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Notes -
Sunderland, UK, is on fire.
It appears a tipping point has been reached; protests are seemingly erupting all over the UK right now in response to the stabbing of three young children. Ordinarily a sadly unremarkable happening, this incident was exacerbated by the authorities refusing to release any details about the attacker other than being "from Cardiff", which did not placate the mob, as media sources routinely use this kind of languages to elide criminals' real origins (saying things like "Mahmood Suleiman of Bristol", later turns out that he's a boat migrant from Albania currently being housed in Bristol), leading certain corners to pattern-match to previous instances of such attacks and conclude the killer was a boat migrant and the media and authorities were covering it up.
This narrative spread quickly in the wake of no other information being released, for which the excuse was that the killer was under-age and so no detail could be released. Internet detectives soon managed to piece together the identity regardless, that being Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, son of two Rwandan parents but nonetheless actually born in Cardiff.
Left-wing sides of the argument immediately went into crowing mode, seemingly elated that the killer was "British", to which the pithy right-wing response came that "a dog born in a stable is not a horse" and that this crime was still preventable if his parents had simply not been allowed to migrate.
Regardless, the protests were now in full swing. A vigil was held, and things got out of hand, with one man being arrested for bringing a knife and balaclava. The simmering tensions of the backdrop of mass migration seem to have come to a head, as a group gathered to damage an unrelated mosque and a police building. This is possibly a response to the boat migrant theory being spread like wildfire as the authorities refused to release any correct information, and possibly in part just a release valve for long-pent up tensions.
Government response was immediate condemnation of the protesters from all and sundry, pledges to set up specialised task forces to deal with "far right extremism" and deployment of riot police to quell the unrest. This only sparked further anger as people contrasted the response to the very recent Harehills riots in which a Roma community revolted over the removal of children from the house of negligent parents. Response on that occasion was the police in full retreat and the later total capitulation of the state in handing back the children in question. Others still remember now-PM Kier Starmer's response to the BLM riots of 2020, in which he knelt in supplication to the rioters and pledged fealty to their cause.
This has earned him the moniker of "Two-Tier Kier", with many calling out that a two tier justice system exists in the country; when minorities riot over facing justice, the state bends over backwards to appease them, but when native whites riot over the stabbing of children, the full force of the state comes out to crush them. As such, more protests have erupted across the country over this double standard, the most notable of which is Sunderland, where people attempted to torch a police station.
Further protests have been stated to be planned all week. PM Starmer has scrambled all police manpower available to suppress them, it seems, with the Home Office issuing a stern warning in the media that "we're watching you". The usual ancillary conversations about "Russian disinformation" being the cause are happening, and the Muslim Council of Great Britain has stated "law and order isn't enough to deal with Islamophobic hate" in response to the mosque attack.
This is almost entirely* the product of the past 5-10 years of the handling by the government/media alliance of every altercation between groups perceived to be white and groups perceived to be non-white or oppressed, most notably the Manchester Arena bombing where the government was more afraid of blowback against protected communites and threats to the status quo than they were about the fact that 23 people had just been murdered by a suicide bomber.
It doesn't actually matter that the suspect doesn't yet conform to the theist boat person stereotype. What matters is that enough people do not see this person as part of their ingroup and resent the fact this person has been brought into their country either to inflate the GDP graph or serve some impossible kumbayist phantasm of human unity. It is endlessly amusing to me that many left of centre commentators and politicans are citing the return of the EDL as the cause of this. The EDL is dead and has been for about a decade at this point. To me, this unrest is more remeniscient of the protests in Ireland around migrant housing that flare up whenever one of the occupants commits a crime.
*The remaining product is the fact it was 28-30 degrees here for most of this week and quite warm in the past few weeks, when the country only really functions at around 5-20 degrees and beyond that things start to break down.
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