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It's all kicking off in Merseyside. Big protest against the UK government's ongoing policy of housing groups of unknown and unvetted asylum claimants who have illegally crossed the channel and are attempting to stay here, in hotels, at the taxpayer's expense. The inciting incident being passed around social media appears to be this. Reports include that a police van has been torched as attendees accuse police of "protecting the nonces".
As you might guess, it is unlikely that these events will be described as "fiery, but mostly peaceful". Several publications such as the Guardian have already gone for calling all in attendance far-right. Accusations are flying that protesters were bussed in from elsewhere because the famously bloc-left voting Merseyside would never do this. Some are remarking that this was organised by people passing out flyers in the days beforehand, and that this should make it a premeditated riot. Opinions are split exactly as you'd expect along culture war lines.
I can only see this sort of thing getting hotter and hotter as time goes on. There's a large contingent of the country who quite simply don't want the migrants here, and reports like the tweet above turn off even more. But the state -- controlled by people calling themselves the Conservative Party -- seems to have no interest in closing the floodgates (they make noise, but no more than that). No solution is in sight, as far as those concerned can see. So I really don't see how this is to be defused at all.
Reminds me of the protests in Ireland. I suspect both will fail for a similar reason: street reactions to Twitter videos have clear limits of how far they can change matters. Policy is changed in the halls of power, ultimately. Though, the issue of "street power" is interesting to ponder. I've been following the Israeli debate on trying to enlist Haredi men into the army and every single government has failed because they managed to bring about huge numbers of people to the streets every single time. So perhaps if this was sustained, there could be a way to change policy indirectly. I don't know.
Either way, the government does try to be tough. The Economist has a piece about it. Predictably, The Economist's solution to the boat asylum issue is to speed up offshore processing. That would actually increase the amount of asylum seekers in the UK, the paper acknowledges, but it would also mean fewer boats. (The paper thinks the main issue is one of optics rather than volumes, but that probably speaks to their own delusion).
So what has the government done? It tried to enlist the help of Rwanda to send failed asylum seekers. The problem is that the Rwandan government only wants a few hundreds. There's talk of quitting the EHCR, which is a Europe-wide human rights court that often makes it hard to deport failed asylum seekers without several re-trails, at which many simply go underground and authorities lose touch with them. 800K people in the UK are thought to be living illegally and the number is growing.
Last year, Britain received 45,000 asylum seekers and the current projections is that this figure will rise to 65,000 this year. It's worth pointing out that Sweden received over 100K in 2015, so on a per capita basis, the UK is definitely not in a "crisis" even at this numbers. But the UK has historically had low levels of asylum seekers compared to the Scandinavians and some mainland European countries, so this situation is new.
I'm frankly not sure if there's any real solution (that is democratic and passes the basic threshold for decency). The problem is that the Third World is not doing well. Pakistan is on the verge of bankruptcy yet has 230 million people. It has a TFR well above 3. Egypt is barely doing better. Nigeria is holding on for the moment but the future looks uncertain. In the 1950s, these countries had much smaller populations and air travel was expensive. Today you have large and growing diaspora populations and smartphones are common even in poor countries, so people know how it is possible to live in the West. In short, there are structural reasons for these waves to continue. Not just to Europe but also to the US. Europe's geographic connectivity with MENA, SSA and to some extent South Asia means that pressures will be greater on Europe. I suspect this will lead to increasing political divergence with the US over the long-term as the far-right will gain ground (just look at the latest polls out of Germany or Austria).
It should be said that this does not inherently mean a failure to stem immigration. Russia has a huge land border but AFAIK doesn't have a meaningful illegal immigrant problem. Guessing the reasons for that are left as an exercise to the reader.
But Russia does have a large problem with illegal immigration, mostly from the Stans. It’s true that the Syrian refugees mostly didn’t go to Russia, but that’s because Russia is mostly a shithole and you would choose to live in Germany too.
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