Britain is falling apart

“Laws,” F.A. Hayek wrote, “must be general, equal, and certain.” An open society rests on public confidence in the impartiality of police and courts.

Sometimes, that impartiality gives way under stress. It happened, for example, during the pandemic , when anti-lockdown protesters were repressed while Black Lives Matter protesters were indulged, and when 1,200 public health professionals went so far as to claim that demonstrations for BLM were justified because racism was more dangerous than COVID.

As so often, Britain followed the United States, importing the same double standard. Sir Keir Starmer, then leader of the opposition, blamed BLM violence in the U.S. on then-President Donald Trump . When copycat protests began here, chief constables, who had until then arrested people for the merest lockdown violations, asked activists to demonstrate considerately.

Since then, climate extremists and anti- Israel marchers have been tolerated in a way that, say, football hooligans would never be. In March, a woman slashed a portrait in Cambridge of Lord Balfour by the artist Philip Alexius de László, angry because the Balfour Declaration had paved the way for a Jewish homeland. Although she made a point of having her vandalism filmed, she has not been arrested or charged.

This is the background to the unrest gripping some British cities, which has prompted Elon Musk to refer to the Labour prime minister as “Two-Tier Keir.”

The sequence of events reflects no credit on anyone. On July 29, in the seaside town of Southport, a disturbed 17-year-old called Axel Rudakubana attacked a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance class with a knife. He murdered three little girls, aged 9, 7, and 6, and injured eight others, as well as the teacher, who had shielded the girls with her body, and a neighbor who had tried to help.

Within hours, there were online claims that the murderer was a Muslim illegal immigrant . In fact, he was the British-born child of Rwandans. But because it is not normally lawful to name suspects under the age of 18 (the embargo was later lifted in this case, Rudakubana being only a week short of his 18th birthday), because broadcasters have a history of downplaying crime by illegal immigrants, and because there had been a cover-up of the grooming of white girls in northern cities by men of Pakistani heritage, people believed the rumors — which, it turned out, had originated on Russian disinformation sites.

Demonstrations of sympathy for the victims were hijacked by anti-immigrant ruffians. Hotels housing asylum-seekers were attacked, and mosques were threatened. The looting was led, unsurprisingly, by people with criminal records. Perhaps they had been encouraged by Labour’s theatrical declaration, on taking office, that prisons were overflowing, necessitating several early releases.

News that the killer was neither a Muslim nor an immigrant did nothing to deter the numbskulls, not that their behavior would have been justified regardless of the murderer’s origins. Soon, equivalent gangs of masked Muslim young men were gathering to defend mosques, waving Palestinian flags and engaging in their own acts of rowdiness.

It was Starmer’s first big test, and he flunked it. He could have posed unequivocally as a defender of the king’s peace, making clear that any vandalism or disorder, regardless of the perpetrators’ motives, would be met by the full force of the law. Instead, he kept harping on about the “far Right” and the need to “defend communities” and suggested a crackdown on social media.

In other words, he seemed to take sides. Instead of pushing disinterestedly for the restoration of order, he slotted events into the comfortable narrative of “Right-wingers Attack Innocent Minorities.” While some perpetrators fit that description, their motives ought to have been irrelevant. The point is that all acts of violence, intimidation, and vandalism should be treated equally, whether they are carried out by racist dunderheads or by pro-Hamas thugs.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The notion that Britain is an unusually orderly society dates only from the end of the 19th century. Before then, mob violence, including attacks on places of worship, was common. Our civility, what George Orwell called England’s gentleness, has come under strain, partly because high levels of immigration diminish social capital, and partly because of the atomization caused by social media.

Yet, without social media, we would have had only Starmer’s approved narrative, namely that everything was caused by racism and Islamophobia. When one broadcaster pushing this story was threatened by a masked man shouting “Free Palestine,” the camera cut away, and the anchor engaged in some embarrassed throat-clearing. Social media has exposed as much as it has exacerbated. And what it has exposed is not pretty.