Elon Musk is wrong about UK 'civil war' - but new immigration controls are needed to stop future riots: Bill Carmichael

For the violent protests to turn into civil war would require the insurrectionists to have some semblance of a coherent political ideology, and I see little sign of that. Sure, there is evidence of some extreme right wing figures manipulating the crowds through social media.

But the vast majority on the streets are opportunistic common criminals who are happy to use the chaos to loot some vape shops and throw bricks at the police. If they weren’t attacking the local mosque, they would be in a drunken brawl outside the pub.

But the warning signs are definitely there, and if our current political masters do not learn the lessons about the root causes of the current conflict we will be in for a very rocky few years.

The heart of the problem is the determination by our political elites to impose a policy of mass immigration and open borders on an unconsenting public, thereby causing the biggest and most dramatic demographic changes in British modern history.

It is not difficult to understand why the ruling class has pursued this policy with such reckless abandon, and in the teeth of clear opposition from the majority of the public. Cheap labour is good for business. And the wealthy can enjoy the services of foreign-born nannies, plumbers, cleaners and gardeners on poverty wages.

But the impact on working people, particularly the very poorest, has been little short of calamitous. Wages at the lower end have been viciously suppressed, and there is increased competition for scarce resources such as doctors’ appointments, school places and social housing.

As a result many have seen their neighbourhoods change beyond recognition, with increased crime and terrorism, less social cohesion, and a sharp decline in the provision of public services and standard of living - particularly in the last 20 years.

There are millions of law-abiding people in this country, who wouldn’t dream for a second of rioting in the streets, who have entirely legitimate concerns about the level of immigration. Surveys show they are the most welcoming people to newcomers in the whole of Europe. They don’t want to stop immigration entirely, and they don’t want to “send back” people who are already settled here. And they don’t care about the race, religion, or colour of the skin of their new neighbours.

They simply want our elected politicians to carry out one of the basic functions of government - to exercise some level of control over our borders and to keep us safe.

Yet if they raise even the most modest concerns, they are inevitably howled down and smeared as racists, Nazis and bigots by the sort of comfortably off people who shout the virtues of multiculturalism loudest (while invariably living in the whitest areas of the country).

And am I alone in detecting a distinct whiff of classism when Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper talk with such glee about the ruthless punishments they intend to impose on wrongdoers? I get a very strong sense of the hatred and fear of the working class expressed by Labour’s bourgeoisie, and it just goes to show how far the party has moved away from its traditional supporters.

Incidentally, Sir Keir was not always so fiercely critical of rioters. Back in 2020, just days after a mob had besieged Downing Street, tearing down fencing and pelting police with missiles, the Labour leader, and his deputy, Angela Rayner, “took the knee” to show fealty to the Black Lives Matter movement (as indeed did the police!).

Not all “violent, lawless thugs” are to be treated in quite the same way, it would seem.

But despite the public constantly asking for tighter border controls, the opposite has happened, with rocket boosters placed under both illegal and legal migration.

Labour, which has opposed every measure to control immigration, immediately dropped the Conservative’s Rwanda plan when it came into office to replace it with … absolutely nothing, other than granting 90,000 asylum seekers awaiting assessment the automatic right to remain.

Carry on down this road and there will be plenty more riots in the future. If you want to destroy the far right, you have to get control of immigration.