When in the last ten years has this dispensation to offend in private been extended to normal people? We’ve got a state apparatus that’s relentlessly eroded privacy in practice and people are regularly punished for saying things in closed WhatsApp groups and the like. I seem to recall a policeman whose career was destroyed for private comment. And yet here we have the home office minister? The rules are stupid but they invented them and have enforced them to the diminishment of the quality of life of everyone for ages. It’s not too much to ask for one set of standards applied to all by which logic these two should be pilloried.
Metallica… day two… London Stadium. Even better than Friday. Generational entertainment, the best father son day out, sharing the stadium with legends. No synthetic, AI generated slop here, just honest raw heavy metal for a hungry, appreciative crowd #Metallica
@Fiat__Justitia@KnockoutAudit Well done knockout for trying to point out what happened.
That said zero confidence in police at the moment whole lot of em need replacing with competent people
.@andyburnham, you say that your generation eroded public trust in politics and must take responsibility for rebuilding it. That is an unusual thing for a man to say three weeks before he enters Downing Street. We will take you at your word.
You entered Parliament in 2001 under Tony Blair. You served as Culture Secretary under Gordon Brown. You were part of the government that took Britain into Iraq on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. You were part of the government that presided over the financial crisis of 2008. You were part of the political generation that began the mass immigration experiment without public consent, that signed the Lisbon Treaty without a referendum, and that left office in 2010 with public trust in politics at a historic low.
You then spent eight years as Mayor of Greater Manchester. A housing fund that delivered less than five percent affordable homes. A transport network twenty two years behind London. A homelessness pledge broken within a year. A flooding problem unresolved for a decade. A grooming gang review your own whistleblower described as a cover up. An ICO finding that your authority failed to publish Freedom of Information compliance statistics. Your wife appointed to the board of a company holding a public contract with the authority you chaired.
Now you are proposing to apply the Manchester Model nationally. With Ed Miliband, architect of Britain's net zero framework and the energy price crisis, as your Chancellor. With Jonathan Powell, whose China connections and vetting status remain undisclosed, as your National Security Adviser. With proportional representation to ensure that once in power the progressive coalition cannot be removed regardless of how it performs.
You say you will take responsibility for rebuilding trust. The record of the generation you represent and the programme you are proposing are the reasons trust needs rebuilding in the first place.
"A grooming gang review your own whistleblower described as a cover up."
Belfast Tonight. Britain Tomorrow. The Trajectory Is Set.
On Monday night a man was pinned to a residential street in north Belfast and stabbed repeatedly in the face and neck. Members of the public intervened. One used a hurling stick. By Tuesday night three houses and a Middle Eastern supermarket were burning. Infants were carried from neighbouring properties. A police vehicle was set alight. Politicians called for calm.
Remember this night. Not because it is exceptional. Because it is not.
This is where the road leads. Not in twenty years. Now. Belfast has experienced serious immigration-related disorder for three consecutive years. The same cycle every time. Attack. Outrage. Disorder. Calls for calm. Nothing. The next incident. What is playing out in Belfast is not a malfunction. It is the destination. A state that cannot name the cause manages the consequence instead, and calls it governance.
Now project forward. Not with imagination. With arithmetic. Over 200,000 people have arrived by small boat since 2018. The majority are unvetted young men from countries with no cultural alignment with the host society. They are housed in communities without consent. Dispersed without warning. The removal rate is four percent. The government knows the other ninety-six percent are staying. It has decided to manage that fact rather than reverse it. Every year the number grows. Every year the concentration deepens. Every year the friction increases.
In ten years those concentrations will not be streets. They will be districts. In twenty years they will be cities within cities, governed by parallel authority, answering to parallel loyalties. We have watched this happen in France. The banlieues were built accommodation by accommodation, retreat by retreat, until the French state no longer entered them except in force. Britain is on the same road, travelling faster.
The trigger events will multiply. One policing incident. One foreign conflict landing on a British street. One court case, one arrest, one viral video. Any spark will do because the kindling has been laid by policy and left to dry by neglect. The riots will not be contained to one city for one night. They will spread, as they spread in France, as they spread across England last summer, because the grievance is not local. It is national. And the anger on both sides will harden with every cycle.
Public order will not hold at current trajectory. The police already negotiate where they once enforced. Investigations are quietly dropped. Reports go unfiled. The state keeps the peace by lowering the bar for what constitutes peace. That bar will keep falling because the alternative requires confronting what the political class has spent thirty years refusing to confront.
The political system will bend to the new demography. It already has. Candidates selected on foreign conflicts. Councils controlled by sectarian bloc voting. Representatives answering to communal leaderships rather than constituents. That process will accelerate as the demographic weight shifts.
And somewhere in this trajectory a trigger event will occur that cannot be managed. A mass casualty attack. A riot that becomes an insurrection. A video so barbaric it breaks the remaining political consensus around managed silence. After that the response will be less controlled, less proportionate and less reversible than anything a government could have delivered by acting fifteen years earlier when the choice still existed.
Britain is not sleepwalking into this. The eyes are wide open. The trajectory is known. The choices being made are deliberate. Every week that passes without a closed border, a functioning removal system and an honest political reckoning is a week in which the future described above becomes more certain and less avoidable.
Belfast on Monday night is not a warning. The warnings came years ago and were ignored. Belfast on Monday night is the bill beginning to arrive.