The UK is still reeling from the murder of Henry Nowak, the eighteen-year-old stabbed in Southampton in December and handcuffed by police as he lay dying, after his attacker falsely claimed Henry had racially abused him. The bodycam footage was released and it became the only story anyone talked about when I was in London last week. And with good reason. The police response was nothing short of atrocious.
Then on Monday night in Belfast, a man was attacked in the street with a knife, allegedly by a Sudanese refugee. By Tuesday, hundreds of masked men were torching houses, a bus, and a Middle Eastern supermarket. The scenes are scary as hell. Thankfully, as I write this, it looks like day three has largely gone without incident. Let’s hope the worse is behind us.
Among the people targeted in Belfast were immigrants who arrived legally and who spend their days caring for other people’s parents in seniors’ homes and working shifts in the health service. They were attacked for being visible. There is a word for that, and it isn’t “protest.” It’s nothing short of despicable.
But there is a reason why we're looking at this and wondering why the UK appears to be a tinderbox. The anger driving British politics right now is not invented. As Andrew points out on this week’s show, Voters have delivered verdict after verdict on immigration at the ballot box, and governments of both parties have ignored them. The asylum system is failing: people genuinely can see it failing, in hotels and high streets, in a way that makes official denial feel like an insult. Andrew made the point on the show that some of the most effective protesters against the migrant hotels in Epping were middle-class residents, some of them immigrants themselves, who were careful, articulate, and entirely peaceful.
The thugs are now those people’s biggest liability. Every burned-out house in Belfast makes it easier to dismiss every legitimate critic of the asylum system as a racist adjacent to arson. Every masked man with a sledgehammer hands ammunition to the people who wanted the debate shut down anyway. The conversation splits in two opposing, polarized, hateful extremes.
That said, I think voters can tell the difference.
At least, if we believe the Number of the Week. Opinium asked Britons to rate each leader’s handling of the Nowak case, and Nigel Farage, whose party leads every national poll, came out worst of any senior leader: negative six.
Kemi Badenoch, who called out both the opportunists and the government, sits at plus twelve. Seriousness, it turns out, still polls well.
But the punishment doesn’t only flow toward the opportunists.
When Keir Starmer said a year ago that he didn’t want Britain to become an “island of strangers,” he was saying something a large majority of his country quietly agreed with. His own side compared him to Enoch Powell, and he apologized for it. The lesson every politician took from that episode is the same one Andrew internalized before his CBC hit yesterday: say nothing, or check first. And when reasonable people go quiet on an issue voters rank near the top of their concerns, the only people left talking are the ones seeking to propagate fear and hatred.
Watching from Canada, it’s tempting to feel superior. We shouldn’t. A majority of Canadians now say immigration levels are too high. The difference, so far, is that our pressure has been routed through Parliament rather than the streets. Perhaps that’s the system working. Or maybe we got geographically lucky; nobody arrives in Canada by dinghy. Our debate has not yet been stress-tested by a Southampton, or by the bodycam video that follows one.
We get into all of it on this week’s episode — the riots, the polling, and why Canada hasn’t burned the same way.
Craft Politics is a Canada-U.K. cross-border political podcast co-hosted by Joseph Lavoie (former senior advisor in a Canadian Prime Minister’s Office) and Andrew Percy (former UK Conservative MP). You can subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
