Riots in England should be a warning for Australia’s social cohesion

Other than New Zealand, the country that’s most comparable to us here in Australia, both as a lesson and as a warning, is Britain.

Who would have thought the place that has given the world its common language, the mother of parliaments, the industrial revolution and the emancipation of minorities would now attract a travel warning from the Australian government on account of a spate of ugly anti-immigration riots that so far have led to 400 arrests?

Britain may not quite be on the verge of “civil war”, as Elon Musk has been tweeting, yet this is the second wave of unrest to sweep the country in the past 12 months.

Ever since the October 7 atrocity, London especially has routinely been paralysed by “river to the sea” protests, often with sporadic violence against counter-protesters and significant damage to property.

Yet instead of a vigorous response against all law-breaking, whatever the cause, the Gaza protests have had kid-glove treatment while the recent anti-immigration ones have been furiously denounced from the Prime Minister down, with talk of an “army” of police against the “far right” and funded protection for mosques but not for synagogues.

Admittedly, there has just been a change of government in Britain but that has hardly involved a change of approach when it comes to politically correct law enforce­ment.

A local parallel, admittedly on a smaller scale, is the difference between the permissive policing of pro-Palestine protests in all our cities and the massive police response, with several arrests, to the protest against the knifing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in western Sydney.

As the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner has just said in a public appeal to the Starmer government: “The rioting and civil unrest across the country following the murder of three children in Southport has escalated to a worrying level … The announcement of the Prime Minister’s new Violent Crime Units has led to an accusation of two-tier policing, which has inflamed protesters who state they are battling to protect Britain’s sovereignty, identity and stop illegal migration …

“Arresting people or creating violent disorder units is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering: what is the government’s solution to mass uncontrolled immigration? How are the new Labour government going to uphold and build on British values?”

UK police arrest, UK Riots

Consider the different handling here in this country of the Black Lives Matter protests and the freedom rallies during the pandemic. Both were in defiance of pandemic rules but one was essentially tolerated and the other ruthlessly repressed, both under a Labor government in Victoria and also under a Coalition one in NSW.

Throughout the Western world, there are now acceptable and unacceptable disruptions; there’s tolerable and intolerable law-breaking. The former include protests against racism, colonialism and climate inaction; the latter include protests against heavy-handed government, the gender fluidity push and out-of-control immigration.

Everywhere, the social fabric is fraying and close to the heart of the growing antagonism are different attitudes to migration driven by radically different instincts about the nature of Western societies.

Are we rich, selfish countries tainted by racism, for which mass immigration is an act of atonement and reparation, a means to enliven the sterility of the old Judaeo-Christian monoculture, plus a way of maintaining economic growth in societies that won’t have kids?

Or is mass immigration, especially from what was once “the Third World”, fuelling lower wages and unaffordable housing, imposing intolerable extra pressure on already strained social services, diluting the enduring character of our countries and putting social cohesion under strain?

There’s some truth in all these characterisations, but the fact they’re all strongly held and deeply at odds is undoubtedly opening massive faultlines even in previously easygoing immigrant-friendly societies.

The response to October 7, an unprecedented outbreak of anti-Semitism throughout the West, masquerading as anti-Zionism, has brought together recent Middle Eastern immigrants, many incultur­ated in Jew-hatred, with leftist campaigners against “white privilege” and “settler colonialism”.

Admittedly Britain’s Muslim population is comparatively somewhat larger than ours, and globalisation has been more disruptive to that country’s old manufacturing industries, but only a blinkered optimist could entirely rule out a similarly ugly reaction here against unintegrated migrant communities that’s really an antagonism towards governments that are keener on celebrating diversity than on fostering unity.

In Britain and across Europe, senior politicians routinely concede that multiculturalism has failed: David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and even Angela Merkel have all done so at different times.

In 2016 Rachel Reeves, now the Labour Chancellor, warned against high immigration: “There are bubbling tensions in this country that I just think could explode.”

The most recent one to admit that integration isn’t working is Kemi Badenoch, currently the favourite to become the next British opposition leader.

But it’s one thing to admit that once reasonably cohesive countries are becoming nations of tribes and another thing to take effective action to replace an old ethnic patriotism with a new civic one.

In the US, Britain and Europe (unlike in Australia) successive governments have utterly failed to stop illegal migration; while in Britain (like Australia) legal migration is essentially out of control because visas are more or less automatically issued to overseas students and foreign workers for hard-to-fill local jobs.

The result is larger overall economies but not necessarily richer individual citizens, and a sense that governments are increasingly incapable or unwilling to manage their borders.

Leaders would prefer to tolerate what can seem like a peaceful invasion rather than face accusations of racism or antagonising existing migrant voters.

As long as newcomers have largely adopted our values, here in Australia we’ve tended to pride ourselves on being the “world’s most successful multicultural society” and have been comfortable with big changes in our ethnic composition as our immigration intake changes from about 50 per cent British (before 1970) to well under 10 per cent now.

While the US and Britain have about 15 per cent of their population foreign-born, we now have almost 30 per cent. After the British-born, the largest immigrant groups are from India and China, communities that are generally keen to succeed and integrate.

Kemi Badenoch

The same can’t be said, though, for some Middle Eastern migrants whom even the government’s recent Towards Fairness multicultural report conceded “offer a particularly striking example of how a growing sub-population experiences disadvantage”.

The appointment of Tony Burke as Home Affairs Minister, with responsibility for immigration and much domestic security too, could be a potential turning point; and how he balances community safety versus the desire of foreign criminals to stay in Australia a sign of which way things are likely to go under the Albanese government.

Burke’s electorate is 55 per cent overseas born and 25 per cent Muslim. Already pressure from Burke and other cabinet ministers in seats with large Muslim populations has produced a more pro-Palestine Labor foreign policy. Labor insiders are telling me the Burke appointment was a deliberate prime ministerial strategy to shore up Labor seats with high Muslim voting blocs.

With Burke under pressure to admit more Gazans and reportedly planning to turn their temporary visas into permanent residency, get ready for an immigration program designed to change our country, not strengthen it; and with little ability to security check many of the new arrivals.