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Barely a month after the elections, and the new Labour Party government is dragging Britain into serious civil conflict, while destroying the preciously little that remains of British freedoms, especially freedom of speech.
The teenage son of a Rwandan migrant family stabbed three little girls to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in Southport, a city near Liverpool, on July 29. The murders triggered protests and riots by Britons who have apparently had enough.
Within a day of the first protests, Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave a speech in which he barely mentioned the murdered little girls, yet painted those who protested as "far right thugs" who had come from outside Southport to stir up trouble. He thus dismissed all the concerns of the majority of the British and their worries about the mass migration that is affecting the safety of their children, families and communities. Incredibly, Starmer's first act after the murders was not, as one might expect, to deal with concerns over the safety of British citizens, but to dedicate funds to new emergency security for mosques.
According to Starmer:
"A gang of thugs, got on trains and busses, went to a community that is not their own... And then proceeded to throw bricks at police officers... Whether it's in Southport, London – or Hartlepool... These people are showing our country exactly who they are. Mosques targeted because they are Mosques. Flares thrown at the statue of Winston Churchill. A Nazi salute at the Cenotaph."
He added that he was creating a special Violent Crime Unit, dedicated to fighting -- guess who -- the protesters:
"And so I've just held a meeting with senior police and law enforcement leaders... Because let's be very clear about this. It's not protest. It's not legitimate. It's crime... We will put a stop to it... A response both to the immediate challenge, which is clearly driven by far-right hatred... And so -- to that end I can announce today, that following this meeting we will establish a national capability, across police forces to tackle violent disorder."
Not letting the crisis go to waste, he also announced that the government would be expanding the use of facial recognition technology:
"These thugs are mobile. They move from community to community, and we must have a policing response that can do the same... Wider deployment of facial recognition technology... preventive action – criminal behaviour orders to restrict their movements before they can even board a train."
Starmer could have stopped the demonstrators in their tracks by listening to -- and addressing -- the concerns of "ordinary" people in the wake of the murders. Instead, he chose to brand them as "far right thugs", thereby inflaming an entire country, with protests and rioting spreading from Southport to other cities. Police further inflamed matters by setting their dogs on harmless protesters, arresting many, and handcuffing a 73-year-old lady with a pacemaker who had never been arrested before, and was guilty of just peacefully protesting the murders of young girls.
"I'm 73 years old and I've here because of them babies that has died and I'm being arrested," said the woman, who was surrounded by riot police.
In Plymouth, according to one report, while leftist radicals were destroying a church, taking stones from its wall to throw at the protesters, police were not stopping the radicals, but instead beating the protesters.
Immediately clamping down on the sad remains of British free speech, the director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, chillingly warned that sharing and retweeting online material of the riots was a serious offense that would lead to arrest. "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material, and then follow up with arrests," he said.
Around the same time, Northampton police posted on X that they had "received reports of a hate crime regarding a post published on social media" and in response had arrested a 41-year-old woman "on suspicion of inciting racial hatred."
So, retweeting posts on X now gets you sent to the pokey. A Muslim brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle on social media, however, while threatening to blow people's heads off, is apparently acceptable. Equally acceptable, evidently, are Muslim radicals vowing on social media that any members of the "English Defense League" (an anti-Islam group that was disbanded around a decade ago) who show up to Walthamstow in northeast London will be murdered, and their bodies "disappeared" in the woods. In fact, Muslims and radical leftists did mobilize in Walthamstow over rumors of an anti-mass migration protest -- which did not take place -- brandishing Palestinian flags. The crowd cheered, as local Labour councilor Ricky Jones gave a speech in which he called for the murder of Britons who protest against mass immigration.
"They are disgusting fascists and we need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all," he said. After the video circulated online, police eventually had no choice but to arrest Jones.
Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, summoned representatives from social media giants and told them to clamp down on users deviating from the government narrative.
"I expect platforms to ensure that those seeking to spread hate online are not being facilitated and have nowhere to hide," Kyle said. Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), was condemned by the British government for stating that the UK was heading towards civil war.
