Protests

Well the uprising has begun at 21:23 with many anti racist demos neutralising the hate filled ultra right wing thugs. I hope this is the end of it tonight, if so it is a beautiful ending and one that I didn’t see coming.

In Walthamstow one of the early announced 30 demo sites, the police told an anti racist demo to ‘go home,’ when asked ‘why’ the police said ‘there is no one else here, only you.’

I also hope it is the end of it

Unfortunately to use the parallel of the NHS as a challenging issue

The government need to address the root causes and perceived problems here

It is EXTREMELY concerning children as young as 11 have been involved

Whatever their reasons they are the next generation

Radical protests dying down doesn’t mean the views and challenges have vanished

After the Manchester Arena terror attacks, every country re-evaluated security at high-density events and venues and the plan of action for if there is significant evidence of a terrorist plot is just to cancel it. Because then everyone will be safe, full stop.

While I agree as an average person, worrying too much about this would hinder your day to day life, in cases like this where solid evidence is about, no chances are taken.

Anyways, back to the protests...

Which is the safer event? One that proceeds immediately after a terror threat has been intercepted and thwarted, or one for which intelligence has thrown up no known issues?

My money's on the former. (Wasn't Manchester the latter?)

In the same vein, I felt incredibly safe flying immediately after 9/11, but less so now that everyone has become complacent again. Straight after the tube bombs, everyone was looking out for anything suspicious. Nowadays, I've seen unattended bags ignored.

People should not give into irrational fear.

The problems are many and varried.

Its easy to blame the right wing media so i wont.

Housing - waiting lists for young males on the council housing reigster is around 7 years, they see mirgrants staying hotels. Its one of the issues, twin that with poor education etc and we have our tinderbox. Or one of the issues in our tinderbox

'Hope Not Hate''s Nick Lowles saying the rumoured Far Right hit list was a hoax (presumably by Hope not Hate, given that their identical SWP type placards were everywhere), but they got great headlines. So loads of people made to feel afraid and targeted, city centres shutting up early, police deployed from other jobs, people cheering that a dragon has been slain when it was never going to attack in that area in the first place. It's all weird and it's not helping matters - feels like recklessly adding a lot of fuel to the fire of mistrust in the media or government and to people's sense of fear and insecurity. So which threats are real now, and which fake? Where do the police go?

It may be originally, but if so, the locations chosen were very odd / unlikely given their demographics and history - Croydon, Walthamstow, Brighton, Hackney? Any far right protestors would be massively and probably violently outnumbered (by sibling lives in Stoke Newington and when I said be careful he said there is no way a demo would happen there, they wouldn't dare). It was also odd that the media were waving the list around - if you're worried specific places will be targets, don't give out those addresses publicly? They may get a counter demo to protect them one night, but those addresses will then be earmarked as targets in the months to come.

And in Belfast, these riots are of course being whipped up by the usual loyalist paramilitary elements who seek to thrive on mayhem any chance they get.

There was an interesting Radio 4 series - and sorry, I can't remember the name! - which had tracked the way divisive / controversial tweets were bot-farm boosted, as well as some accounts invented for the sake of doing this and stirring the pot. It was probably ever thus (Norman Hampson mentioned it going on in the French Revolution, and, spoiler alert, it's the punchline in Alan Bleasdale's GBH, a TV drama inspired by Hatton-era Liverpool)

Does Council Housing still exist, in the real sense? The large estate my mum grew up on is now owned by a private organisation - that was quietly done. We're in a neighbouring council area now and when you call them, they state (recorded message while you're on hold on the helpline) they no longer own any housing whatsoever (meaning don't bother us with your problems, ask your landlord). These are both Northern, working class, low income areas, Labour councils for as long as I can remember, but someone somewhere is trousering the cash. 

As it happened in the end the social media site Telegram took down some of their channels, citing ‘violation of policy.’

Then you kind of answered your own question with foreign powers, which surmounted to Russian actors using social media to drive insurrection. When there is a threat like that social media needs to go offline. As it is social media had a positive effect with other people taking to the streets. I’m also glad that a poster was jailed for spewing hate speech.

The reality is that immigration has been a huge failure of the democratic process since 1992 and realistically since 1945. The public has never wanted mass immigration and every time the Conservatives have been elected since 1992 they have promised to reduce it, and have then increased it. Tony Blair's government unsurprisingly was particularly egregious in terms of what they promised relative to what they delivered.

We are currently living in an insane situation where many people have been convinced that the most recent Conservative government were very right wing on immigration when they in fact presided over by far the highest incoming levels of net migration ever seen.

The European country which has produced the most longitudinal data on the effect of immigration is Denmark and not uncoincidentally Denmark is now the most anti-immigration country in Western Europe. The data showed exactly what you should expect: measured over a lifetime, immigrants from rich countries are on average beneficial to your economy and immigrants from poor countries on average are detrimental.

After Brexit the UK has replaced very high levels of immigration largely from the EU with almost incomprehensibly high levels of immigration largely from poorer countries. The immediate effect of this is to slightly increase GDP while lowering GDP per capita. The long term effect is almost certainly going to be the lowering of both as immigrants also get older, sicker, and want pensions.

Labour and the Conservatives do not want the electorate to realise any of this as they are equally culpable for these failures since 1992. For now the media is happy to run coverage for them and journalists are increasingly drawn from a narrow set of highly educated cosmopolitans who consider any criticism of immigration to be uncouth, not least because journalism is an increasingly low paying job only likely to appeal to those willing to trade high status for low income, in particular the already wealthy.

Labour has been losing votes from both Muslim communities and white working class communities. Their differing responses to the BLM situation, the Palestine situation, and to this situation makes it clear that they are going to side with their middle class voters and their multicultural voters against their traditional base.

This has been the strategy of the Democratic party in the US since 2008 and it is a winning long-term strategy whilst mass immigration continues because immigrants tend to vote Democrat and Labour and over time you can import yourself the electorate you want. Kamala Harris would have lost to Donald Trump with 2016's electorate but she has a chance in 2024. With 1980's electorate she would have been unlikely to win a single state.

It is therefore hugely in the interest of Keir Starmer and the Labour Party to suppress information concerning immigration. Drumming up the essentially non-existent threat of the 'far-right' is now a convenient way to achieve this.

But this strategy now puts Starmer on a collision course against one of the world's richest and most powerful men who controls one of the few major media outlets still committed to something resembling free speech, and this could easily backfire on Labour and lead to the election of a party that would be genuinely right-wing on the issue of immigration, which would of course only be the correction expected in a functioning democracy.