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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.
I'm not familiar enough with the state of it all to opine, but if someone were to steelman the opposite position -- that there is no two-tier policing and the UK authorities and police treat everyone fairly -- what would it be?
Does it require a context wherein a certain response to BLM type or Indo-Paki protests are justified to receive tacit support, but things like anti-vax/anti-lockdown/anti-mask protests do not? Rotherham grooming gangs is sufficiently dated to where a steelman may not necessarily need to address it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are more recent examples that a Brits would point to. What is the evidence that UK authorities do not treat the benefactors and subjects of the migrant friendly, multiculturalist policies more kindly than they do their own native citizens? Or would the argument be that they are justified in doing so to avoid, well, I would have thought they'd say they do so to avoid conflict like this.
Looking it up 3/4 of migrants that they detain file some legal dispute and the UK deports around 5,000 foreign criminals a year.
Say what you will about the Bri'ish Isles, but UK government reports seem so much higher quality than stuff America puts out. That second link is nicely packed with information. Especially the part where they explain EU human rights commissions fudge up "deport first, appeal later" policy where they kicked people out before hearing out their disputes. Just what exactly did Brexit do for the UK in this regard? Anything? As an aside, opening up your nice Western legal system to the world continues to appear untenable. Where can I invest in human rights law firms?
Whether those numbers are a lot or a little does little to quell concerns about importing tragedy. Anyone knowledgeable enough and feeling steel manny enough to explain why this is just a common nativist rage, the UK government deals with these issues handedly, or alternative angles? From this side of the ocean it does seem like this is a long time coming.
EDIT: Thinking about it, if they're deporting about half the number of "foreign offenders" that they keep in jail, that seems like a significant amount. Although this doesn't engage with the fact that foreign criminals become classified as native ones in a quick 15 years, stuff like the criminality of 2nd generation immigrant citizens, and so on.
The steelman to there being no two-tier policing is that the difference in police response to different demographics is motivated not by racism, but instead by a desire to prevent escalation to violence. The police know that if they break up a BLM riot, the next day half of London will be aflame, so they don't touch it. But milquetoast anti-lockdown protesters, who are maybe protesting for the first time in their life? There's no risk to baton charging them, so they get baton charged. Repeat for Hamas vs Israeli marches. If they start arresting tens of thousands of Islamists for terrorism offences, as the letter of the law would demand, they'd face retaliatory terror attacks. Peaceful Jewish counter-protesters might similarly provoke the violent Islamists, however, and need to be stopped.
This steelman is the mainstream response to arguments of two-tier policing (when not simply ignored). The police are biased because they're pragmatic, rather than because they are racist or serving as the paramilitary wing of the Labour party.
It has two problems
Yeah, my gut says we're failing the Turing test. That reads too closely to online doomer well-of-course-the-whites-won't-revolt rage thinking. A person that thinks that nativist uprisings in this context are completely unjustified isn't going to defend their position with a through-and-through justification of the lopsided enforcement. Maybe they do, but if they're a dedicated pragmatist, then surely they can see the inherently impractical nature in failing to sufficiently placate the majority native population? All you have to do is demonstrate that the majority is sufficiently cared for and protected from [bad people]. It doesn't take much to Set Examples for said population. If there were enough examples to support a policy choice they'd be easy to point to?
It may be the case that the authorities deliberately decided it was safer to align against the majority to some extent, but I'm struggling to think of alternatives explanations that aren't ideological. If it's been a misjudgment of pragmatic policy (less strife and chance of ethnic misgivings if we stack the deck this way) that'd be one thing, but it's ended up so predictably wrong I don't know how you can really say it was a practical policy choice at all. UK decided to do this in 2005 when all was nice enough and inertia carried it through 20 years I guess?
You are right, but you asked for the Steelman argument. That isn't the political turing test argument for it, which is that two-tier policing in any form doesn't exist.
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