A Question

Riots Why?

Riots Why?

The UK has been plagued by riots this past week, which have included the destruction of properties local to the rioters, looting of businesses and men roaming the sceptered isle looking for anyone that fits the narrative of their “enemy”; there also doesn’t seem to be any sign of them stopping only increasing in frequency and aggression. So the question becomes what is behind these riots, what is driving them, and whether they can be stopped.

The failing legacy media those of the BBC, Sky, GBNews, and various newspapers like the Daily Mail, and The Sun would have you believe that they are centered around a tragedy that took place in the seaside town of Southport where three children lost their lives, with more being irreparably damaged both physically and psychologically. But is this accurate, it was certainly coincidental in timing and it fits the easy framing argued by the legacy media. I would argue that the riots have very little to do with the tragedy that took place and at best it could be opined that this was merely a “straw that broke the camel’s back” after years and years of resentment built up by a political system that no longer functions in the safety and wellbeing of its clients (us).

The first and perhaps the most important issue the legacy media wishes to ignore is one of inequality. Since 2007/8 during the financial crisis caused by thousands of bad home loans given in the US and here, there has been a gradual eroding of wealth from the many into the hands of the few. We can look at multiple indicators surrounding this to give us an idea of how between 2007/8 to the end of 2019 the UK experienced a slow, but massive transfer of wealth. First, we can look at GDP per capita, a far better indicator of overall health than general GDP which is allowed to include loans given to the UK government as part of its total. In 2000 the UK saw massive growth in GDP per capita increasing from £27,539 up to 2007 £31,493 and then to £33,271 in 2023¹, this trend tells us that people in the UK were experiencing increases in household disposable income, leading them to enjoy “luxuries” like more frequent dining out, cinema visits, the boom in gym memberships, take out coffees from higher-end establishments. So therefore wages should have conversely increased in volume, but the numbers show a different story. With the exception of approx 4 years since 2007 wage growth has at best stagnated, at worst declined backwards².

So if the UK is increasing GDP growth per capita where has the money gone: becomes the question as the everyday worker hasn’t felt the benefits of the increase in their income. An anti-economist Gary Stevenson puts it down to asset transfer; in simple terms, the already wealthy have increased their asset portfolios at the expense of the working and underclass. They were assisted in this process through complete mismanagement of public funds by successive governments, the banker bail-out has been stretched to death, but one that is still fresh for us all is the COVID allocation of funds for lockdowns. As Stevenson quite rightly asks “Where is the £800billion?” in cash that was created to fund PPE acquisition, furlough and lesser schemes like eat out to help out; the reason the question is asked by him is simply maths. £800billion (Government spending in 2019 was around £1,800billion as we reach 2024 £2,600billion)³ divided by the population of the UK is £16,000 per head. So the question is then clearer, ” Where is the money” as I doubt anyone felt £16,000 better off during or after. I’m sure some people were assisted and helped, but by no means was everyone £16,000 better off. The financial measures put in place for the lockdowns were simply there to transfer large portions of wealth to the already wealthy from the working class (now working poor) and the poverty class (now underclass). For an example of a direct transfer of wealth, we need to look no further than Matt Hancock for an example who awarded his local pub landlord a £40million government contract⁴ and this is just one example of many. What did happen to the money was the wealthy increased their assets and held reserves of cash which they are still holding today as evidenced by an increase in “luxury” goods markets; Louis Vuitton’s share price has increased since by nearly 75%⁵ and I’m fairly certain it isn’t the working class or underclass or even middle buy these kinds of products.

What does all this mean, the extra printed money from COVID is being held by the already wealthy with some of it splurged on luxury items; holding onto the rest in assets in case of another emergency. Whilst everyone else from the middle class downwards is fueling a debt cycle, created by an inflationary cycle because of the transfer of money to assets and the increase in the luxury goods market. The increase in the volume of currency that now cannot be sucked back into the system has debased the value of the currency, thereby causing an unnatural inflation spike. The response to this has been to raise interest rates, which has then further squeezed those at the bottom with rising mortgage repayments, increases in everyday goods and energy. The result will be a debt spiral where even more wealth is transferred to the wealthy. Now if you’ve come this far, no matter your background or how rich or poor you are imagine yourself as a child in a family that up to 5 years ago had an average existence. Mother and father worked to make enough money for little things you saw as luxury, days out, cinema trips, and the odd pizza takeaway. Now imagine that child today, watching their parents still both working and skipping meals to keep the lights on or pay the mortgage. Do you think that child is going to grow up healthy or resentful at the way his parents have been treated by the country they were born in? Do you think that child will in any way be interested in engaging in society?

