The country-wide riots following the terrible knife murders in Southport have been nowhere fiercer than in Northern Ireland. The province of course has a long history of communal violence, but the sectarian divide appears to have come to something of a temporary truce, with scenes of the Irish tricolour borne alongside the flag of Ulster as both Catholics and Protestants march against mass immigration. Whilst we have seen scenes of burnt-out cars and ruined shops on the mainland, nowhere has matched Belfast for violence. And whilst rioters have been received sentences of more than two years for shouting at police in England, the odd brick thrown in anger has not matched the petrol bombs launched over the Irish sea.
The Police Service of Northern Island (“PSNI”) has more experience of violent disorder than its English equivalents, but has struggled to maintain control; indeed it has requested support from the mainland. And it has failed to make arrests; as at the time of writing only 16 have been made, compared to 29 in Liverpool, 35 in Hull and 40 in Middlesbrough. (London, of course, leads the way - although these are less to do with actual rioting than the “arrest anyone” policing in the immediate aftermath of the killings.)
Ulster, I believe, has lessons for us; it is where we look to be heading. (For the avoidance of doubt, nothing herein is an encouragement for anyone to undertake any unlawful act; indeed I would discourage any reader from attending any protest, however peaceful their intentions.)
Narrative control and state capacity
The week after the Southport killings was characterised by two contrasting features: wooden communications masking effective on-the-ground policing (on the mainland).
Starmer is obviously no media performer - as I wrote in the days following the election:
In an election where a dead donkey would have walked home, Starmer flopped. Against (whatever reasons we think) Rishi Monsoonak and Sir Ed “Mr Blobby” Davey. He’s an electoral liability. The inner sanctum of the Labour Party (read: Blair and Co) must be concerned - already - that he would not be a safe bet in a competitive election. Whatever the benefit of the message of “stability”, there must, a handful of days into his premiership, be a good chance that he will not fight the next election as Prime Minister.
Well, he surpassed my expectations at the first test. From his wooden, near-inhuman initial visit to Southport, through his initial failure even to hold call COBRA, to his rumoured holiday, it was a comms disaster. Neither did we have the usual “Don’t Look Back in Anger” co-ordinated response; the “controlled spontaneity” which we know the government has up its sleeve to deflect public opinion in the aftermath of incidents such as this. And although this incident was not (or is not being treated as) a terrorist one, it was obvious that public rage would be high. Remember that the 2023 Nottingham attacks where immigrant Valdo Calocane killed three (including two students) received the controlled spontaneity treatment, and the murder of young girls was bound to enrage the public more. Terrorism can’t explain the failure.
Neither can we put it down to the new government. The reality is that the interview-monkeys who are cabinet ministers are very much a second thought when it comes to the real workings of the state, from the cabinet office down through the relevant departments (well described by Dominic Cummings on many occasions, most recently here.)
After ten days, the narrative machine clunked into gear with a vengeance. The “counter-protests” on the evening of 7 August generated the perfect headlines for the papers the following morning, with a matching of messaging “across the political spectrum” in a manner reminiscent of the Covid years. It is, of course, questionable how organic these counter-protests were given that they took place against a list of targets circulated beforehand; and never materialised. Even the head of Hope Not Hate boasted that this was a “hoax” (though he has since attempted to row this back).
We have become used to thinking of there being a competency crisis throughout the organs of the state, driven by (inter alia) corrosive diversity hiring, declining educational standards, and generalised institutional entropy. These things are real, and all too observable throughout the country, from our potholed streets to Our Beloved NHS.
But this masks a deeper reality. Out potholes are unfixed, but 5G masts and fibre cables march on. Nobody who has lived through the Covid years can believe that the state is not capable of behaving with a high level of effectiveness, when it wants. From the “nudges” of SPI-B to the mass vaccination programme, the state proved all too efficient, even down to distracting us from the fact with the narrative that it was chaotic and late, spun by media ever since and prevalent at the Covid inquiry. We should also note that Covid offered a great chance to stuff some budgets as well as line the pockets of the well-connected; do you really believe that the £37 billion (yes, billion) Test and Trace programme was just spent on a basic app and dodgy lateral flow tests?
We must consider the possibility that the week-long riots were actually allowed by the state (if not actively enabled). Remember, police are happy to ban protests when they want, and it has happened in some places during the current round, including Bradford and Carlisle.
We can all come up with a list of the possible reasons for this: gathering intelligence on members of the “far-right”; manufacturing a pretext for clampdowns on communications and leverage over social media firms (in particular X/Twitter); normalising the use of facial recognition technology; even our our friend digital ID.
All are valid, potentially. But another, deeper explanation may lie in the changing nature of how “community relations” (regime-speak for ethnic tensions) are managed.
Managing away from Michaela Multiculturism
I have written before about what I call Michaela Multiculturism1, and I shall quote again the founder of the free school, “Britain’s Strictest Headmistress” Katherine Birbalsingh:
At Michaela, those from all religions make sacrifices so that we can maintain a safe secular community. Some Jehovah’s Witness families have objected to Macbeth as a set GCSE text. Some Christian families have asked that we do not hold our GCSE revision sessions on a Sunday. Some Hindu families have objected to dinner plated touching eggs. And our Muslim families have signed up to the school knowing that we do not have a prayer room. We all eat vegetarian food so that we can break bread together a lunch where children are not divided according to race or religion. We all make sacrifices so that we can live in harmony.
This has been the model we have lived with over recent decades, instigated (like so many liberal ideas) by Roy Jenkins in 1968.
