Few of us over the last few days can have escaped a sickening feeling that something terrible was happening in Britain. Most horrific was the nightmarish killing of children in Southport. A series of events—some coincidental (the violent affray in Southend), others connected (the widespread riots since)—recall Yeats’s alarming vision from the 1920s: ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’
The ceremony of innocence: little girls dancing. Nothing could more deeply outrage every instinct of right and decency than the act of a depraved mind taking a kitchen knife to those vulnerable and trusting souls. There followed savage and impotent rage, seemingly stirred up by trouble makers—including the Russians—and aimed at an inoffensive neighbourhood mosque. Similar episodes took place in other towns, with attacks again usually directed at random targets. Righteous anger thus degenerated into ‘mere anarchy’. Is Britain becoming a land where people take wanton violence into the streets, as in the United States or France?
Yes, frightening things are happening in our society, but to begin to understand them we need to take a longer view. It would be misleading to think that the events of the last few days are something new, or signs of a sudden change in British behaviour or politics.
Drunken riots and attacks on minority places of worship were commonplace in England well into the 19th century. Catholic and Dissenting chapels were then the targets. Arson and intimidation were methods of economic bargaining. Trade unionists used violence against unpopular employers and blacklegs, and as late as the 1860s a house in Sheffield was dynamited. Although of course a different world from that of today, there are interesting continuities over a long period of history. Violent disorder has almost invariably been blamed on outsiders, on criminals, on a handful of ringleaders. There is often an element of thrill-seeking (sometimes termed ‘recreational violence’) and hangers-on who see the opportunity to loot, and authorities often target such people for punishment. But almost invariably major disorders turn out to be predominantly the act of fairly ordinary people behaving in an extraordinary way—mostly working-class and lower-middle-class men in their 30s and 40s. An extreme and famous example are the Gordon Riots of 1780. In popular memory they were a mindless outbreak of drunken thuggery, described as such by Dickens in his novel Barnaby Rudge. In reality, they had clear political motives, and were mainly carried out by respectable (and often religious) London artisans, among them the mystical artist William Blake.
But from the mid-19th century, something remarkable happened. Over a couple of generations a violent and disorderly society became peaceful. Drunkenness continuously declined, as did all crime. During the 1920s-30s many prisons were closed. George Orwell was stating a commonplace in 1940 about the ‘gentleness of English civilization … You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil.’ It was no less obvious in 1955 to the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer: the English were ‘gentle, courteous and orderly … you hardly ever see a fight in a bar … football crowds are as orderly as church meetings.’
Early uniforms
This ‘gentleness’ began to break down not in the 2020s but after the Second World War. Teddy Boys met to fight with bicycle chains and flick knives. Mods and Rockers terrorised seaside towns in the 1960s. Football hooliganism became a national disgrace, with the nadir in Brussels in 1985 when 38 spectators died due to drunken violence by Liverpool supporters. Crime doubled between 1957 and 1967, and doubled again by 1977. There were 200 robberies in 1937; 1,200 in 1957; 14,000 by 1977. In 1937, only 800 criminals were serving sentences over 3 years; by 1997 there were 23,000; today, of the 97,000 prisoners in the UK, 55,000 are serving sentences over 4 years.
How can we begin to explain this staggering deterioration over the last half-century? During the Victorian period, there was a powerful consensus that a violent and disorderly society—and one that was experiencing rapid and disorienting changes as great as those today—had to be tamed. Politicians, churches, charities, trade unions, schools, the police and ordinary people in their neighbourhoods cooperated. There remained a ‘rough’ element, but as crime figures show, respectability eventually became the norm. There was a price to be paid: conformity, deference, sometimes harsh treatment of the non-conformist, ultimately the gallows. In the 1960s, this restraint was deliberately thrown off. The Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins instituted ‘a more civilised, more free and less hidebound society.’ That of course is what we now have throughout the West, where similar social changes have happened and similar ideas have prevailed. Permissiveness too evidently has its benefits as well as its costs. But what seemed a civilized choice to Jenkins changed its nature with the breakdown of the old industrial system with its relatively orderly and patriarchal society. Family stability collapsed. Long-term and inter-generational unemployment created a new ‘underclass’—the late Victorian term was rediscovered. Society was not merely ‘permissive’, it was broken.
These processes were well under way before the onset of mass immigration in the Blair years. But the arrival year after year of large numbers of strangers with different beliefs, behaviour and expectations inevitably added a further element of social disintegration. This was even celebrated in a new ideological vision that rejected Integration, mocked tradition, espoused ‘diversity’ and fomented resentful identity politics. On the other hand, Christian families from the West Indies and Africa, and respectable Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs have brought counter-elements of stability and good citizenship often superior to those of the indigenous population. For example, Hindus and Sikhs are remarkably law abiding. Nevertheless, of today’s prison population, 27 percent are from ethnic minorities, and 12 percent are foreign nationals—far in excess of their proportion of the population. Young Black and Muslim men are greatly over-represented, as are Eastern Europeans. It cannot be coincidental that they originate from the most violent parts of the world and of the Continent.
Violence and disorder are not, of course, a British phenomenon. We are now about average in Europe. The riots in Southport, Hartlepool, Sunderland and elsewhere are strikingly similar to those in Dublin in November 2023 following a knife attack on three young children by a North African. Many European countries, notably France and Germany, have seen similar acts of violence and lawlessness by immigrants and similar acts of angry retaliation. Perverse links have grown between crime, alienation, mental disorder and Muslim extremism, of which prisons have become hotbeds.
As in the case of Southport and Dublin, retaliatory violence has undoubtedly been fomented by radical groups, whose small size does not prevent them from raising a mob through social media. These mob reactions are invariably misdirected, and innocent people have suffered.
Such collective acts of violence are an alarming sign of a deep malaise in Western countries, including ours. The cause throughout history is always the same: the breakdown of political trust. I suggested earlier that there had once been a consensus that social order had to be created and defended. That consensus has long gone and shows little sign of returning. Politicians and institutions are unwilling or unable to maintain a stable and orderly society. Identity politics and unrestrained individualism have conquered, promoted both by Left-wing ideology and Right-wing economics.
Yet for a diverse and individualistic society such as ours to function, more commitment is required from its citizens, not less. The Victorian age had many ways of making people toe the line. As the 19th-century Russian asylum seeker Alexander Herzen put it, ‘your neighbour, your butcher, your tailor, family, club, parish keep you under supervision and perform the duties of a policeman.’ Without such sanctions, people need to accept restraints willingly, and they need to learn to do so. Community, family and school are essential in creating an orderly society. But which politicians treat these as priorities? Southport still seems to preserve willing community solidarity. There are many places in Britain of which this can be said.
But ‘the duties of a policeman’ when all else fails do need actual policemen. Those who command them, including the politicians who are ultimately responsible, have presided over a catastrophic collapse in basic policing and public confidence. It emerged in 2023 that in half of England no burglaries had been solved for three years, and the Chief Inspector of Constabulary warned that ‘The public’s trust and confidence are unacceptably low’. This is partly due to money and numbers, but that does not explain wide disparities in police performance. Nor does it explain why some forms of disorder and crime are tolerated. The police, like any quango, too often pander to fashionable elite priorities. The law must be consistently enforced without fear or favour. Angry people must not think that they have the right and even duty to take it into their own hands. That is the first step towards a civilized society. For further steps to follow, we would need a generational change of culture that is barely even on the horizon.
An earlier version of this article was published in the Daily Telegraph. History Reclaimed is grateful for permission to republish it here.
