I try not to be some sort of Cassandra about Britain and its politics but looking around me it is something that I find increasingly difficult to avoid. This is because there’s so many different crises happening at the same time that finding any sort of positive outlook is getting harder and harder.
I do believe, based on evidence from news stories and what people are saying, that Britain is approaching a crunch time, a period when lots of different problems coalesce into one big problem. There’s economic, social, demographic, political and other problems that successive governments have just kicked down the road instead of tackling them. Now these problems are becoming one big massive ‘omni-problem’ that seems like it is going to burst out at any minute like the monster from John Hurts abdomen in the movie ‘Alien’.
Nobody with any sense trusts the political classes, or the Civil Service, Britain’s nationalised healthcare system, or local government or the police or the judicial system or the charity sector. All those entities have failed to live up to the high expectations that we once had of them.
It could be the case that Britain is in for a long hot summer of conflict. What might set it off is anybodies guess but we are only in April and already we’ve got mobs on the streets of Epsom in Surrey facing down the police because the public there do not accept the explanations by the police for the slow progress of the investigation into an alleged gang rape. Local people have swarmed onto the streets to surround hotels and other accommodations that they believe are housing Dinghy Invaders because they believe that said Dinghy Invaders housed in the town are behind the gang rape allegation. As I said in a previous article on the Epsom situation, there might be a whole host of legitimate reasons why the investigation is taking so much time but local people are in no mood to listen to any of the police’s explanations, once they might have done but the police are no longer trusted to the extent that they once were. What’s concerning is that this public scepticism of the police is probably not confined to Epsom, it’s an attitude that is probably building in many other places across the country.
This sort of attitude by the public towards the police and other authorities where nothing they say is believed is almost unprecedented on the mainland outside of Ulster in post war Britain. Yes there’s been conflicts in the past where there has been hostility towards the authorities such as in the Miners Strike during the 1980’s. But in that case the conflict was localised, only to the coalfield areas and were not widespread across the country among those who were not connected to the mining industry or those supporting the miners for political reasons such as those on the Left/Far Left. Now however the sort of sceptical and hostile attitude towards the authorities is not just confined to one or two towns, it’s across the country.
Other things that could make conflict more likely is the increasing boldness of what could now be reasonably termed as ‘the enemy’ in this case the radical Muslims who are flexing their muscles and might do even more of that if the party that they’ve hollowed out and taken over, The Greens, do well in the May local elections. Also what I’m also factoring in with my predictions is a growth in British people who might feel that they have ‘nothing to lose’ by kicking off. There are more people now than there were in previous times of stress who because of economic mismanagement, exclusion from services that they need, migrant crime and economic stress from rising energy prices (which is not all the fault of the Iran War) who now could feel that they have more to gain from kicking off than they would lose.
If the period from May to September of this year is a time where there are long periods of good weather and if it is coupled with even more migrant crime, economic problems and our political classes continue to besmirch their image even more than they are doing already, then we could be in for trouble. There might be so much trouble and it might become so widespread that it might not be able to be contained by police public order units in anything like the way that it was tackled in 2024 following the Southport Atrocity or after the riots of 2011. Big cities are well up to speed with dealing with sudden public disorder incidents but more rural police forces, small cities and market towns might not be. If there is simultaneous disorder in 20 different small to medium sized towns then the current public disorder management systems might not be able to cope. Oh and don’t think that we can call on the Army to back up the civil law and order powers as we don’t have much of an Army to speak of these days. Even our much admired Special Forces troops are leaving in droves because of fear of the lawfare of Britain’s enemies and from the political Left.
What will be the spark and will it be just one spark or several? I really don’t know. It could be some awful crime committed by migrants or yet another terrorist attack by Islamic extremists or disturbances like we recently saw in Clapham in South London occurring in some previously peaceful market town or attacks on the elderly. It’s difficult to say but things do seem to be getting increasingly febrile at the moment and people can almost taste the state failure in the air.
I would prefer that this sort of disturbance and conflict didn’t happen. I pray everyday for there to be a civil political solutions to my nation’s ills and maybe there will be some last minute reprieve that averts disaster? Maybe we have a government of national unity which suddenly has a miraculous talent for seeing things as they really are or a snap general election that fills the House of Commons with patriotic realists or something?
I grieve for my nation’s current situation and I grieve even more because many of our current problems may well have been avoidable if the political class had taken correct actions in time. If the borders had been strengthened, if the justice system was just, if the police were not politicised, if the Islamic extremists had been jumped upon by the state early enough and jumped upon hard and if the economy had been managed far better than it currently is, then I might not be so worried about where things are going. However we have all the ingredients for a recipe for a dish that many of us have warned about and that meal is going to taste very very bitter indeed.
You may say that I’m an incurable and unrealistic pessimist but sometimes being a pessimist is the correct thing to do. There were an awful lot of Jews in mid century Europe who were split between pessimism and optimism when the monster Hitler rose to power. Some among Europe’s Jewry, some of whom had experienced Pogroms and other oppression before, were optimists. They’d seen all the Jew hating stuff before in Russia, Poland, the Balkan states and elsewhere and thought that Hitler’s regime’s type of Jew hating would be similar to that which drove Pogroms and oppressions in other countries. They thought that things would not get too bad that there would be temporary oppression, maybe some murders but then things would calm down or they could pop across the border into a ‘safer’ place like France or Belgium or the Netherlands until things got better, which of course as we know today did not work.
We know now that the optimists in that situation were wrong. The pessimists among the Jews at that time realised just how bad things could get and that it could be worse than previous bouts of oppression. These Jews got out when they could, to Britain, to the USA, Mandate Palestine, wherever they could get to they went and as far away as possible from the dangers to be found on Continental Europe. The pessimists who fled to places far away from the growing conflict mostly survived, the optimists who stayed behind and hoped for the best did not.
I’d rather be a pessimist and be hopefully proven wrong at some point in the future than be an optimist who thinks things might not get as bad as the pessimist thinks they’ll get only to find that the situation is worse than might be initially imagined. I’m worried greatly about the way things are going and if you have critical thinking capabilities and awareness of what’s going on then maybe you also should be a bit more pessimistic.