Bexleyheath has reintroduced lockdown measures in response to rumours of ‘TikTok-fueled looting’. In an op-ed for UnHerd, Doug Stokes reflects on his own experiences growing up in Hackney, and how London today is a far cry from the multicultural harmony he remembers. Here’s an excerpt:
Lockdown reportedly returned to Bexleyheath on Saturday. As rumours about an impending wave of ‘TikTok-fuelled looting’ circulated on social media, shopkeepers debated whether it was safe to unlock their doors. Eventually they did, but only after a dispersal order was issued, handing the police additional powers to snuff out antisocial behaviour. No doubt the Met’s officers hoped to avoid a repeat of the carnage that had unfolded earlier in the week, when gangs of children ran amok on Oxford Street, allegedly in the hope of ransacking a JD Sports.
Central London isn’t “safe anymore”, led one report after the mayhem. Countless others carried a similar message: that lawlessness had returned to the capital’s streets.
You will forgive me if I reserve my shock and outrage. I was born in Hackney, East London, in the early Seventies, when such scenes regularly played out in working-class communities to little or no media fanfare. My inner-city state schools were more like prisons, and by the time I was 18, I had seen more acts of violence than I care to remember. …
Despite the horrors, my memories of Hackney remain mixed. As violent and poor as it once was, there was always a sense of solidarity. The settled white working-class communities were nearly always at the sharp end of the policies imposed by successive post-war governments, almost all without democratic consent. Mass immigration radically altered those communities, but they largely muddled along as best they could, forming cross-cultural social norms. At my grandmother’s funeral, mourners from every race gathered to commemorate the life of a white working-class cockney matriarch. Born into desperate poverty to a widowed mum with seven kids in the thirties, she formed deep bonds with the first-generation Afro-Caribbean mums who, as they grew older, would look out for each other.
Over the past decade, however, such multiracial harmony has slowly been replaced with new cultural norms centred around self-expression and hyper-individualism. The civilising nature of national identity and shared values – precisely those that held together the long put-upon British working class, black and white – are now viewed as gauche and unreconstructed concepts. In their place, today’s cultural narratives divide society along identity lines. If it erases the agency and ‘lived experience’ of long-established working-class communities and casts the U.K. as a racist hellhole, so be it.
Worth reading in full.
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I dunno. Just looked at a selection of images from “bexleyheath looting” internet search. Didn’t look very multicultural to me.
It does if you include the police in the images.
Lol. The Met not doing a good enough job making sure they reflect the people they arrest.
People left alone will often naturally congregate with others like them. We don’t force it in certain areas of London for example, so why should we force it everywhere else.
This is a difficult thing to do. We want to be a strong national culture that asserts its identity but given the level of selling out that has occurred over the last few decades we simply can’t. This country has a spiritual potential greater than any other country in the world. It has to be reconnected and re-established. You will not find a political solution to a spiritual problem. You will not even be able to map out the means and methods because it is beyond that. As things deteriorate there will be movements that move closer and closer to the spiritual source
We were a strong National culture – now apparently we don’t, we want a Balkanised one based on race.
If you import far too many people from 3rd world poverty, who have negative standards of behaviour and contempt for the law you eventually get a society which consists of poverty, negative standards of behaviour and contempt for the law.
If you import Albanian mafia/drug gang members, you will get a society which is run by the Albania mafia/drug gangs.
Enoch warned us. The Establishment cancelled him and continued with their destructive policy of race-replacement.
Any damned excuse to impose the agenda & use fear to convince the people that TPTB know what is best for the by terrorising the people to willingly hand over control of their lives.
TPTB want lockdown to become a normalised response to anything.
My old Cockney father-in-law, bless him, used to talk about his boyhood days in the early 20th century, when whole families used to take a constitutional after the evening meal, and go for a stroll along their local thoroughfares in the East End. Any nonsense from ‘yoof’ would have been swiftly dealt with by beefy dads.
Culture defines society.
Multiple cultures means multiple societies.
Multiple societies is not a demos, it is tribalism.
Tribalism = conflict, warfare.
When race is used to define culture (racism), then it becomes a race war.
Well done all those modernist, multicultural progressives who contributed.
Why looting has returned to London. Because they expect to get away with it because they are Black.