I have lived long enough, in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain as well as in the West, to recognise the signs. Serious social unrest is in the air.
And you don’t have to take my word for it. Even Deputy PM Angela Rayner, a staunch socialist, warned this week that ministers at last need to acknowledge the public’s ‘real concerns’ about mass migration, while Downing Street officials fear the nation is ‘fraying at the edges’.
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Reform’s Nigel Farage captures the public mood when he warns that Britain is close to ‘civil disobedience on a vast scale’.
The atmosphere of discontent seems palpable. Last week’s demonstrations in Epping, east London, ignited by reports that a boat migrant sexually harassed a 14-year-old girl in the street, have provoked other protests, at Diss in Norfolk and at a luxury hotel requisitioned for asylum seekers amid the glittering skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, east London.
Alarmingly for the authorities, groups of protesters appear to be gathering outside migrant hotels around the country every day.
Yesterday, it emerged that Essex Police had actually escorted Left-wing, pro-migrant counter-protesters to Epping’s Bell Hotel, now given over to illegal arrivals. The force has suggested this was to ‘facilitate free assembly’.
Last year, of course, a wave of riots was set off by the appalling knife attack in Southport, in which three small girls were killed and seven other people – five of them children – were seriously injured by a malevolent teenage psychopath.
Now there are concerns such violence could break out again, fuelled by mounting public rage at the seemingly endless tide of young men arriving illegally on small boats. Keir Starmer has spoken about his wish to see our ‘social fabric’ repaired, but the Prime Minister and his Cabinet simply don’t understand that this mounting crisis has been directly caused by their and their predecessors’ unwillingness to grasp the concerns of ordinary people.
Around 150 people gathered outside The Park Hotel in Diss, Norfolk, on Monday. No one can deny that our society is more fragmented than it was a couple of generations ago, says Furedi
A man is arrested by police at a protest outside The Bell Hotel, believed to be housing asylum seekers, in Epping. Furedi writes: ‘As this long, hot summer roils on, I fear that events may force our leaders to confront these mounting tensions in our society – whether they like it or not’
The traditional values that bind a nation and give it stability – patriotism and loyalty to the whole country instead of splintered communities – have long been deliberately undermined by our political leaders and the State itself.
Gus O’Donnell, the most senior civil servant in the country under three Prime Ministers between 2005 and 2011, captured this when he boasted: ‘At the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration… I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.’
Again and again, the public have expressed their opposition to such attitudes at the ballot box. Again and again, the politicians have ignored them.
One man I spoke to recently, an ex-serviceman named John, told me: ‘I’m fed up with feeling like an alien in my own community.’
The Labour Party used to represent people like John. No longer.
The Blairite project of ‘multiculturalism’ has visibly failed. Of course there are exceptions, and of course many migrants make a wonderful contribution to our country. But no one can deny that our society is more fragmented than it was a couple of generations ago.
Starmer himself, before he feebly backtracked on his own phrasing, understood this when he referred to our ‘island of strangers’.
But he was right. Large parts of Britain, from Tower Hamlets in east London to districts of Bradford in West Yorkshire, have become ethnic enclaves. Assimilation or integration of the second, third or even fourth-generation migrants living there is increasingly unrealistic.
The political establishment refuses to admit these profound problems, because to do so would be to accept the failure of their world view, maintained despite its obvious flaws for 30 years or longer.
Why else would Labour ministers be so eager to fight the battles of the past – from reversing Margaret Thatcher’s union laws to threatening to prosecute soldiers who served in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and now investigating police actions during the miners’ strike more than four decades ago?
As this long, hot summer roils on, I fear that events may force our leaders to confront these mounting tensions in our society – whether they like it or not.
All it might take is one spark. An online rumour, a viral video clip, perhaps a single inflammatory post on social media – and Tinderbox Britain will go up in flames.
Yes, some far-Right thugs have been present at recent anti-migrant protests. But it is completely dishonest of Labour to pretend that these scenes are purely the work of racist agitators.
A report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services into last August’s riots in Southport concluded that most people who took part in them lived locally.
They were whipped up not by criminal factions or extremists, but by disaffected individuals and online influencers.
Ideology and political views played little part. The riots were a spasm of protest from a people who felt that no one was listening to them.
Millions more who took no part in the disturbances still shared some of those concerns. They are ordinary men and women – largely apolitical. They would indignantly reject any suggestion of bigotry, and they are emphatically not racist.
And yet they cannot maintain the silence, foisted on them by successive governments, any longer.
As prime minister more than 20 years ago, Tony Blair schemed to make mass immigration an acceptable policy, with a ‘marketing strategy’ to sell multiculturalism to the country.
This was despite a report, commissioned by the Home Office, that warned: ‘People feel they do not have permission to freely express their fears.’
Even then, in faraway 2004, many Britons believed our borders were ‘open and overrun’. Labour’s response was to downplay these fears, so that immigration stories were ‘no longer automatic front-page tabloid material every time’.
That cynical technique has become embedded in Labour’s DNA. Starmer cannot imagine doing things any differently. But year after year of enforced silence has not dissipated the nation’s fears – or its anger.
It has achieved the opposite, by containing them under pressure.
Now that pressure is building, and though I hope to God I’m wrong, the ominous sense that something terrible is about to flare up is becoming inescapable.
Professor Frank Furedi is the director of the think-tank MCC Brussels.