Within a few days, Starmer's ramped-up special unit had managed to arrest, try and sentence a British rioter to three years in prison for punching a police officer. Yet, the murderer of the three Southport girls, Axel Rudakubana, will only go on trial next year, while rape victims in the UK, including little children, wait an average of 358 days before their rapists go on trial.
Police launched "dawn raids" on protesters after having "scoured thousands of hours of footage to identify people who engaged in violent behavior."
What the police did not do was arrest the gangs of armed Muslim men who took to the streets across British cities. In Birmingham, Bolton, and Middlesbrough, "Muslim patrol" members beat white people, whom they accused of being part of the anti-mass migration protests. In Sheffield, machete-wielding Muslims roamed the streets in search of white "far right" people to attack.
In Birmingham, the UK's second-largest city, Muslim gangs armed with swords went looking for white protesters -- with not a policeman in sight. A Sky News reporter was forced to end her broadcast after a masked man approached her shouting "Free Palestine" while other men surrounding her made shooting signs with their hands. The gangs violently attacked an innocent man, beating him to the ground in front of a Birmingham pub he had happened to visit. They also shut down roads and attacked cars, after checking them to see that there were whites inside. No police officers were to be seen.
Why were no police officers present? When West Midlands police were asked why they did nothing about "an awful lot of people armed with various weapons" (Muslim gangs) in Birmingham, the answer was that the Muslim communities had been allowed to "do their own policing".
West Midlands Police Superintendent Emlyn Richards said:
"We have really strong business and community relations [with the Muslim communities]... we had the opportunity to meet with [Muslim] community leaders, meet with [Muslim] business leaders... to kind of understand the style of policing that we needed to deliver... So we knew there was going to be a large amount of people out on that counter protest, we knew who the vast majority of who those people were."
He then went on to note that the counter-protesters (the Muslim gangs) had "the right intentions" and that only "a small minority" of people had been intent on causing "either criminality, disorder or fear within our communities."
Curiously, British police did not acknowledge "right intentions" of those protesting the Southport murders and that only "a small minority" had engaged in violence and riots against the police, hotels hosting illegal migrants, and mosques.
Richards concluded:
"What we saw was a response from our [Muslim] communities where they were kind of trying to make sure that was policed within themselves as well and trying to deter people from taking part in that disorder,"
Translation: huge parts of the UK are no-go zones where the police no longer hold authority.
Contrary to what the police said, Muslim "elders" appeared to incite members of their community in Birmingham, telling them to "protect the house of Allah" against the "far right" and messaging Starmer that they were fully able to "defend themselves".
"[W]hen the call is made, we will defend ourselves. We are not ashamed of this, inshallah, and we will openly say the takbeer ["Allahu Akbar", "Allah is the greatest"] whenever we feel like it," the Muslim elder told a crowd which proceeded to break out in shouts of "Allahu Akbar!" A threat?
Not according to the Chief Constable of the West Midlands, who released a video statement addressed to the Muslims in the region, greeting them deferentially with "Salam Alaykum," and reassuring them of the police's support and giving "huge thanks" to their "elders" for their "cooperation."
In Stoke-on-Trent, the police nicely asked a crowd of armed Muslims gathered outside a mosque to please "discard" their weapons inside the mosque. No arrests.
"Don't give anybody any reason to have any interaction with the police, so if there's any weapons, get rid of them, we are not going to arrest anybody," the police officer said.
In Croydon, London, Muslim gangs went on a rampage apparently in search of white people to attack, but finding none, they instead proceeded to smash up whatever they could find. The police posted a deceiving message on X in which they claimed that the Muslim riot in Croydon had nothing to do with the protests but was a separate issue.
The list goes on. The legacy media barely reported the Muslim violence. The BBC claimed -- as most of the media did in the US during the fiery summer of rioting in 2020 -- that although a Birmingham pub had been attacked, the Muslim protests had been "largely peaceful."
