Tinderbox conditions

How and why dogmatic 'liberalism' has created profound social tensions

Protesters in Epping earlier this week.

Last week unrest broke out in the usually sleepy market town of Epping, near London, after an Ethiopian migrant was charged with a string of sexual assaults. He’d arrived in England on a small boat eight days earlier.

Mothers took to the streets holding banners saying things like “I’m not far right I’m worried about my kids.” Other protesters became violent.

We’ve seen similar scenes playing out in numerous towns and cities across Britain, and Europe more broadly, in recent months.

To be blunt: large parts of the West are a tinderbox, and our political class are completely incapable of addressing the matter properly. Indeed their worldview rests on doing precisely the opposite (to see what I mean here, watch the way Labour MP Jess Phillips squirms and obfuscates when confronted with the fact that Afghan men are 20 times more likely to be convicted for sexual offences than British citizens).

We’ve reached this point for a number of reasons. An absolutely central one has been the policies pushed by ‘progressive’ elites, whose illiberal, quasi-religious dogma is now colliding with hard reality. They will respond to these events as they always do — by decontextualising them and dismissing all public anger as mere brainwashing or bigotry. But that isn’t going to wash for much longer.

Don’t get me wrong, undoubtedly bigotry is often on display at these ‘demonstrations’, and it should be called out. It’s worth worrying about, and my aim here isn’t to make excuses for open displays of violent racism where they do occur. But while that one aspect of the problem is obsessed over in isolation, the root causes of a rise in such attitudes and behaviours are overlooked for ideological reasons.

While decrying ‘misinformation’, for instance, mainstream outlets and commentators themselves frequently provide a deceptive and misleading framing of exactly what led to the original discontent. Tom Slater has summed up how this works well:

In Knowsley, in February 2023, a protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers was leapt on by troublemakers and turned into a riot. The protest was called after a young girl was allegedly propositioned by a migrant on the street. This detail was naturally omitted in much of the mainstream media’s coverage, even though local media had covered it and the police were investigating. The true blame, the broadcasters piously intoned, lay with ‘misinformation’.

This pattern keeps repeating itself. A violent or sexual crime allegedly committed by a migrant causes tensions to flare, while the media and politicians play dumb. We saw it again in Ballymena last month, where the attempted oral rape of a girl by two Romanian Roma boys was followed by days of rioting.’¹

‘Counter-protesters’, meanwhile, are painted as heroes, rather than what they often are: hardened ideologues fervently enforcing their cultish narrative, even if it means denying the obvious and allowing serious social problems to fester (they also frequently engage in unbelievably provocative acts like screaming at victims’ families in plain view of their friends, attacking pubs, and so on).

What there will not be is any self-reflection. Nor any honest attempt to grapple with how decades of mass migration, generally imposed against the democratic will, have led to this state of explosive volatility.

As I’ve argued at length elsewhere, millions of people are understandably concerned about the irreversible changes unfolding in their communities, imposed from the top-down, and which have at times given rise to grave societal ills. These include brutal rape gangs targeting white and non-Muslim girls (see my essay on that here), regular marches featuring jihadist chanting and the glorification of mass murder, countless deadly Islamic terror attacks, the rapid spread of Islamist-style ‘modesty dress’ in public spaces, the large-scale importation of young men who are disproportionately involved in sexual violence against women, and the refusal to collect, let alone release, much of the data that would confirm these issues exist in the first place. All of this has been accompanied by intense gaslighting for decades, with those who seek to draw attention to these phenomena relentlessly demonised for doing so.

While this doesn’t excuse far-right violence, it is vital context that cannot be ignored when seeking to understand why tensions are so high.

Blindly repeating empty liberal slogans won’t fix anything. In fact, those slogans (or, more specifically, the policies they’re designed to shield from scrutiny) are precisely what have fuelled public resentment to begin with.

If nothing changes, things could get worse fairly quickly. If and when that happens, the ‘liberal’ response may well be solely to blame critics of metropolitan groupthink, and further enforce that groupthink.

That is unlikely to end well.

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1. https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/20/we-are-coming-apart/