Opinion: The last weekend in August is Bank Holiday weekend in England, marking the end of the summer holidays. It’s also, in my neck of the woods, the Notting Hill Carnival, the celebration of Caribbean culture that is the biggest street party in the UK. But as is often the case these days, I wasn’t there.
A regular attendee as a young man, I’ve tried to arrange to go to the countryside in recent years to escape the crowds, the thumping boom of the sound systems and, most of all, the noise of police helicopters hovering above in the west London skies.
Last year, when we didn’t manage to get away, the Met’s choppers were so oppressive I thought the police must be focusing on our back garden for a fleeing suspect. It turned out that someone had been stabbed just 200m from our front door.
Yet despite the flashpoints of crime, even more was riding on the carnival this year to be a kind of multi-cultural corrective to the spate of anti-migrant riots that broke out across the country in early August.
The protests were sparked by the murders of three young girls at a dance studio in the seaside town of Southport. A false rumour spread online that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker. In fact, he was a 17-year-old boy born in the UK whose parents were originally from Rwanda.
No one is quite sure where the rumour began – one theory is that it was in Texas by way of Pakistan – but provincial England was a tinderbox that was primed to ignite.
Concern about migration was a major contributing factor in the Brexit vote, but legal and illegal immigration spiralled only after we left the EU. That has left an embittered and easily mobilised section of the white population which is susceptible to nationalist rhetoric.
Throw in the experienced rabble-rouser and new Reform MP Nigel Farage, who claimed the authorities were holding back the truth about what had happened in Southport, and all the ingredients were present for trouble.
It was Keir Starmer’s first major challenge as Prime Minister, if you discount the shrivelled economy he inherited. He responded with determined firmness with sped-up court appearances, where stiff prison sentences quickly discouraged further rioting.
However, the damage to the country’s self-image, let alone its social fabric, had already been done. It was as if someone had opened a door to the nation’s ugliest emotions and they came pouring out in a fanfare of aggression and idiocy.
Starmer may have had success in stopping the riots, but the social rot that underpinned them will be much harder to arrest. A few days after the mayhem subsided, more than 500 migrants arrived in one day on England’s southern coast, having crossed the Channel from France.
The nation’s overstretched infrastructure is struggling to absorb the flow of refugees and migrants, who inevitably end up being lodged in hotels in the poorest neighbourhoods (because they’re the cheapest), where resentment at outsiders and falling wages is at its most potent.
It’s on these aggrieved sentiments that Farage hopes to build a new populist-nationalist front. The liberal counter-hope was that the carnival went off without any discord at all. That was always a tall order, given the million people attending. There were several stabbings, one near fatal, and 230 arrests. Sadly, about par.
The last thing the country needs right now is any further ethnic tensions. But that is exactly what certain unscrupulous politicians were secretly wishing for as the English summer comes to an end.
