I don’t know about you but I want my country back. I want to be able to eat pork which I can’t do now. I want to be able to go to the pub and drink beer. I want to be able to go to a Christian Church and worship. I want my wife to be able to walk in public without covering her hair. I want to be able to get rid of this beard. As I’m sure you’ll realise, I can no longer do these things but, with luck, Tommy will sort it for us.
Sounds good, I’ve bought the audiobook.
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Farage and others - Musk, the Daily Mail - have not made these people angry and disappointed. These left-behind communities were already that. Farage/Musk/D.Mail have seized on this frustration to ignite and encourage the violence.
Thus the eternal conundrum of ‘nature/nurture’. We can all come up with examples of people who had unpromising starts who subsequently excelled but they did so because somewhere along the line encouragement and inspiration came at just the right moment for them to achieve their potential.
It’s too late now for those trashing their towns and stoning the police. There may have been a glimmer of recognition of the problem of deep deprivation, economic and social, with the creation of Boris’s ‘Minister for Levelling Up’ but it’s a process that has needed attention for decades.
It remains to be seen what the new government can achieve to deal with it.
Maybe it’s time to make it illegal to display the St George’s flag. It’s now like the swastika, a symbol of hate and intolerance used mainly by violent thugs
Indeed. Which is why I think stamping on the violence is actually the easy bit 
The flag of St George of England belongs to all of us English. It is flown on many occasions from the flagstaffs of English churches.
It was never, as was the swastika, the standard of a criminal, murderous regime.
One data point here is that membership of the EU was not an issue with the British public until Vote Leave told them that it was.
I agree that Farage et al have more capitalised on this group than cause their anger, though they are happy to whip up dissatisfaction into racial hatred by encouraging the idea that it is all the fault of immigrants that there are few opportunities for the poorly educated “working class” - but this is the enduring legacy of Thatcher’s plan to crush the unions, decimate manufacturing and move to a service economy which left those that might have found employment in the shipyards, mines or steel foundries struggling in the “Brave New World” of a mainly “white collar” economy.
That successive governments failed to “level up” - either for the North, nor for this group of people has only exacerbated the issue. In particular the last 14 years of Tory rule has seen this group left behind more and more - possibly because of the value of an angry rent a mob where necessary.
I have no doubt that the RW are more than happy to launch a bunch of riots onto the new government’s plate as part of their poisonous legacy.
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Let me know what you think! I read Rory Stewart’s On The Edge memoir just before and that makes some similar points.
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The first thugs sentenced, one for three years. Not sure how punching a police officer only merits two months in jail though.
Interesting comment by former Twitter employee…
“Musk is a challenge as he’s ‘pretty toxic’, says former Twitter executive”
Maybe he grassed others up for leniency.
[quote=“billybutcher, post:168, topic:48655”]
- but this is the enduring legacy of Thatcher’s plan to crush the unions, decimate manufacturing and move to a service economy which left those that might have found employment in the shipyards, mines or steel foundries
- [/quote]
- ‘Crush the unions’. Recall that it was Denis Healy, the Labour Chancellor of The Exchequer in the Callaghan gov who confronted the unions in the days of 30% pay rises with, “Get your tanks off my lawn”.
In the mid 70’s my ex-colleagues on the Royal Parks Dept Tree Gang, courtesy of the GMWU, got 30% pay rises three years running - after I’d left to get a ‘proper job’ See below
The power of the unions in the 1970’s was excessive. I was getting calls from TV companies to do location research, something I was already doing for the advertising industry. Unlike the advertising industry, which was never unionised [a vote was taken and rejected by a massive majority] I knew I would need a union card for this.
At the meeting at the appropriate union I was told that if I worked on a TV production without union membership, the union would ‘black’ the transmission of the programme. The only way I could get a card was to get a job on a production listed on the notice board in their office, once a week.
Pre Thatcher it was becoming cheaper to import coal from Poland than mine it in Britain.
Thatcher did not ‘decimate manufacturing’. Not least amongst the problems was decades of dreadful management of UK industry. This was a primary cause for the demise of the UK motor industry.
I remember a piece by a production manager at BMC [or subsequent iteration]. He described how they bought a Mercedes saloon car, dismantled it down to the last nut and bolt and were at a loss as to how this car could be produced to such a standard and at a profit.
It took the Japanese at Sunderland to prove that correct management of a willing workforce could produce a quality car in UK.
On a shoot for ‘Dexion’ racking in the days when Datsun [Nissan] had a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the UK gov to keep imports below 10% of market share, we went to the Datsun UK spares HQ. The manager told us that the average cost for parts under a g’tee claim was GBP6. At Jaguar it was GBP100+ In 1970-ish that was a lot of duff parts.
