An X reply to forum favourite Matt Stadlen, I agree with every word
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@MatthewStadlen
, nobody seriously condones the burning of homes or violence against innocent people. That has been said clearly and repeatedly. Peaceful mass non-compliance, sustained public anger expressed through votes, through civic pressure, through the kind of informed public argument that refuses to be silenced, would be far more effective and far more legitimate than disorder. That is the argument worth making.
What you deliberately fail to address is why we are here. This didn't happen because of social media. If anything social media has given a voice to millions who were ignored, dismissed and labelled by the very people supposed to be representing them. For thirty years the political and media class controlled the terms of the debate. They decided what could be said, who could say it and what label would be applied to anyone who said the wrong thing. Social media broke that monopoly. The anger you are now describing as dangerous was always there. It was simply not permitted a platform until now.
Britain was forged over a millennium. Out of invasion and resistance, reformation and revolution, industrial genius and imperial reach, two world wars and the stubborn refusal to be broken. The people who built that country, who dug its coal, staffed its factories, fought its wars and buried its dead, were never consulted about the transformation of their communities at a speed and scale that their own government now admits was too much, too quickly. When they objected they were called racist. When they persisted they were called far right. When they voted for parties that reflected their concern those parties were dismissed as extremist.
The working class communities now erupting with anger are not doing so because of a website. They are doing so because their concerns were ignored for thirty years by people like you, who had the platforms, the education and the proximity to power to raise these questions honestly and chose instead to brand those raising them as bigots. The road to perdition was not paved by the people of Belfast. It was paved by the political and media class that substituted mass migration for economic reform, celebrated the transformation as diversity, prosecuted those who questioned it as racists, and is now, as the consequences arrive, reaching for the same tired accusation one more time.
You are not describing a backward ideology. You are describing the consequence of your own class's choices. The difference is that the people in those streets have to live with those consequences. You do not.
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