In contrast to this blitz of an authoritarian crackdown, Starmer, when he was leader of the opposition in Parliament, showed nothing but understanding for the people participating in the large-scale riots that Black Lives Matter (BLM) unleashed on the UK after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Large-scale violence and destruction, dozens of policemen wounded by BLM protesters and property damage, including damage to the Whitehall cenotaph and defacement and destruction of historical statues, apparently did not bother Starmer. Instead, at the time, he released a photo of himself "taking a knee" in support of BLM along with a statement in which he asked the British government to "ensure that our exports are not being used in the suppression of democratic rights in the US."
Ten months of weekly protests across the UK in support of the terrorist group Hamas -- and orchestrated by Hamas-affiliated organizations, calling for "Jihad!" and for Israel to be cleansed of its Jews "from the river to the sea," while waving jihadist, Al Qaeda flags, and celebrating terrorists who murdered, raped, mutilated and burned innocent people alive -- have had no consequences whatsoever for those involved, who continue their demonstrations, even though, in the UK, both Hamas and Al Qaeda are proscribed terrorist organizations and supporting them can carry a prison sentence to imprisonment for up to 14 years.
Meanwhile, however, the Greater Manchester police, following a complaint, removed posters of kidnapped Israelis, an act for which, after a severe backlash, they later had to apologize. In London, the Metropolitan Police also removed posters of Israeli hostages, to, as they said, "avoid any further increase in community tension" and out of "a responsibility to take reasonable steps to stop issues escalating." Then calls for Jews to be killed, according to the British police, do not "escalate issues" or "increase community tension"?
Starmer, following in the footsteps of his Conservative predecessor Rishi Sunak, has evidently felt no need to clamp down on jihadists, on calls for an intifada or on cries to "free Palestine from the river to the sea," a chant widely understood to be calling for the destruction of Israel."
The terrorist threat of jihadi mobs continues to this day, yet the former head of counter-terrorism policing, Neil Basu, opined that the current UK protests against the murder of little girls and illegal migration were the ones that had "crossed the line into terrorism."
Many of the places that have seen protests and riots are towns and cities such as Rotherham, where inhabitants rightfully fear the consequences of continued mass migration. Those cities were the scenes of sexual abuse on an unbelievable scale and equally unbelievable deliberate failures by authorities to deal with that abuse. In Telford alone, Muslim grooming gangs raped, abused and tortured more than 1,000 little children and teenagers beginning in the 1980s, and, in some cases, even murdered some.
Similar horrific acts by grooming gangs took place – and still are taking place -- in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Peterborough, Keighley, Newcastle and Birmingham. Today, many illegal migrants, almost all men from outside the European Union, are housed in hotels, courtesy of British taxpayers, who reportedly pay £8m a day for their accommodation, in some of those very cities, and reportedly continue to stalk and harass local English children. According to one former child victim of the grooming gangs, British police are still trying to cover the whole wreck up.
Almost the only figure of authority to talk any sense since the protests and riots began, is Donna Jones, Police and Crime Commissioner of Hampshire and Isle of Wight, who urged for calm and for the country to work together, calling on the government to listen to the legitimate grievances of those who are protesting:
"The announcement of the Prime Minister's new Violent Crime Units have le
ad to an accusation of two tier policing, which has enflamed protestors who state they are battling to protect Britain's sovereignty, identity and stop illegal immigration... Whilst the devastating attacks in Southport on Monday were a catalyst, the commonality amongst the protest groups appears to be focused on three key areas: the desire to protect Britain's sovereignty; the need to uphold British values and in order to do this, stop illegal immigration..."The government must acknowledge what is causing this civil unrest in order to prevent it. Arresting people, or creating violent disorder units, is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering; what is the government's solution to mass uncontrolled immigration? How are the new Labour government going to uphold and build on British values? This is the biggest challenge facing Sir Kier Starmer's government...
"We all need to work together to stop this mindless criminal behaviour committed by a small number of people, whilst understanding the views of those attending rallies who feel strongly but don't cause disorder."
Using the ongoing protests across Britain to crack down -- one-sidedly -- on basic rights, Starmer has successfully exacerbated racial conflict, inflamed tensions, created division, penalized free speech and neatly sneezed at legitimate concerns.
Robert Williams is a researcher based in the United States.