So this brings us round to the second point, that of political indifference. For at least 25 years the UK has become a cycle of elected officials simply saying one thing and doing something else. There is not even a law that governs a politician’s ability to tell policy-based lies⁶ (skip to the conclusion if you don’t want to read all). As politicians have infected themselves more and more into the everyday lives of people so has people’s attention shifted to them, how many of your parents or grandparents knew who the chancellor of the exchequer was in their youth without a glaring headline with their name, how youngsters today can answer that question; I would estimate a lot more. What politicians didn’t account for was the more they wanted control over how we live and speak, the more we would look back at them. This coupled with the free flow of information via the internet created a unique situation where politicians could be called to account by the everyday person. However, rather than adapt and change like the rest of us are forced to do, they doubled down on their doublespeak, assuming the people were too dumb to understand them if they put jargon on top of it, particularly when cameras began recording sessions in Westminster. The childish and belligerent displays put on by grown people are quite honestly pathetic to bear witness to. People in that chamber making decisions that affect people’s lives as if they were toddlers arguing over a toy. This funnels into a kind half-way state between the younger generations of laughing at them and pure contemptful apathy and at times we all feel it not just the under generations. This can be evidenced through voter turnout, in 2001 was close to an all-time low at just under 60% we then rose to just under 70% in 2017, another dip in 2019 to 67% approximately and finally in 2024 a sharp decrease to 60% again⁷. This may not be cause for alarm, but with more people engaged in politics through the internet and politicians making themselves known to us all it shows a downwards trend in the negative, when it should be increasing logically. It springs to mind a phrase I heard somewhere on TV or in literature; nobody cares who the king is until the king affects them negatively.

The third point here is the lack of natural respect or deference to someone in an authoritative role, this would be the police, politicians, teachers, etc... What do I mean by this, well we can look at a statistic from here that uses government figures⁸, attacks on teachers are steadily rising and have been for years before that; to the point, it is almost an accepted behaviour now. Whilst I do not agree with the way the education system works in the UK no one should enter their daily workplace with the looming threat of being attacked. This isn’t something that is confined to just children, for example verbal assaults on teaching staff by parents are also on the increase, so there is something fundamentally broken in the culture of the teacher-child and teacher-parent relationship. Again it is something that has been highlighted due to over-exposure, the government edicts on what can and cannot be taught along with the arbitrary testing process creates unnecessary tension, whereby trust is lost through automation of processes that should be natural and fluid; the passing on of knowledge from an adult to a child.

This belligerence to authority has also permeated other institutions like the police force for example, who would like us to believe that they have at the point of writing captured 400 rioters. But the strange disconnect between what the police tell us and what the police numbers show again creates tension in the relationship, you may not even be aware that tension exists consciously but it is there nonetheless. The metropolitan police are held aloft as the most proficient of the police forces in the UK yet as shown in statistics they haven’t solved a single petty crime in 3 years in 160 London communities. We can take the violent and sexual crimes statistics and find very similar worrying figures, as per Baroness Casey’s⁹ figures for 2013/12 21% of crimes solved (still far lower than it should be), as of the time of Casey’s report that stands at 8%. When you add in the fact that sexual assaults in London have increased by as much as 244% since 2012/13 it is a question of why should the police be taken seriously, clearly they are utterly incompetent. Would you take some seriously if they arrived to repair your television with a pair of scissors and a hammer?

