To blame Nigel Farage personally for this mess.

[twopercent]

Some people are fundamentally unpleasant. We know that. Some people. a tiny minority, hold views that are unacceptable to general society. We had a system whereby they knew they were better off keeping their poison silent in their heads. Farage has given them a cloak of respectability, and a way of connecting with other likeminded psychos. And he has organised them. Now look where we are.

It is going to be interesting to see how many people convicted for these riots are the same people convicted in 2011. Some people will just jump on any excuse to join in and stir up disorder.

These people would be better off finding a sporting outlet for their energy and aggression, and learning to discipline it. But Farage has kicked it all up, purely because he needed personal supporters for personal power, and saw this demographic as an untapped source of numbers.

Nobody advocating "Leave" had any idea what it was they actually wanted beyond getting out of the EU, nor did they have any clue about how to go about it without causing utter chaos. Remember the "Brexit means Brexit" and other such banalities bandied about by Leavers?

Dominic Cummings, the Campaign Director of Vote Leave wrote extensively about how not having a post-Brexit Leave plan was a deliberate decision on the part of the Vote Leave campaign. He knew that as soon as they tried to pin down anything concrete (e.g. leave the single market) they would lose votes. So the entire Vote Leave campaign was based around selling a vibe instead of a plan.

He argued that it was up to to the government to come up with a plan to implement a Leave vote, not the campaign trying to convince people that leaving was a good idea.

No one is silencing these idiots.
They’ve practically been given carte blanche to do what they want.
They are destroying /looting property owned by the very same people they claim to be protecting, namely the indigenous population .
My concern is these protest could lead to the government limiting the right to protest which would be a disaster

Good news - one of the racist terrorist has been sentenced to three years( will probably serve eighteen months)
When he is released, presumably he will look for a job( the jobs that all the immigrants have supposedly taken) . His criminal record may preclude him from getting said job.

A lot of people are only thinking it because the papers have told them to

No, people are only saying what the scummy papers have told them to think. What do you think the Sun and co are for? They're not a public service. Plenty of literature available on the subject.

Yes but newspapers aren't there to only say what people are thinking. They're supposed to report news. And maybe people are only thinking it because of what they read in the newspapers. Daily Mail have had dozens of front pages demonising Muslims. I can't remember ever reading anything positive about Muslims in the Daily Mail. I'm not Muslim but live amongst Muslims who do so much good for the community. Why isn't this ever reported? They've deliberately stirred up hate.
I keep hearing that people are fed up but a lot of these people live in very white communities. They probably know every little about Muslims and other ethnic minorities but they read things in the Daily Mail and that shapes their whole world view. They have shit lives and they think "Oh it's because the illegal immigrants get given all the good houses as soon as they arrive and they get benefits. There's nothing left for the British people." The situation is far more complex than that.

Doesn't matter how it's working out for me, does it. Why do you think I wanted anything from Brexit, you don't even know how I voted, or if I even did. That question validates the post completely, thanks.
Missing the whole point and bringing it down to individual impacts.

With a a hint that I am one of the dumb racists who voted leave.

I think it is unlikely that Farage is the sole cause of the unrest. Historically, when things are going wrong there are plenty of troublemakers ready to foment unrest. But when people are wealthy and healthy and everything is rosy, those troublemakers don’t get a foothold. So it may be easy to blame Farage because he is icky, but he is unlikely to be the underlying cause.

Hi Clare. There is a reason why most countries, including the UK, are not absolute democracies but representative democracies. And there is a reason why the large majority of policy proposals are not decided by a referendum. It's not just because people are morons. It's because most people 1. Vote for their own benefit nd shoet term gains rather than thst of society at large and long term benefits and 2. Don't have the bandwidth to sufficiently inform themselves enough to be able to understand complicated issues with enough factors. How could we? It's not our job. We've got other full time jobs thst require our time and energy. So we vote for people whose job it is to study these issues, understand them and make decisions that are in our best interests. Of course that doesn't work brilliantly because our politicians are self serving assholes and a lot of them don't know more or understand more than a 2 year old.

My point is that the people who promoted brexit made the referendum result sound like some sort of divine intervention that must not be questioned. That's nonsense. Everything needs to be questioned and when we find that something isn't in our best interest we need to be able to reevaluate it and if necessary change track. That this was not allowed to happen in a society that appears to be mostly secular is shocking. Brexit has become something like religion. You must not question it or question how it came about because to do so is WRONG. Why is it wrong? Why is it wrong to question the result of a democratic vote especially one yhst was surrounded by so much misinformation? No one answers that. People say you are undermining democracy but if democracy means that a single referendum is allowed to do so much damage and you must NEVER question that damage then that democracy isn't working very well. It's working as a religion. Ironically I suspect that a lot of people who voted brexit are not fans of Fundamentalism but obviously that is what brexit has unfortunately become. Right or wrong. No one must question it. That is what brexit has become and like all religious leaders it is what people like farage have so brilliantly utilised (or created) for their own ends.

I don't think anyone is saying that he's the sole cause.

