Britain on fire

It’s a scary time! The news is full of right wing mobs who are attacking mosques and hotels, and arbitrary businesses run by muslims. It is clear the mobs only needed an excuse.

I suppose everyone knows what's going on, but for that exception who doesn't know what I'm talking about: on July 29th, there was an event in Southport where little kids (mostly girls) were dancing to music by Taylor Swift. For unknown reasons, a 17-year-old boy walked in with a knife and randomly started killing children. He also stabbed any adults who tried to stop him. Three girls are dead; one is, at the time of writing, still in hospital; and quite a number are recovering at home.

It seems that rumours started circulating quickly that this was a Muslim small boat refugee. It totally wasn't! This boy was Born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents, and doesn't seem to be a Muslim at all, as most Rwandans aren't. But that didn't stop the hooligans who quickly started riots on the streets. And we are a week later now, and these riots are still going on. And everybody knows what the situation is by now, and that this was just one British-born individual doing awful things, but the hooligans don’t seem to care. They are still targeting non-white people and refugees and Muslims, and probably preferably people who are all that at the same time.

Imagine having fled war and persecution, and then ending up in some Holiday Inn or something like that, with a 700 strong mob outside who are smashing the windows, setting the building on fire, et cetera! Miraculously, it seems that in that incident, nobody in the building got hurt. But imagine the terror.

Violent racism must have been so close to the surface! This country is in a deplorable state. I suppose the Tories have spent well over a decade kicking a lot of people in the teeth. And the electorate has started to peacefully kick back, but one election doesn't undo many years of austerity and mismanagement. And now there are mobs out there looking for scapegoats.

There was a lady on the radio who couldn't get a dentist appointment, and who was frustrated that there were asylum seekers housed in hotels. She wanted public services for the likes of herself before she would be happy with money being spent on people she identified as strangers. So she didn’t condone that violent towards the asylum seekers, but she understood why people were angry. I suppose that's easier than being angry at politicians who have let the backlog build up so much that anyone seeking asylum here has to wait years for an outcome. And while you wait you can't work, and when you can't work you can't sort out your own accommodation. And most countries do manage to sort out sufficient dentistry for their population. Why can't the Brits? 

I'm not saying no one is thinking about the little girls anymore, and their families, but it is clear that there are scarily large numbers of people who indeed don't. And just want to create more pain.

The genie is well out of the bottle now. I think the Tories are quite smug about it. Let the Labour Government sort out the mess! Let them become unpopular due to disturbances of public order, while the seeds were sown by the previous governments. And I'm sure the genie will be put back, how much damage will be done by the time that happens? Time will tell…