Rachel Marsden – RT.com Aug 6, 2024

Every summer now, Canada is rife with forest fires. Some exploit the disasters to push an agenda, arguing that it’s a surefire sign of climate change, and ignoring that a lack of environmentally inconvenient controlled burns are the actual culprit. The same could be said for the riots that have swept Britain since three children were murdered in Southport at a day camp by a British 17-year old of Rwandan origin.

The British government has long known that the migration issue was out of control, and newly-elected Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has found the culprit. It’s the “far-right” Brits that are “targeting” Muslim and “other minority communities.” Because who, en route to doing a little shopping in Mayfair, isn’t tired of passing their “Nazi salutes in the street” as they stretch their arms in between putting beatdowns on cops, as Starmer suggests.

The “far-right” is to these riots what “climate change” is to forest fires: a politically useful pretext to deflect from the long-festering negligence of the political class.

It’s not like the average Brit is buying Starmer’s gaslighting. In fact, Starmer himself owes his recent electoral win to the growing popularity of the right wing, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party significantly eating into the popular vote of the center-right Tories last month. These are voters who feel that Rishi Sunak’s Tories didn’t go far enough in an election where “immigration and asylum” was the second most important issue for voters, (after cost of living), according to a YouGov poll. When nearly a fifth of your population has just finished telling pollsters that the immigration issue dictates their vote, it’s probably a dumb idea to get up in front of them and suggest that the real problem is those who are just imagining that to be an actual issue, because they’re a bunch of racists.

It probably doesn’t help that the Brit accused in this particular attack is of Rwandan origin, when Rwanda has been all over the UK headlines for former Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s plan to deport asylum seekers there – an initiative that Starmer has now cancelled. Much has been made in the Western press of all the erroneous allegations flying around in the initial wake of the attack suggesting that the alleged perpetrator was an asylum seeker himself. The fog of war always comes on thick around breaking news, particularly online. But what’s the actual argument here? That the guy’s not actually a migrant himself so people should calm down? Everything’s just fine then, because this one single case, upon closer inspection, doesn’t actually tick the boxes for what the establishment considers to be a legitimate expression of anger?

Also complicating the issue is the fact that Southport itself has long been described by locals as a festering cesspool of crime, drugs, and violence, where teenagers seem to be out of control. The High Parkers drug gang that has plagued the area doesn’t seem to have a visible minority in sight among their mugshots, but various things can be true at the same time without being mutually exclusive. Southport clearly has a long-documented crime problem. The crime isn’t exclusively committed by minorities. The suspect is of minority origin in this case. The UK has a migration problem that transcends this single incident, but which it has clearly served to catalyze. And not everyone who’s evoking the problem within the convenient context this incident provides is just a racist yob.

While every protest or riot is an opportunity for special interests to exploit, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t also legitimate underlying issues in desperate need of resolution. How hard would it have been for Starmer to acknowledge all of these realities instead of just whitewashing everything by trying to make people believe that there’s no actual problem anywhere here beyond the “far-right”?

The actual science would like to have a word. According to data from University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory published in June 2024, “net migration was unusually high in 2023, at 685,000, driven by an increase in non-EU citizens coming to the UK” which was “far above pre-pandemic estimates of 200,000 and 300,000.” The researchers underscored that the government data “tells us little about who is arriving and leaving or what their impacts are.” It looks like that’s left to the locals to experience and perceive, and for politicians like Starmer to conveniently manipulate.

Oxford also reports that the number of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats was about 12,600 in the early part of this year, 16% higher than during the same period in 2023, with the vast majority being from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, and Albania. Just how horribly bad is the British government at controlling the situation? Worse than the African country they tried to outsource it to. “Citizens of Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen all had a 0% success rate in claims processed by Rwanda from 2020 to 2022. By contrast, in the UK in the same period, the success rates were 74% for Afghans, 98% for Syrians, and 40% for Yemenis,” according to Oxford.

Officials were caught out by the British press last year plotting to send Channel migrants to Ascension Island if they weren’t going to be allowed to dump them on Rwanda. We’re talking about one of the most isolated places in the world – a British overseas territory that’s part of the same set of Islands where the Brits exiled French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte so he couldn’t plot a comeback after losing the Battle of Waterloo. Who needs cruise lines when you can just ditch your papers and have the UK government send you all around the globe courtesy of the British taxpayer?

It’s totally not a sign of bad policy when the UK runs out of affordable places to house migrants who make it across the Channel from France. They set up a barge called Bibby Stockholm off the coast of Dorset to house hundreds of migrants, from which they could travel back and forth to the shore and enjoy excursions and all kinds of activities, including sports. Not swimming, though. NGOs like Care4Calais have blocked migrant transfers to the barge, claiming that it’s inhumane because some migrants don’t want anything to do with water or boats because they’ve seen people drown on the boat ride over. One Tory MP said they could just “eff off back to France.” Maybe they did! A “Refugee Olympic Team” was recently spotted floating up the Seine during the Paris Olympic Ceremony. Or maybe France is just sending them back again.

Joking aside, the establishment politicians pretend to be open and welcoming to migrants as a means of differentiating themselves from the far-right populists they’ve taken to blaming for everything, but at the same time, they know the general public is getting fed up. So what’s the solution? Just call the entire public far-right populists, apparently.

Finding other countries to serve as a giant rug under which to sweep the result of your bad policies seems like a pretty strong clue that things are totally out of control. The latest riots are yet another symptom of that, and like a Canadian forest fire, maybe everything has to burn for the establishment to actually wake up. But likely not before they try throwing the water everywhere else but on the actual flame, and use it all as a pretext to roll out the kind of security state that’s typically attributed to that pesky ‘far-right’.

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Rachel Marsden is a media professional with over two decades of expertise in international politics. Her extensive career includes multilingual hosting, presenting, producing, and debating across TV, radio, and digital platforms. She has been an internationally syndicated columnist since 2011, contributing to over 100 major newspaper outlets globally. Rachel has also taught in the Masters of Journalism and international affairs program at Sciences Po in Paris, France.

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