Thread by @SAshworthHayes

It's worth spelling out why they act like this.

Britain's establishment is aware that the migration policies it imposed have been an economic and social disaster. It also knows that it would be completely delegitimising to admit this.

https://twitter.com/SAshworthHayes/status/1951753533453135966

The worry about coming clean is twofold. First, they can't see a way to fix the mess, and people would demand that changes were undone. Admitting they've inflicted an irreversible negative doesn't seem like a recipe for harmony. Second, they wouldn't be calling the shots anymore.

The defenestration of the Conservative government last year would look like a tremor next to the earthquake an actual reckoning with the scale of this failure would unleash. The politicians responsible would never hold power again. Their parties would be erased at the polls.

So instead, we have increasingly desperate attempts to manage the “concerning narratives” that have emerged as a result of this dissatisfaction, and two-tier policing to manage the occasional displays of public unease.

Protests or misbehaviour among minority groups that can be minimised by turning a blind eye result in kid glove treatment. The same behaviour among the majority would rapidly spiral out of the ability of Britain’s limited police forces to control.

The result is an attempt to construct an illusory state of affairs where the general public agrees with the state; to smear those who complain as “far Right”, to limit the visibility of dissent in an attempt to avoid common knowledge among the population that views are shared.

In service of this goal the state cracks down on those who do protest or speak out to intimidate others by example. It imposes laws on speech and digital communication, it refuses to track economic, social and criminal outcomes, it refuses to publish data when it has it.

It also pushes tediously transparent narratives about historical wrongs and contributions, and the nature of life in modern Britain in an attempt to forge a national myth for the population to buy into; Britain began when the Windrush arrived to build our NHS, etc.

The goal of the establishment is survival; the goal of the state is managing the backlash until the population is sufficiently demoralised or altered to accept 'YooKay-ification'.

This is why there are state 'spy' units tied to the actual intelligence services monitoring your posts about migrant hotels and demanding social media censorship; this is why there's a unit devoted to domestic propaganda to be wheel out in the wake of the latest terror attack

The reason it's getting increasingly unsubtle is that techniques which previously worked - associate dissent with disreputable far right activists, put moral pressure on people with narratives of current and past wrongs not to object, lie about the scale of issues - are failing

In turn the population has picked up on what's going on, including the police accompanying of 'counter-protesters' to events to make sure there's an alternative to focus on.

But again, it's not working. It's extremely notable that in Epping the usual 'don't look back in anger' frontlash failed to manifest. Over 1,000 protesters turned up, kept turning up, and then protests started to spread.

There are enough communities experiencing the latest wave of migration firsthand that charming news stories about cricket and tea as engines of integration are being drowned out by what people can see happening to their homes. And understandably they want the Government to stop.

This is a problem because it really doesn't intend to. It's too costly to the elite consensus. The alternatives it's willing to offer are: put migrants in houses on your street, or wave them through for instant approval to live among you.

Neither are likely to be popular.

They may make things worse. Policing is a sort of confidence trick. There aren't enough officers to attend simultaneous protests across the country for an extended period. And if they further disperse arrivals they'll have more sites to watch.

So at the moment the plan is 'get through the summer, move to plan b'. If the protests succeed in forcing the government to close a single hotel, they'll erupt everywhere. The goal is not to make that concession.

"May you live in interesting times"