Causes of riots

Stroud News & Journal, 21 August 2024, p. 27

In his weekly column (August 14), new Stroud MP Simon Opher lists eight examples of how ‘weak Conservative government’ has influenced recent unrest.

But nowhere in his list is there any mention of the elephant-in-the-room that the vast majority of our elected representatives dare not be seen to mention – namely, the levels of immigration into the country over the past three decades.

As Dr Opher rightly says – albeit for different reasons to the ones he adduces – no wonder people ‘feel they’re not being listened to’.

Dr Opher’s claim that some people say ‘it’s all the fault of the immigrants’ is a straw man and a highly misleading characterisation.

A very tiny number of unacceptably racist people might be saying that; but they are dwarfed by the numbers who rightly don’t ‘blame’ immigrants in any way, but rather, hold responsible a political class (Labour and Conservative) which has essentially gone missing in abdicating its responsibility to appropriately regulating the rate at which people from different countries and cultures enter what is geographically a relatively small country.

Between 1964 and 1993, the number of people entering the UK and the number of people leaving were essentially in balance.

But immigration has been accelerating significantly and inexorably from 1994 to date, with net migration being the main driver of Britain’s population growth since 1999. There were sharp accelerations under New Labour; and repeated Tory promises after 2010 to reduce immigration levels were summarily broken.

Cultural and cross-racial assimilation can and does happen as a natural, organic process up to a certain point; but beyond that point, for a host of complex psychological and socio-cultural reasons, healthy organic assimilation becomes very challenging in the face of considerable movements of population between countries over short time-scales.

It is neither ‘far right’ nor ‘racist’ to point this out: it’s simply a fact of human psychological-cultural life.

And it is grossly irresponsible for virtue-signallers to weaponise the recent unrest in order to demonise and score cheap political points against those whom they inaccurately and divisively label as ‘far right’ – let alone using the unrest as a pretext to stampede in censorship and major attacks on free speech.

Some of the iron-fisted prison sentences currently being meted out by government-appointed pseudo-judges in magistrates courts doing the executive’s bidding – thus bypassing trial by jury, our constitution and principles of common law – are simply outrageous.

Just imagine the moral outrage that our own leaders would be expressing, had comparable sentences been handed out in Russia or China!

Tony Blair once famously spoke about being tough on the causes of crime, as well as on the crime itself. Whatever happened to that, I wonder?

To date, there has been a deafening silence from the government on possible underlying causes of the recent unrest.

Time for Tony to have a quiet word in Keir’s ear, perhaps?

Richard House

Stroud