“The violence of the last week has been unusually vicious and frightening, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Fourteen years of Conservative rule have seen minority communities used as a scapegoat for worsening inequality time and time again. The history of institutional racism in Britain goes back much further, but you could begin the most recent version of this story at the introduction of the Hostile Environment, a set of policies that aimed to make Britain feel inhospitable… Labour right must also take its share of responsibility. New Labour helped to embed the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 years, with new, stronger powers of policing and surveillance and campaign literature that demonized asylum seekers. Keir Starmer appears to be taking up this mantle… Just this week, Sarah Edwards, the Labour MP for Tamworth, referred to the town’s Holiday Inn as an “asylum hotel” and said that the town’s people wanted “their hotel back.” Days later it was set alight by the far rig...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51