with symbolic treats while building nothing of value, all while failing to reform an economic basket case. Yet it also differs from England. Sharing an island, Northern Ireland’s Loyalist anti-migrant riots now overlap ambiguously with the Irish Republic’s protests, riots and sporadic arson attacks against mooted mass-migration housing. Ulster Loyalists have attempted cooperation across the border with Southern anti-migration activists, and have been rebuffed, with the Southern protest organisers adopting an increasingly Republican, and partially Gaelic nationalist flavour. Yet the cross-border dynamics also extend to the forces of order, with London and Dublin joining together to suppress anti-migration disorder. Fearing a recurrence of the Dublin riots — the modern precedent, I believe, for all such occasions on both islands since — the Irish state borrowed water cannon from Northern Ireland’s PSNI. Similarly, the current murder trial of a Northern Irish citizen in Belfast, allegedly by an asylum seeker, is, highly unusually, being held in Dublin, presumably in an attempt to ward off disturbances north of the border. Westminster and Dublin may not have agreed on much when it came to Brexit, but they happily cooperate on this more existential matter.
Do the “Epping Says No” placards derive from Ballymena, or from Coolock? The slogan-coiner is from the Homeland Party, an identitarian Right-wing group strongly analogous to Ireland’s National Party, right down to the visual branding and internal feuding. Indeed, Homeland’s recent attempt to expand to Northern Ireland was quickly demolished by National Party-sympathetic Gaelic nationalists on both sides of the border. On anti-immigration activism, it is possible to discern the cultural and political dynamics in the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and Great Britain influencing, accelerating but also rivalling each other in a cycle of cultural exchange, just as they have done throughout the history of our archipelago.
In the summer of 1914, mainland Britain was only spared a civil war spreading from Ulster by the outbreak of the First World War, just as 1640s Protestant settler refugees from Ulster fleeing to London helped spark the conditions for England’s only civil war the state chooses to refer to as such. The Glorious Revolution, still referred to as such for its foundational role in the wavering modern liberal-democratic order, is still celebrated for its climactic Boyne victory every summer by Ulster Loyalists, albeit for their own Irish reasons. Unlike a growing number on the Right, or even in ordinary life, I believe the modern British state is very far from outright conflict. Yet disturbances of a lesser kind, for being less grave in their consequences, are surely more likely to spread, and to become our new, so easily avoidable, normal.
Many of last year’s English rioters, given the epicentre of the disturbances in northwest England, were of Irish descent and may, like that other child of the Irish diaspora, Tommy Robinson, have kept up with events across the water. Even the English movement’s two political martyrs, Lucy Connolly and Peter Lynch, bear good Gaelic surnames, just like Reform’s Epping candidate and female organiser, as well as many of the Homeland Party’s public faces. Whether this signifies successful Irish diaspora assimilation into Britishness is perhaps a deeper question than you might initially think. Similarly, the “No Surrender” slogan on the English flag borne by masked Canary Wharf protestors nods to the interest in Ulster Loyalism apparent in some London football firms, something also true of the British radical Right in the Seventies and Eighties.
The Euro ‘96 effect, beloved of Fabian commentators still trapped in that halcyon age, appears under pressure. In England, flags are re-adopting a territorial nationalist or communitarian quality, just as they always have in Northern Ireland and as is increasingly the case with the Palestine flag in South Asian Muslim areas of Britain. Yet the similar ambiguities over the politics of the flag, sometimes civic and sometimes ethnic nationalist, is also true in the case of Scotland and Wales, if there deriving from Britain’s foundational ethnic conflicts. How the new politics of mass migration will interact with the Westminster state’s already fraught management of three existing ethnic separatist movements is so far an unknown quantity. Through its own ineptitude, Britain’s political class has created a situation of almost unimaginable complexity, whose outcome is impossible to predict.
While there are many similarities between the current wave of English protests and Ireland’s longer-running ones, the existence in England of two political parties more than tacitly backing mass mobilisation is a major difference, let alone the fact that one of these parties is currently topping the polls. The current asylum hotel protests have seen Reform tack back away from the centre and towards chasing the angry public mood, here defined as the increasingly radicalised Facebook comment sections of provincial news websites. Yet if England’s provinces are adopting the aggrieved, conditionally loyal attitudes of Ulster Loyalists, Reform increasingly appears as the equivalent of the Ulster Unionists, uneasily representing their volatile support base while disavowing its methods. Labour, on paper, possesses four more years to dampen the angry public mood: but given the extent of radicalisation over the party’s first year in power, it is difficult to imagine what British politics will look like by 2029.