This brings us round to the fourth point, that of the cultural change the UK has experienced over the past 25 years. I want to be fundamentally clear here before you read further, I am not against immigration or emigration; I believe it is an important part of the human story and isn’t by any stretch a new phenomenon, the exchange of ideas and methods of living are as important to humans as air and water. With that said it is important to understand when that exchange of ideas is one-sided or when one side wishes to exert its dominance (as in the case of colonialism) it becomes dangerous for both sides, historically leading to conflict. I don’t want to get bogged down on this issue simply because it is talked about with such frequency it has again become something we just accept as the normal way of things, but I do want to present some numbers and legal evidence. In 2000 migration to the UK was approx 479,000, emigration was 321,000, the difference between the two being the net migration figure of 158,000¹⁰; given the overall population of the UK this is a reasonable balance particularly to assist with economic growth providing those coming in are offering skills and investment and 2014 this was the case as evidenced by the economic growth experienced until 2007 as already detailed. Once the dust began to settle and people were instructed by legacy media that the economic crisis was over, despite the UK still being under austerity measures (a little more gaslighting here) we can see a large gap starting to emerge between emigration and migration; a difference of 309,000, once we reach 2023 that figure doubles again to around 700,000¹¹. It is deemed “far-right” to discuss these figures in any logical basis, but that doesn’t resolve any ongoing issues and ostrich syndrome serves no one and nothing outside of people with a vested interest in seeing this increase exponentially. As already discussed the benefits of migration are profound economically that cannot be argued, historically many civilisations benefitted from migration, Rome, Persia, Ottoman empires all benefitted from the flow of people (granted in some instances this was due to indentured slavery, but that is forced migration not voluntary migration and we are discussing voluntary migration), but the driving factor for all of these instances was culture. The question always being “What makes you Roman or was there any such thing as Romanisation; we can transfer that idea to Britain. What makes you British and can an outsider be Briticised?”

The issue we encounter with the question is what makes Britain, Britain; what are the shared values between people who live on the collection of islands termed Great Britain. Some would say Judeo-Christian values and whilst there is a steeped history with those values and religion, can we honestly say that is the case anymore, most likely not. Is it the set of manners we abide by in all dealings, shaking hands with the enemy over breakfast and then attempting to kill each other at lunch; the kind of stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on, things the world views us as? Again most likely not, for at least 25 years there has been a direct erosion of that method of thinking, an erosion of good manners. Is it our varied architecture with buildings like Hampton Court Palace and its Tudor regality, The Circus in Bath with simple Georgian elegance, or the angular gothic style of the Queen's House in Greenwich? Again the argument is no, World War 2 destroyed most of the classical architecture of regular buildings and in its place, we have brutalist, empty buildings constructed for nothing more than economic gain. The only buildings left would have been largely inaccessible to the public at the time of their construction, only standing now mausoleums of a former time. Perhaps art would bind us, the tales of Shakespeare and Chaucer, the epic poetry of Milton, the philosophies of Locke; again outside of historic value there is no such movement or collective alive today. Art is sanitised and corporatised before it ever reaches the gates of our living rooms, in essence, a period like the Renaissance could never be again as no figures exist to pioneer such a movement and if they do they are quickly commercialised. So what makes you British, it isn’t any of the above and it isn’t geographical circumstance as many across the commonwealth would consider themselves British. What makes people British is a sense of shared concern, a sense of hope for the future of our respective communities, a sense of progress both socially and economically for those we share this land with; or perhaps it is none of those things and what makes us British cannot be defined only known. There can be little doubt that the things we would have said made us British no longer exist, they are remnants of a past world for better or worse. However, as history has shown once that shared set of values we classify as culture is disrupted or dismantled the outcome is a hard kick backward. The French Revolution when the wealthy elite no longer shared the values of the regular citizens, the destruction of the Greek Empire when Athenian politics was disrupted by Laconian politics, Rome when the mob came for Nero and nearly destroyed the empire; I could go on but the result is always the same.

We have to at this point return to an economic condition, but not one that is numbers-based more a sentiment-based one. £16billion has been funneled to Ukraine since the outbreak of war in 2022 by the UK, which is just one of the many foreign aid packages sent abroad by the UK. I will argue the moral merits of this as I take no side in the conflict, but what I want to focus on is what political advisors call “optics”. If the UK is going through an unprecedented economic inflationary cycle (as mentioned solely down to mismanagement of public funds and unqualified people being in charge of government spending) where people are as the phrase goes “choosing between heating or eating” how does this look to those struggling? Whilst on a global scale with the budgets of entire countries being taken into account, this is a small amount, but on a micro scale for a regular citizen, this is a huge amount of money being given away and just for clarification that is half the expected budget of the armed forces in 2024/25 for the UK¹². When they see the headlines and are being told that this is happening when they can see their local communities going to ruin or going bankrupt, you can empathise with the sense of resentment felt by them. The resentment felt from the profit of their labour being sent to a faraway place that most have never visited or even seen; for them, it would be almost mythological the equivalent of the old church asking for money from the parishioners for god. They would all have an opinion or an idea on how a small portion of that money could fix their local communities, how they could do so much; but again they are told by both the legacy media and government that “this must be done, because”. All the while they see their surroundings deteriorate, their crime rates rise and their own money being worth less than it was a year ago.

