Cities and towns across England, a subordinate country within the United Kingdom, have suffered days of rioting by large groups of predominantly white men. Some American conservatives are lending support to the rioters in the belief that they are legitimately protesting immigration laws and the destruction of traditional English values.
Such support is delusional. These rioters are not patriots, they are criminal thugs. The same is true of the smaller number of Islamist men who have targeted and attacked white protesters.
The central cause of these protests is anti-immigration sentiments. And the match that lit the spark was the murder of three girls, ages 5, 6, and 9, on July 29. Those girls and eight others were stabbed at a dance workshop in Southport, a town just north of Liverpool. The 17-year-old attacker, Axel Rudakubana, is a British citizen who was born in the United Kingdom. It appears that he is mentally ill. False rumors spread online, however, have suggested that Rudakubana was a recently arrived asylum-seeker or Islamist extremist.
The key point here is a quite simple one. Namely, that it is entirely legitimate to protest levels of immigration, failures of integration, and asylum policies. It is entirely illegitimate to attack mosques and commit arson against police stations and hotels housing asylum-seekers. It is entirely illegitimate to attack police officers who are simply protecting the communities they are sworn to serve.
Again, there is a legitimate concern over pressure on government services that has at least marginally been exacerbated by immigration. Timely access to the U.K.’s socialized medical system, public housing, and other services is no longer possible in many parts of England. At the same time, there is frustration over high tax rates and diversion of government expenditures to migrants and asylum-seekers (access to taxpayer-funded hotel rooms, etc.). And there is legitimate frustration over historic reticence by the police, especially in northern England, about confronting serious criminality by elements of the English Asian community.
There is also a sense that white identity-centered political speech online is treated more harshly than Islamist identity-centered political speech online. On this latter point, X CEO Elon Musk is right to resist British government pressure (as he resists European Union pressure) to defer to its speech laws on X rather than the freer speech tradition offered by the First Amendment. U.S. speech law recognizes that the best antidote to extremism is to allow a wide range of voices to express their views and vent their frustrations.
Still, attacking innocent people because of the color of their skin, their ancestry, or their religion is patently unacceptable. And while the police should enforce laws regardless of whether criminals are of a white or South Asian ancestry, most of the recent disorder has been caused by white men.
It would be a mistake to lend too much moral sincerity to the motives of those engaged in mob violence. Many of those engaged in criminality are likely motivated by a desire to take advantage of the summer weather to have a violent party. It should also be noted that this violence reflects a fundamental failure by the white working class to take responsibility for their own economic situation rather than blame others for it. The welfare state has inculcated generations of Britons with the belief that the government owes them and them alone handouts.
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Top line: Protest, passionate speech, and a push for robust changes to immigration laws are, or should be, absolutely acceptable.
Attacks on places of religious worship, police officers, or select residents are utterly unacceptable.