Where the Republic of Ireland differs is that the “mammy-at-the-forefront” legal protests against planned asylum centres coexist with the social pressures of public shaming and intimidation, and the sporadic, and mostly nocturnal arson, of migration infrastructure. I’ve often toyed with writing about the historic line from the Land Wars, and Ireland’s earlier rural outrages and peasant mobilisation, to Ireland’s current popular insurgency. Now I find it hard to believe that England is many years away from such direct activism. If anything, the attempted burning of occupied migrant housing in last year’s English riots went far beyond the Irish arson wave on unoccupied centres. Yet while the Republic of Ireland is a few stages ahead of Britain — in terms of the focussed application of violence against the infrastructure of mass migration — it is certainly not approaching the civil war scenario which Britain’s mainstream Right is now rhetorically toying with, and nor, I would say, are we. At least, not yet.
But if English rioters have drawn a lesson from Ballymena, it is that, judiciously applied, violence works: far more quickly and decisively than voting anyway. Five years ago, the British state bent its knee to a wave of protests and rioting over explicitly racialised solidarity with a different ethnic group thousands of miles away. Why would it not buckle further before the previously dormant, and now increasingly volatile, majority ethnic population? Even in Northern Ireland, as the Guardian recently observed, the Ballymena riots were successful on their own terms: “of the approximate pre-riot [Roma] population of 1,200, two-thirds are gone — or, to use a loaded term, ethnically cleansed.” For the residents of Epping, similar methods have proved equally effective. This is not a lesson a serious state should be imparting to its populace, but it is the situation the British state has now created for itself.
Unlike Northern Ireland, where rioting is traditionally confined to “interface areas” where working-class sections of the two dominant ethnic groups abut each other, in England this summer any migrant facility could be the spark of protest, and any protest could become a riot. Most will be peaceful, will fizzle out, or just won’t draw numbers. But planning and preparing for the rare occasions where violence does occur will strain Westminster’s capacity to respond. The policy of dispersing migrant housing across the country has only dispersed the opportunities for protest. Last year, it was the North; this year, so far, Eastern England. Angela Rayner’s solution is apparently to replace the hotels with private rented accommodation in residential areas. But Ballymena shows the risks with this approach. For a state whose every budgetary decision is now being associated with mass migration and its consequences, then whatever it says about the future path of the Westminster system, the policing costs of this apparent new reality will be enormous.
As in Northern Ireland, meanwhile, the police itself — its ethos, its tactical decisions and its demographic make-up — will become a source of political contention. As for adventures abroad, or the approaching world war the Westminster state continually warns us of, I do not see the young men of Epping or Diss eagerly answering Whitehall’s future call to star in a drone snuff video. Just like Ireland in the First World War, and Northern Ireland in the Second, even conscription now looks untenable within the British state’s former English heartland. Given the international commitments it has adopted towards other countries’ borders, this presents a major problem. A government excessively enamoured with the opinion of global elites, even by the standards of the Westminster establishment, will now find that political paralysis at home through recurrent ethnic rioting is also Not A Good Look.
The Westminster state has spun itself into a web of legal, moral and essentially aesthetic obligations which it cannot easily escape, in its current form anyway. How can Starmer smash the gangs when the biggest smuggling gang of all — in its lavish inducements to game the asylum process, and its fawning attitude to the rent-seeking and grey economies propped up by mass migration — is the British state itself? The gangs to be smashed all sit in Whitehall offices: yet neither Starmer, nor maybe even Farage, are temperamentally inclined to the task ahead. Perhaps this, more than the external displays of flags or rioting, marks the real Ulsterisation underway this summer. Holding or ceding Northern Ireland is a manageable headache for Westminster, which correctly treats the statelet like its own self-contained universe. But losing legitimacy in England is an existential problem for the British state. However this ends — and there are many potential outcomes, a few of them positive — whoever succeeds Starmer will face a daunting, and perhaps impossible task. As for the current government, the danger is that for its opponents on the street, England’s Ulsterisation increasingly appears less a threat than an exciting new opportunity.
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Author: Aris Roussinos
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