I will leave that there we all have the ability to think critically, to think thoughts away from that of the state and will wrap this up. To sum this up it would be fair to say that the anger and resentment felt by people is not wrapped up in a sole issue of migration, it is a multitude of issues with a particular focus on the economic divide being created between the abjectly poor and the unfathomably wealthy. For many people lines have been drawn in the sand, their lives irrevocably worse off than their parent’s lives and their parents before them and they aren’t willing to let it deteriorate further without kicking back. Empathy is a word that is thrown around a lot by many people who don’t understand the meaning of the word, it isn’t my feelings are your feelings or someone being emotionally overwhelmed. It simply means being able to from someone else’s perspective, so when we look at the live streams and see people reacting don’t immediately dismiss them as “far-right” or “jobless idiots” and try to see from their perspective why they are angry.

At the time of writing this, the UK parliament has come out three times and directly threatened people with punitive punishment for taking part and completely ignored the underlying reasons why these protests/riots are taking place. The limp prime minister has pushed all his chips into the pot and now cannot back down in his threats only doubling down on them. A dangerous, dangerous move to make and one that will only result in one outcome; making things worse than they are. Threats are being placed on those using social media for their consumption and endorsement of views the legacy media in conjunction with the government deem wrong, if you cannot now see where this is going, and where it ends you have no understanding of human behaviour and lack empathy. They believe they can threaten one of the richest men in the world; the sheer hubris to believe they force his capitulation towards their way of thinking is staggering. Supposed intelligence people like KC’s discussing the banning of social media platforms in the UK. If you’ve come this far I want to something fundamentally clear there is no left or right divide, the only difference between the extreme left who want Marxist economic theories to rule the day and the extreme right who an economic model completely free of restraint of government; the clue is these are not political ideologies, but economic ones. I am not interested in childish arguments of the illusion of a left or right divide in political parties; both parties, all parties want the same thing total control over your behaviour and habits. To a large degree they have achieved that aim, we fight with each other over labels we parrot via the legacy media, they have taught you to ignore your natural instincts, ignore that little bell of intuition in your head by creating a moral neurosis within you. This is the term Nietzsche used to explain the downfall of Western civilisation and looking at the way things are the UK will be the nexus point for that collapse. This is the start of the world we find ourselves in, a moral world so rigid in its architecture that to step outside of the parameters of morality laid down by its made-up laws and system is an act of self-destruction. A hive-mind like social membrane that even the smallest deviation from it causes it to strike back disproportionately. A world free of intellect, free-thinking, artistic endeavour or creative progress, that destroys empathy as it is no longer required. A system that holds aloft the underprivileged criminal as a seeker of a better world, but destroys the one perceived as privileged demonising them. I will leave you all with a quote from Nietzsche himself “Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it”

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/970672/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk/

2. https://www.economicsobservatory.com/why-has-it-taken-so-long-for-stagnant-pay-to-become-central-to-uk-politics

3. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/government-debt

4. https://goodlawproject.org/weve-won-another-freedom-of-information-battle-with-government/

5. https://www.google.com/search?q=louis+vuitton+share+price&oq=louise+vutton+share+price&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0i13i512l6j0i22i30l3.8431j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

6. https://www.landmarkchambers.co.uk/news-and-cases/promises-promises-the-enforceability-of-pre-election-statements-and-manifesto-pledges

7. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050929/voter-turnout-in-the-uk/

8. https://dannyhatcher.com/data-shows-rising-abuse-and-assault-numbers-in-schools/

9. https://www.met.police.uk/police-forces/metropolitan-police/areas/about-us/about-the-met/bcr/baroness-casey-review/

10. https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/

11. https://www.statista.com/statistics/946736/net-migration-to-the-uk-by-citizenship/

12. https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/brief-guides-and-explainers/public-finances/#:~:text=In%202024%2D25%2C%20we%20expect%20central%20government%20departments%20to%20spend,defence%20(%C2%A332.8%20billion)