HANNAFORD: Canadians should take note, English rioters may have a point

The recent spate of rioting in Great Britain appears to have subsided. However as the smoke clears, two things are left to talk about.First, could this kind of rioting happen in Canada? Answer, probably not and if it did, it wouldn’t be for quite the same reasons. But the kind of free-speech crackdown employed by Westminster is exactly what Canadians can expect the next time we want to talk about government overreach in — let's say a pandemic response.Second, notwithstanding the vileness of some of what went around on the internet (see the WATCH clip below,) a well-informed person would concede that successive British governments brought this on themselves..That is, one need not utter the customary condemnation of the most outrageous comments posted to the internet by angry Britons (the usual routine,) before roundly condemning the government overreaction they provoked.Lengthy — 20 months — jail sentences are being imposed not as a proportionate response to a crime. Heavens! Between light sentencing and early release for good behaviour, you wouldn’t do much more over there for murder and considerably less for assault and robbery.No, the government was sending a message via the courts for the express purpose of telling people they were not free to say what they thought on the internet. Or anywhere else. The sad truth is that these riots were, to mix the metaphors a little, a thousand bomber raid of chickens coming home to roost.The issue is really this. The British people were never asked whether they wanted or supported mass immigration. In 75 years, no politician ever took the podium and said, “Vote for me, and I will ensure that for neighbours you will have people from other countries who have different customs, different beliefs and possibly different religions. They will want to embed these in your community. Some will want to take over. Some may specifically want to change the character of your country. But you should want this and I will give it to you.”I repeat, immigration was never an election issue. It was just done. And those people who objected were damned as horrible people, racist, unkind and unworthy to have an opinion, never mind express one.And the British people have never forgotten that.To some degree, this is a class divide. (In England, social class still matters.)In the late 1940s, when legal mass immigration began with the arrival of the government-owned Empire Windrush bringing hundreds of Jamaican nurses to London to support the Labour government’s brand-new, labour-hungry National Health Service, new arrivals tended to gather in working class areas, not Sloane Square or Mayfair. Objections to their presence were therefore couched in the working class argot of their new neighbours, upon which the great and the good of the middle class took pleasure in pouring out their scorn, in perfectly articulated received-English.The aristocracy was not so sure, as I recall..But impeccable upper-class credentials made no difference anyway. The urbane, Cambridge-educated, Conservative Health Minister Enoch Powell, a general during the war and widely touted as a future prime minister, warned in a 1968 speech that things would not end well. Quoting the Roman poet Virgil he concluded, “I look into the future and am filled with dread. Like the Roman, I see the Tiber foaming with blood.”Powell’s realism has received less than its due from the British commentariat over the years but from contemporary polls it appears he had summed up the feelings of more than two-thirds of Great Britain. Then-Conservative Party leader Edward Heath summarily sacked him from his shadow cabinet, anyway. So much for having the discussion.So much for governments representing the will of the people.So, no wonder legal immigration was never allowed to be put to the vote, not by Conservatives and not by the Labour Party.Since then, things have simply gone from bad to worse.Governments that were not prepared to discuss the fundamental demographic changes brought about by legal immigration, proved too craven to resist a massive wave of illegal immigration.So-called ‘migrants’ — chancers, frankly —follow no rules but simply show up and make their demands upon the state services paid for by resident Britons who work hard, pay their taxes and follow the rules. Just how many there may be is hard to calculate, but the low estimates are at half a million. It is entirely possible that British governments of whatever party, would rather not know the truth.One would think the crass illegality of it all would have given governments of the day all the justification they needed to take a firm hand.But they didn't. Thus Britons were first astonished, then alarmed and are now howling made that no British government of either party, under any prime minister — and there have been a few over the 20 years — has had the intestinal fortitude to simply deny entry to the illegals and deport them as they are discovered.It has often been pointed out that in the incident that sparked the riots, the brutal stabbing murder of three white children at a daycare by a black youth, the youth was not an illegal. He had been born in England. And indeed he was, but to a Rwandan mother who had entered Great Britain illegally.This then is a distinction without a difference. No doubt the poor woman is horrified at what her mentally ill son has done. The fact remains however that had she been denied entry in the first place, that particular disturbed youth would not have been wandering the streets of Southport last month with a knife in his hand, looking for somebody upon whom to vent his rage.It's great to be a compassionate community but who looks for out for the host? Not the governments they vote for, apparently.It doesn't contribute to peaceful coexistence of course, when immigrant communities indulge in repetitive patterns of criminality and anti-social behaviour, even domestic terrorism, that reinforce prejudices that already exist. In 2014, a senior social worker in the English city of Rotherham reported that over a period of 16 years, an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually abused there, predominantly by Pakistani-British men. As Al Jazeera reported, “council staff and others knew of the abuse but turned a blind eye to what was happening and refused to identify the perpetrators in part for fear of being branded racist.” Sordid as that is, it was not an isolated case. And there are also the social issues. As Douglas Murray pointed out in The Spectator, economic decline makes some communities dry tinder for any kind of a riot.But neither immigrant criminality nor economic decline are necessary to validate the ground-level resentment so many Britons feel that these fundamental changes were made to their country without their consultation or permission.For there is a bitter irony here. Having in two World Wars called forth extreme patriotic instincts in two generations of young men and women, and produced within them such passionate mother-country love that many of them were faithful unto death in Great Britain’s defence, the all-party government message ever since has been that their identity wasn’t worth preserving.As for the supposedly deep British devotion to the grand traditions of liberty and free speech, Britons now understand that they are at liberty only to freely utter speech that does not contradict their government. Free speech heroes John Wycliffe, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Milton, John Stuart Mill be damned. As far as Westminster is concerned, the Yanks (in whose Constitution their wisdom can be found) can have ’em.And so, the Tiber foams.And I have no idea how it all ends.As for Canada, the proud inheritor of the Anglo-American free-speech tradition, to the best of my knowledge nobody in Canada has yet gone to jail for saying something unkind about the prime minister.But the Trudeau-Liberal government we have is not proud of the free speech tradition they inherited. They are in fact remarkably thin-skinned and our prime minister distinguishes between people who hold acceptable views such as his own, and those he believes to be ‘racist, misogynist and who hold unacceptable views.’“Do we tolerate these people?” he asks. Ask a trucker... For you see, the great and the good in Canada do not actually think "you may be wrong, but you’re entitled to your opinion." They think "if you’re not with the program, you should shut and obey."It should therefore be no surprise that Mr. Trudeau's government has passed all the legislation necessary to place Canada’s press, telecommunications and internet-users in a vice-grip of constraint. Jordan Peterson calls it ‘the most authoritarian law conceivable... Not just the Orwellian Thought Crime, but the mere possibility of a thought crime.’Bottom line: What can happen in Great Britain, can happen here. The only rights Canadians have are the ones we defend..This is what the Western Standard is up againstThe Trudeau government is funding lies and propaganda by directly subsidizing the mainstream media. They do this to entrench the powerful Eastern, woke and corrupt interests that dominate the political, social and economic institutions in Canada. Federal authorities are constantly trying to censor us and stop us from publishing the stories that they don’t want you to read. 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