A storm is gathering

I don’t believe Britain is a ‘tinderbox’ – but it may take just a small rise in the temperature for it to become one

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Photo: ITV

I know Epping. Situated in the borderlands between London and Essex, it is a short ride from Dagenham, the place where I grew up.

Somewhat unlike Dagenham, however, Epping is a fairly affluent and sedate old market town.

I also know Diss, another attractive place just a few miles from my current home in East Anglia.

In the past few days, both these towns – usually the type of places where you go for a nice lunch or a round of golf – have been thrust into the national spotlight, as demonstrators took to local streets in opposition to decisions to house large numbers of young male asylum seekers in nearby hotels.

Similar protests have broken out in a number of other towns across England, from Altrincham in Greater Manchester to Southsea in Hampshire.

Footage of the protests showed the level of anger. Certain unsavoury characters turned up to some of the events, and in Epping a handful of morons inexcusably resorted to violence. But most demonstrators stayed within the law and made their case robustly but peaceably.

What I found striking about some of the protests – Epping and Diss being obvious examples – was that, by and large, these were not the sort of towns or people that one would usually associate with rebellion or social discord. So it is a measure of how deep public resentment is now running over the immigration crisis – and, in particular, the requisitioning of hotels on a vast scale and at considerable public cost – that these places now find themselves centre stage in the debate.

Many protestors were parents worried about the safety of their children, particularly their daughters. While it is important not to tar all asylum seekers with the same brush – many will be decent people simply seeking a better life for themselves – data published recently and widely reported in the media shows that foreign nationals are far more likely than native Britons to commit sex crimes, with Afghanistan, a country from which many have arrived in the small boats, topping the table for the total conviction rate per head of the population for each nationality. So the concerns of the protestors are not irrational; they are grounded in reality.

For at least two decades, our political class has been playing with fire over the issue of immigration, repeatedly promising to get numbers down but invariably failing to do so. And now a storm is gathering.

I began warning about the impact of high immigration numbers on working-class communities after witnessing, in the first decade of this century, the disorientation and bewilderment caused to my fellow citizens in Dagenham by the effects of the new global market, especially the rapid and large-scale deindustrialisation and demographic change that began to take hold in their community.

The liberal globalists who ran things arrogantly dismissed the inevitable disquiet aired in Dagenham and other places experiencing a similar phenomenon as the intolerant reaction of closet racists and bigots. They were profoundly wrong. People were uneasy because their sense of order, and not their sense of race, had been violated.

The contempt shown by establishment politicians to people in Dagenham resulted in the British National Party achieving its best ever result in local government elections – securing 12 seats and becoming the official opposition on the local council.

That’s what happens when legitimate concerns over immigration are ignored by mainstream parties. People look elsewhere – including to hardliners and extremists – for representation. It is a lesson that so many among the political elites in Britain stubbornly refuse to learn.

Sir Keir Starmer says he recognises public concern over immigration and has pledged to fix the broken system. He doesn’t have long. Voters can see that the government has made nothing like sufficient progress on the issue since it came to power – in fact, record numbers are now arriving on the small boats – and patience throughout the country is wearing thin. And Sir Keir’s recent recantation of his own warning that, without action, Britain risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’ will leave many wondering just how sincere he is in his promise to tackle the problem.

The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be this way. If successive governments had run a sensible immigration policy, ensuring numbers were modest and manageable and asylum claims were dealt with swiftly and competently, the issue would not be dominating our national discourse in the way it is, and our communities would be more harmonious than they are.

As a country, we had moved on from the dark days of the 1970s, when the National Front was busy standing in elections and holding intimidatory marches in areas with large ethnic minority populations. But then someone decided it was a good idea to fling open the borders in the name of improved GDP or cultural enrichment, or whatever it was, and now we have set ourselves back half a century. Worse, hardly anyone in authority knows how to get the genie back into the bottle. Indeed, I suspect that some among them have no desire to do so.

In the end, the ballot box is a pressure relief valve. When the valve becomes faulty –in other words, when politicians do the opposite of what the public consistently demands – the pressure doesn’t go away; it simply breaks out elsewhere. That is precisely what we are now seeing in some of our communities – generally the ones that have suffered most from the effects of mass immigration.

I desperately hope that the government gets to grips with the situation. If it doesn’t, we can reasonably predict that the scenes that played out in Epping and Diss and all those other towns will be repeated elsewhere.

There has been much talk recently of Britain being a ‘tinderbox’. I don’t think that is the case. Not yet, at any rate. But I fear that it will take a single sudden turn of events or flashpoint – perhaps a recession or, God forbid, another terror attack – for it to become one.

These are indeed troubling times.

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An edited version of the above piece first appeared on GB News website.