There are three broad models of managing community relations, and each has its own logic, dependent on the level of immigrants in society:
Integration: at low levels of immigration, incomers are expected to integrate into the host society. They may keep their traditions alive in private settings: the family and religious establishments or social clubs; but they are expected to conform to societal expectations more generally, and the wider society does not make any particular efforts to alter its institutions or behaviours for them. Immigrants, particularly those from close cultures and similar races, may essentially assimilate in as little as a generation or two.
Multiculturalism: as immigration grows, separate communities are retained. This is the “melting pot”: whilst not living in absolute “ghettos”, there are identifiable areas where communities congregate: think Little Italy or Chinatown in New York. But, communities still mix: for example schooling (state schooling at least) in undertaken together. This brings costs, as Birbalsingh enunciated above; inevitably, these are borne more by the native population. Laws are codified in favour of the minority groups, but the law is still universal. Yet there is still a national myth to which all groups are expected to adhere: “British Values”, “The American Dream.”
Milletisation: (“Millets” was the name given to the separate “nations” of the Ottoman Empire.) Communities now run themselves as separate entities within a wider polity, with a leader (or leaders) given autonomy to run their own internal affairs, so long as these do not directly counter the interests of the state. Schooling is separate, and different legal systems may apply internally. Pretence at race or religious equality may be abandoned, and different jobs or industries may be segregated, or protected. Customary laws (over dress, or acts like the ability to carry weapons) may apply. Intermarriage stops. The communities are not held together any longer by the “soft” idea of a national myth, but rather the “hard” means of elite law - which is ultimately comes down to power.
(Of course, the particular historical dynamics of how this comes about will be very different between the Ottoman case of conquest, and the mass immigration we see across the West.)
The important point here is that, each model is the stable way of managing community relations at different levels. The cut-off point is not hard and fast, but the logic is inescapable. It makes no more sense to run integration at our level of immigration than it would have done to operate millets in the Britain of the 1950s, as the first generation of Commonwealth immigrants dripped in.
1968 was the turning point for the first change - and the year of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech.
I contend we are moving towards a second inflexion point. We all know how the scale and nature of the influx of immigrants over the last years. We may look back on the 2024 riots and their aftermath of issuing it in, as iconic as Enoch.
The future as Ulster
Of course, there is one part of the United Kingdom that has operated on something like the millet system for a century, albeit with just two communities.
In terms of how the current riots are managed through “community leaders”, this report is illustrative:
During the flag protests senior officers often met with leading loyalists.
However, no one in any position of influence has been able to curb the violence in south Belfast.
The UDA2 in Sandy Row, which is orchestrating much of the disorder, has split from the mainstream leadership and has rejected calls for calm.
A veteran UDA member was seen in the area on Saturday evening, but was “chased” by local loyalists.
The UVF3 has said it is not involved in the protests and won’t be working with police.
It is clear that police relations are currently breaking down; why and how is another matter. It is possible that the unprecedented “ceasefire” between Catholics and Protestants has changed the dynamics of how the PSNI are interact with the communities. Perhaps the Northern Irish subset of the state has been caught off-guard; perhaps the central UK government did not expect the Southport murders to resonate in the same way in a province with a different history.
What is notable, though, is that the entrenched hierarchies on both sides of the sectarian divide have managed to cause more trouble for the police than has happened in England, and at a lower “cost” in terms of arrests. Organisation matters.
Despite the current situation, we should note that the British state has an unparalleled experience amongst western, advanced countries of managing different millets (perhaps the closest is Spain with Basque separatists). The Troubles were bloody, and barely contained, but consider the context: the IRA had serious paramilitary capabilities, the tacit support of a neighbour whose border could never be more than fluid, money and political cover from the most powerful state in the world, and dark links elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Loyalists inherited the structure of the Ulster Volunteers who had very nearly brought civil war in 1914, but for events on the continent (there was the real prospect of an elite fracture, probably for the last time in British history).
The institutional memory of this remains both within the security services and the Army. And the deployments in both Iraq and Afghanistan for long periods by the latter were in situations of ethnic and religious tensions.
It is also interesting to note that the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Sue Gray, has strong Irish links (and comes from an Irish family), and has even had to deny being a spy from the time she took a “career break” from the civil service to run a pub ( the Cove) on the border of the Republic:
We do know, though, that Gray's English provenance came close to landing her in a tricky situation on at least one occasion during her time at the Cove.
This was when she was confronted by Republican paramilitaries while driving alone at night on a nearby country road.
A friend told reporters last year how Gray was forced to stop her car at a 'checkpoint' which was run by balaclava-clad terrorists. 'One night she had a very heavy cold and one of her staff wanted to get off early, and she closed the bar,' said the friend.
'She drove the person home and was returning from South Armagh. She came across a light in the middle of the road and was ordered to stop.
'She thought initially it was the Army and didn't realise the guy was a paramilitary. He said to her: "We want the car, get out."
'And she just bluntly refused and said: "No."
'Taken aback, he said: "What?" And then he said to her: "Oh, you're f***ing English as well?"
'Just as the situation looked set to escalate, a voice came out of the darkness and said: "That's Sue from the Cove, let her go on."4
What was her role? Is this coincidence? Or is her experience needed?
Whatever else, the formation of “Muslim Defence Leagues” to “protect mosques” appears like an embryonic analogue to sectarian groups in the province. How the still-majority White British population will be managed as community relations change is an open question - including whether this will involve fragmenting over (broadly) class/geography lines (the “Red Wall North” and the Liberal Home Counties).
We are at an early stage of the process, and much is unclear. And in order to get there, much more “two-tier” policing (and politics) will feature.
A term which appears to have caught on, even to the point of plagiarism. You know who you are.
The Ulster Defence Association, the most militant paramilitary loyalist group.
The Ulster Volunteer Force, a more “moderate” paramilitary group which declared a ceasefire in 1994 and officially ended its campaign in 2007.