In his 1977 book The Break-Up of Britain, the socialist and Scottish nationalist writer Tom Nairn titled his chapter on the United Kingdom’s then-most restive province “Northern Ireland: Relic or Portent?” On this, as with so much else, Nairn may have been prescient. A year ago, it was natural to speculate on whether anti-migrant disturbances would become a feature of the English summer, as those deriving from the province’s traditional, and now largely ceremonial, ethnic conflict are in Northern Ireland. Today, it appears that “rioting season” has become England’s new routine. Rather than a freak occurrence, to be dealt with by harsh sentencing, the mixed protests and clashes in Epping, like the demonstrations in Diss and now Canary Wharf, still seem like only tremors before a greater earthquake. When Nigel Farage warned this week that “nobody in London understands how close we are to civil disobedience”, the response from Left-liberals, confused and frightened by a predictable course of events nevertheless incomprehensible to their worldview, was to cast him as a sort of English Ian Paisley, threatening violence at a safe remove for political gain.
