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Britain’s Hard Hat Riots
Foreign Affairs
Britain’s Hard Hat Riots
Left-wing cultural aloofness triggers a revolt of the working-class.
Credit: Paul Oulton via Shutterstock
Joseph de Maistre, commenting on the stability of Britain’s political order, once noted that “the true English constitution is that admirable, unique, and infallible public spirit, beyond all praise.” Britain’s ongoing riots have revealed that that public-spiritedness, tranquility, and famous lawfulness of the English people have been pushed past their breaking point by the governance of an out-of-touch elite.
Britain’s current domestic disturbances began when Axel Rudakubana, a child of Rwandan migrants, stabbed and killed three children and wounded ten others who were attending a Taylor Swift–themed dance class in Southport, England. The attack, coupled with false reports about the identity of the attacker, resulted in riots beginning in Southport, where local English residents attacked police. In subsequent days, riots have spread across England, as English protestors riot against police and immigrants, while immigrants have formed armed bands, rioting and attacking English protestors in return. In sharp contrast to the English rioters, foreign rioters are favored by the British state.
While the government has yet to respond decisively to the riots, it seems poised to enact Covid-style lockdowns to prevent further protests from its indigenous population. Simultaneously, the British elite has blamed Britain’s “far-right” for the rioting.
To understand these riots, it can be helpful to look at an analogue in U.S. history. In 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War and following a long decade of left-wing protests (often favored by elites and featuring students from elite backgrounds), blue-collar workers (‘hard hats’) in New York rioted and beat up protestors who were demonstrating against the Vietnam war. The Hard Hat Riot represented a cultural straw breaking the camel’s back and foreshadowed Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide two years later. Blue-collar workers, once a major constituency of the left, had been culturally alienated and left behind as the elites in the Democratic party moved to placate an increasingly detached cultural fringe.
Much as in Britain, where a complacent elite has allowed mass immigration into the United Kingdom and neglected concerns about multiculturalism, America’s cultural elite in the 1970s was entirely disconnected from the working class. The film critic Pauline Kael once wrote in the New Yorker that she knew of only one person who voted for Nixon in his 1972 landslide. Likewise, while working-class Americans were drafted to fight in Vietnam, the children of the elites received deferments for university attendance, and subsequently used their deferments to spit on America’s working-class soldiers. The Hard Hat Riot was the aggravated response to a detached elite by the American populace, and Britain’s current riots, however ugly, come from a similar vein.
As with the Hard Hat Riot, those rioting in Britain are hardly the natural constituents of the Tory Party or the right more broadly. Britain’s anti-immigration riots are occurring principally in the northeast of England, historically Labour’s heartlands, which are now post-industrial and increasingly left behind. That these areas and communities are the ones taking to the streets against multiculturalism should show how detached Britain’s ever-increasingly London-centered left has become from their natural constituency, and how these communities feel as if they have no voice in Westminster.
It should also be noted that both Britain and Ireland, the only two countries to see this kind of rioting on the parts of their indigenous populations, are also the two without any real right-wing immigration restrictionist parties or conservative counter-elites. Such rioting would be unnecessary in Hungary, for instance, and in countries such as France or the Netherlands, there are restrictionist parties that have a reasonable chance of ending up in government. While Britain has Reform UK, and Ireland has an array of minor nationalist parties, these are far from power, and Reform is moderate by continental standards; the party leader Nigel Farage has even distanced himself from France’s (post-dédiabolisation) Rassemblement National. Should the working-class communities angry about multiculturalism gain an electoral vehicle to address their concerns through parliamentary means, such rioting will become superfluous, much as the energy of the Hard Hat Riot was channeled into the electoral process in 1972.
The culpability for Britain’s ongoing riots, much like the Hard Hat Riot of 1970, does not lie at the feet of any of the rioters. Instead, it lies at the feet of the detached elite, which created a dysfunctional society divided on ethnic lines without ever consulting the English themselves. Britain’s elite must either understand the concerns of the working-class on the subject of immigration and multiculturalism and give immigration restrictionists a seat at the table, or face electoral annihilation at the hands of a populist party—just as the American left did in 1972.
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