God, how depressing. According to a survey by WeThink, carried out in the wake of the recent unrest, 39 per cent of us (excluding the don’t knows) believe that “When it comes to the refugee problem, violence is sometimes the only means that citizens have to get the attention of British politicians”.
We used to be known throughout the world as an orderly country, a country whose police went unarmed. However much we disagreed with our politicians, we understood that mobs were not an alternative to the ballot box. What Orwell called “the gentleness of English civilisation” rested, not on the passivity of its people who, on the contrary, were capable of unusual violence, but on institutional structures that channelled that violence away from politics.
Indeed, one of the arguments against excessive immigration was precisely that it would undo the high levels of social capital that can flourish in a homogenous society.
But immigration is not the only destabilising factor. The spread of smartphones since 2012 has made us angrier, more impatient, and more credulous. We believe stories that put our opponents in the worst possible light, no longer pausing to consider whether those stories are plausible. Social media make a perfect habitat for hostile propagandists. There is some evidence that the claims that sparked the Southport riot began as Russian dezinformatsiya.
But the single biggest factor is the rise of partial policing. During the lockdown, I kept reminding ConHome readers of Hayek’s dictum that “laws must be general, equal, and certain”. Indulging BLM rioters while cracking down on anti-lockdown protests was bound to undermine respect for the system:
With each violation of the lockdown rules, the taboo against law-breaking buckles further. The police come to be seen, not as impartial upholders of the law, but as one more group with an agenda. And the worst of it is that there is no reason to expect these things to come to an end when the lockdown does.
Sure enough, here we are. A group of thugs, many of whom have strings of previous convictions, are being given stiff sentences. You might hope that conservatives would unequivocally favour locking up people who biff coppers or set fire to buildings. But the unevenness of policing, and a lingering sense that, democracy or no democracy, the anti-immigration views of the majority are scorned, has led to some alarming equivocation.
Karen Stenner, the Australian political scientist, carried out ground-breaking work into what makes some voters ready to demand policies that would normally be considered beyond the pale. To cut a long story short, she found that a subset of voters turned to extreme and authoritarian solutions when they believed their society faced a “normative threat” – in other words, a perceived danger to its way of life.
The lockdown, portrayed as a response to an existential menace, made a lot of voters more authoritarian. Immigration, when accompanied by demands that the non-immigrant population adjusts its way of life by, for example, modifying its attitudes to free speech, dress codes, or the role of women, can have the same effect, making voters who, in normal times, shun illiberal solutions, turn to extreme measures.
Where does this leave law-and-order Tories? Might some of them be in the 39 per cent who think that violence is the only way to be heard on the immigration question? I leave the answer to the NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In 2016, my favourite professor wrote:
Status quo conservatives are not natural allies of authoritarians, who often favour radical change and are willing to take big risks to implement untested policies. This is why nearly all conservative intellectuals oppose Donald Trump; he is simply not a conservative by the test of temperament or values. But status quo conservatives can be drawn into alliance with authoritarians when they perceive that progressives have subverted the country’s traditions and identity so badly that dramatic political actions (such as Brexit, or banning Muslim immigration to the United States) are seen as the only remaining way of yelling “Stop!”
Have we really reached the point where a rioter with 14 previous convictions can be given three years for punching a police officer, and the reaction of some on the Right is to think his sentence too harsh?
Shouldn’t the attitude of conservatives be that rioters, regardless of motive, deserve condign punishment? Be they BLM hooligans, eco-protesters, anti-immigrant thugs, or common criminals (and, as we see from the “previous” of many of those now being sentenced, these last two categories overlap), should we not want them to cool their heels in cells?
“Ah”, you say, “but it’s not that simple. In an ideal world, yes, we’d want every rioter nicked, but we are not in an ideal world. For example, the woman who destroyed the Balfour portrait in Cambridge has still not been arrested or charged. We need consistency.”
True. But if you called for the Balfour slasher to be prosecuted, if you wanted the Just Stop Oil loons taken off the streets, if you raged at the police when they dropped to their knees before BLM imbeciles, then you also need to be consistent. You should be applauding the police and the CPS, and demanding that they apply the same standard to the next lot of vandals, whether they claim to be motivated by anti-racism, climate change, Gaza, or anything else.
Let me end by quoting a 2018 essay for the American Institute for Economic Research by the world’s most engaging and under-rated historian, Steve Davies:
All groups will have within them some people whom we may describe as bigoted idiots. I am sure that we are all familiar with people of this kind, hostile to people different to themselves and ready and eager to employ violence against them. Normally, these people are checked: there are mechanisms that control them and prevent them from following their instincts and inclinations. In particular, the legal system imposes severe and exemplary penalties against them if they should do this. This leaves the rest of the populations who range from feeling mild dislike to positively friendly sentiments towards individuals from other groups to do what they want.
Sometimes however, for various reasons, this breaks down. The most important thing is when the overarching authority stops punishing bigoted idiots who commit violent acts. (The punishment does not have to be severe, the main point is that it is certain). At this point, things rapidly go to hell in a handcart. The bigoted idiots on all sides act according to their inclinations and commit various atrocities.
In other words, without general, equal, and certain laws, Southport can become Sarajevo. What should the rest of us do in such a situation?
The great majority must hold fast to a humane position, in personal relations or speech, and organizing among themselves, to counteract the rise of politicised bigotry in all its forms.
Quite. All conservatives used to know this in their bones. Have we forgotten it?