Far more insidious is the utter crap that is repeated ad-infinitum on Facebook, Twitter etc. I don't do social media any more (beyond this and one or two other forums) because I grew absolutely sick of supposedly intelligent people regurgitating utter tripe without giving any thought to to the source or veracity

Yes, that's also a massive problem.
So much absolute shite out there peddled as fact, and nobody can be arsed to fact check anymore before sharing it.

That rag is a cesspit.
Has definitely stoked Islamophobia.
The sad thing is that some ‘decent’ people who have been brainwashed by this rag.
They are not the terrorist who have gone out to cause anarchy, but they are the armchair critics who sympathise with the thick marauding terrorists.

I absolutely agree that the crap spouted on social media has had a huge effect. I'm left wing and still see loads of posts from right wingers going on about immigrants etc. I imagine that if you're actually looking for that content you will be bombarded by it. It's very influential.
But the newspapers are still very read. They may not sell many paper copies but I heard the Daily Mail online is the most read online news site in the world! So their hate is reaching many millions of people.

Absolutely I agree. I feel some people aren't bad people but are completely misguided and misinformed.

Yes, it's a pertinent point that "newspapers" are not just in print/paper format any more. I'm guilty of forgetting that because I predate the internet, so I still see online, print, and TV media as wholly different things even though it's now many of the same people/sources operating in all three.

I think AIBU to blame NF personally for this mess suggests that’s what the OP is saying, and it’s not much different when all the other names are added to the list. There are always many many factors in play and blaming one person or even nine or ten people is a way of trying not to examine the complexity of the issue. Doesn’t matter unless you want to solve the problem.

100%
He was the first to have 'Stop the boats 'on this podium which has been adopted by the far right.

YANBU @twopercent.

Nigel is a grifter. His grift is to exploit the stupidity of racists. He's made a very successful career out of it.🤷‍♀️

See also Tommy-Tokehead-Ten-names. Somebody's got to pay for his properties, travel and drug habit so he grifts on the stupidity of racists too.🤦‍♀️

Vladimir Putin isn't a grifter but he's got a beady eye on racists so he can stir them up without a single employee having to leave Russia. Racists are useful, cheap idiots for him to deploy at will against countries he doesn't like.😬😬😬

Of course none of these cunts would have a chance if RACISTS WEREN'T SO FUCKING THICK AND GULLIBLE!🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️ So I think the racists also need to take responsibility, open their eyes and sort themselves out.

Fair summary boots

Interesting point of view- do you think that in fact most of us kind of join a party or “left wing” or “right wing” set of beliefs exactly as people used to join a religion? Because that does seem to be the case to me - which “side” you align with defines the unsayable, but either way there are opinions that are treated as apostasy by political groups. I am a party political nomad and everything I believe is anathema to one side or the other.

Interesting. In the absence of religion, faith has to be put somewhere, filling a vacuum. Now it seems we have political cults with devotees as fanatical as the religious believers of less secular times. That's quite concerning, I hadn't thought of it in those terms before.

@XDownwiththissortofthingX because they can’t even articulate why they’re so angry. They’ve grabbed race and ran with it because they don’t have the ability to put what they’re feeling into words - it’s the same for the majority of people that react with violence and anger. They’re shitty people there’s no doubt about that, but they’re rioting on the base of race because they either do not have the intelligence to articulate their problems or they do not have the ability to recognise that their anger is a symptom of a much larger issue. So no, they’re not being heard or listened to. No one wants to listen to racist roger spouting shit about “them forriners” because people know it’s not the colour of someone’s skin that’s the issue and no one is going to listen to him while he insists that migrants and refugees are the problem.

I don’t disagree with much of that, but it’s more nuanced for sure, and you’re missing the part played by the Bliar government in this societal and structural mess too.

You’ll see that most, if not all, of these riots are in traditional Labour strongholds. The massive push to increase the numbers going to university (itself a means to manipulate the unemployment numbers) 20
odd years ago without investing in anything to create actual jobs for all these graduates meant that large numbers came out of university with debt and the expectation of a well paid job, when no such jobs existed. They then found that large numbers of the ‘blue collar’ jobs they’d have otherwise have done had been taken by imported ‘cheap’ labour (Eastern European at the time) depressing their earnings potential and effectively writing them off as wave after wave of newer graduates followed them. This has created massive structural problems in many of these areas for a generation. There are still more graduates than graduate jobs, and it’s only the rise in the living wage that is pushing salaries up at the bottom end.

What we are seeing is, in part, the frustration of swathes of the population whose needs have been ignored by politicians of all colours because they are not within the sphere of understanding of most of them.

Farage and his ilk are whipping up the extremists, but there are plenty tagging along, fuelled no doubt by drink and drugs, who are not far right but want to vent.

The government needs to get this under control quick - if it spills beyond traditional ‘working class’ Labour strongholds there’s a bigger issue. And why SKS is engaging with that lunatic Musk I do not know. The arrogance of a politician I guess.

So much wrong in this. Asylum seekers are here legally. They have not come from safe countries. They are not all men. They have no obligation to stop in the first safe country they come to. Not everyone has the same, small-minded attitude about migration and many of us are very happy to support those who have come to this country legally and will go on to contribute to it both culturally and economically.