Heavy industry was moving east. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and others in Japan had replaced the Clyde and other UK shipyards as the source of shipping. Now the Japanese have been superceded by the Koreans in the ‘metal bashing’ industries, and the Koreans now have the Chinese breathing down their necks.
I remember a quote by PM Ted Heath, “We can’t all be video salemen and tour guides” in the hope that UK might continue to be a manufacturing economy. Ironical, the mention of ‘tour guides’, because I did have a spell as one. 
On one of ny trips, taking a lively bunch of women from Melbourne, AUS, there was a day touring The Valleys of S. Wales. I’d never been there before. I was shocked. Even more so were my clients. It was rarely the case that there was not animated chatter going on behind me but as we toured one ex-mining community after another, silence fell. The best that had been done in the days after the mines closed was a ‘Leisure Centre’ or ‘Community Hall’.
All western economies have the same problem. Detroit has becme a ghost town, an economic black hole where a massive motor industry used to be and has the social ills that go with that decline.
Locking up the window-smashers and car-burners is barely the start of what the goverment is faced with doing.
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I agree it was multifactorial and, indeed, terrible British middle and upper management is a thread which runs through to this day (emerging in an Eton educated toff who wanted to be PM because he thought he’d “be rather good at it”) but Thatcher definitely wanted to remove the union power base any way she could.
As you say many industries would have declined anyway not least the mines (Scargill was right but mostly for the wrong reasons when he said the industry was in decline) - the problem is that successive governments gloated rather than realising work had to be done to ensure a framework was put in for long term economic success (and North Sea Oil money made pepering over the cracks easier to achieve).
We’re sitting at the wrong end of 50+ years mismanagement by government - perhaps that old saw about winning the war but loosing the peace was right.
However it is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be the fault of people born outside the UK wanting to live and work here.
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It is funny how some things become a bad mark and stick.
One of my neighbours, the other night, threw quite a lavish party on the excuse that he obtained French nationality. The dress code was anything with blue, white and red. Another neighbour turned up in a white dress with a distinctive red cross from shoulder to waist that really threw me all evening - and to make it worse, she has what I call a short crew cut hair… 
It is sad that the George Cross has become a symbol of the extreme right.
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It was, the 1st quote was nonsense, the 2nd one true.
Thatcher liberated millions of us from the absolute dead hand power of extreme union bosses.
I was nearly killed by rioting miners, yes they were fighting to retain their jobs but they did it by terrorising other innocent workers merely trying to do their legitimate jobs and provide for their families. My union the Transport and General lifted not a finger to protect us from Scargill’s maniac mobs of flying pickets. I have never crossed a legitimate picket in my life but we were faced by thousands at places away from the mines.
That wonderful union of ours, the T&G, also counted amongst its members all the dockers. The same ones who wouldn’t let their ‘brother’ lorry drivers use their toilets or canteens in some places. In London we were forced to use the Asian ones. I don’t complain about their existance or use, if kept clean they are more hygienic than the traditional sitapons, but it was the racism as the cause that they were there and the contempt for fellow workers of all colours which demonstrated the evil. At Liverpool docks a driver was killed, forced to unload 20 foot steel pipes all by himself when the whole stack collapsed taking him with it. I was the shop steward at the time and requested that we only go in twos so that at least we didn’t have to scramble back and forth placing multiple hooks on both ends. Refused. So we simply went to the docks and waited 'till another lorry turned up and then unloaded both of us together. No help from the union.
There was much that Margaret Thatcher could be blamed for, but there was much on the other side of the card too.
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She did, but she didn’t care that the collateral damage was almost our entire manufacturing sector (yes, I agree that there were other problems including terrible management).
Scargill wasn’t worried about violence - he was all for the violent overthrow of the government, I’m not even sure he didn’t view the whole thing as a form of civil war with him as the heroic general on the side of the workers.
I remember the pickets, the violence and getting stopped more than once by the police as I was driving my dad’s van.
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Reuters are reporting that one of the anti immigration rioters has been sentenced for 3 years. More than some ‘manslaughter’ convictions. Let us see if the thug who broke that police woman’s nose gets the same sentence. If not, it will only add fuel to the fire.
But less than people got for peaceful protest recently.
True. Offences were violent disorder and assaulting an emergency worker, which carry a maximum of 5 years and 2 years respectively.
He punched a policeman in the face and threw bricks at police.
It’s a fair point, but contempt is always dealt with more seriously than the underlying offence, because it strikes at the justice system itself.
Very, very good point.
While the thugs that have been sentenced deserve no mercy, my immediate reaction was is there scapegoating and making examples of was in progress? What sentences would they have received a month ago, or one month hence? But, of course, I’d no to benchmark.