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Those who claim that Britain is “broken” and in precipitate decline have had a good week, and are swift to proffer enticing but lethal cures for the national ills.

In Belfast, a nurse named Chinonso Uche, who came from Nigeria five years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic, told Irish News she is considering leaving the country. During last summer’s riots she was hit on the head with a rock hurled by a rioter as she walked in her white uniform to put in a 12-hour shift in her care home. When she related her experiences online she found that “people are still attacking [me] and telling [me] to go home” – and following this week’s unrest, she believes she has no option but to do just that.

People in Britain avoid thinking about Northern Ireland because they view it as a weird and dangerous place, and one which has no relevance to their lives. But it has just experienced the worst race riots in recent UK history, inspired by hatreds that are also welling up in the rest of Britain.

Burnings and forcing minorities to flee for their lives is not new in the north, but the latest outbreak is the worst since the burning of Bombay Street in West Belfast in 1969. The targets half a century ago were Catholics and today they are non-whites, though in both cases the perpetrators were loyalist/Protestant mobs. Racial identity has replaced religious allegiance as the enemy. Any bus or truck driver of colour is at risk of being dragged by masked men from their vehicle which is then set ablaze.

In much of Protestant/loyalist Northern Ireland, racism is as basic as in Mississippi and Alabama. This is more dangerous nationally than during The Troubles because anti-Catholic hatred was never going to spread from Northern Ireland to secular Britain, but the racist microbe based on colour and ethnicity is much better adapted to make the infection leap from one national host to another.

Some of this racism is blatant, as with the man caught on CCTV in Bolton this week igniting a petrol bomb and throwing it at an imam’s house. At other times, it is spread under the guise of pained but reasoned argument giving a patina of respectability to anti-immigrant and xenophobic grievances. Distinctions are made between legal and illegal migrants, but the Nigerian nurse Uche found to her cost that none of those who attacked her had the slightest interest in what she did or her legal status, only in the colour of her skin.

During the 30-year-long Troubles – in practice a fierce low-level war – Northern Ireland had grim experience of those who might denounce some hideous atrocity, but then pull their punches by emphasising the strong feelings of the community from which the perpetrators had come. Condemnation of sectarian assassinations and bombings was seldom total, and something of the same happened during last week’s pogrom, as some have called it.

As terrified people were being intimidated out of their homes across Northern Ireland, up popped Jonathan Hall KC – the independent reviewer of terrorism – calling for a national debate on the impact of migration on national security. He spoke respectfully of Donald Trump’s “legitimate” concerns in the President’s security strategy published last November, which said that migration had led to a destabilisation of Europe.

Hall said: “It does raise the question if certain countries are more likely either to commit very serious offences or to get involved in state threat activity, do we need to start thinking about migration now not simply in terms of the economy or housing but also in terms of national security?”

Having reported a dozen ethnic and religious conflicts over the years, I know that there is no situation so bad that a supposed expert on terrorism and security cannot make it worse. Their expertise is usually spurious and their ignorance profound. Identifying minorities as a threat to national security was Saddam Hussein’s justification for detaining them, seizing their property, and dumping them on the far side of Iraq’s border.

Once a migrant or ethnically distinct minority acquires pariah status in the eyes of other communities it becomes fair game, regardless of nuance. In Northern Ireland this week, people of colour who had owned their shops there for 30 years saw them reduced to ashes. What happened was very crude: people in the village of Moygashel in County Tyrone last year placed life-sized effigies of 12 people in yellow life jackets in a boat on top of their annual 12 July bonfire to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and set it alight. Below the boat were signs reading “Stop the Boats” and “Veterans Before Refugees”.

As for Trump’s legitimate concerns over migration destabilising Europe, the great destabiliser has clearly been Trump himself, spreading lies about Haitian migrants killing pet cats and demonising the American Somali community – even turning back a respected Somali referee at Miami airport on his way to the World Cup.

Northern Ireland carries many grim lessons for the rest of the UK. Back in 1969, when Bombay Street was burning, British counter-terrorism specialists did much to turn a crisis into a calamity by treating victims – the Catholics of West Belfast – as a security threat. Those responsible for the violence by and large got off scot-free, the British state was delegitimised, and a conflict began which left 3,000 dead.

What might be billed as a national discussion on migration, incorporating Trumpian prejudices, would simply make a bad situation calamitously worse. Northern Ireland has less immigrants and asylum seekers than almost any region in the UK. The boat-burning village of Moygashel has a population of about 1,000, almost exclusively white and Protestants, with about 20 non-whites living there. Even so, a banner was recently erected by the children’s playground reading “Muslims not welcome”. There is, as in so many other places, scant connection between the number of migrants and the hatred expressed towards them.

Britons are slow to recognise what has been called the creeping “Ulsterisation” of the mainland, but it goes on apace. The Rev Ian Paisley was the demagogic populist politician who most resembled Nigel Farage, his rise propelled by religious rather than racial hostility. Paisley’s DUP is the party that most resembles Reform, pounding away on identity issues while ignoring social and economic problems.

Paisley won a crucial by-election in 1970 and became a powerful and toxic political force. Farage and Reform may do the same next Thursday in the Makerfield by-election. Meanwhile, the slow disintegration of Sir Keir Starmer’s Government opens the door to snake-oil political salespeople who know who to blame for the lack of housing and NHS queues.

Countries are frequently described as being at a crossroads in their fortunes, but for the UK this summer such apocalyptic forebodings might for once turn out to be correct as national self-confidence sags, government implodes, money is short – and nobody knows what to do.

A worried nation might drink deep from radical cures like seeking to reverse immigration, which would propel Britain into a Trump-world dystopia of ethnic division and strife. Future pogroms might not be confined to Belfast.

Further Thoughts

Once again President Donald Trump has cancelled “the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran” because “the highest level of Iranian leadership” has approved some sort of deal that had been discussed, but Iran says it has taken no such decision.

Just possibly Trump’s desperation to escape from his forever war will produce a temporary deal, but his track record argues against it. For all his vainglorious boosterism about his skills as a deal maker, the precise opposite is the case. He has shown Iran that he is utterly untrustworthy, twice ordering – in June 2025 and again this February – strikes on Iran in the middle of peace negotiations. Understandably, the Iranians suspect that, if they do make concessions in pursuit of a deal, Trump and Netanyahu will simply bank these, fail to fulfil their side of any bargain, and look for a suitable occasion to resume the war against a weakened Iran.

The Iranians believe that the US and Israel are trying to erode Iran’s strategic gains during the five-and-a-half-week war that was paused on 8 April. Israel is not abiding by any ceasefire in Lebanon and the US has been trying to nibble away at Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. To stop these low-level counter-attacks, Iran has escalated its tit-for-tat retaliation – firing missiles at Kuwait in retaliation for US actions in the Gulf and at Israel for bombing Beirut. This doubling down by Iran speeds up escalation by all sides and brings the final breakdown of the current ceasefire nearer.

As regards Lebanon, Iran is the main Shia Muslim power and was much criticised by Lebanese Shia in 2024 for doing nothing when Israel struck devastating blows at a long-time Iranian ally, the Lebanese Shia paramilitary movement Hezbollah. This included the assassination of its revered leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Also hobbling any chance of a peace deal is the sheer amateurism and de-skilling of what passes for US diplomacy, with real experts sacked, ignored or marginalised by Trump and his minions. Instead, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his real-estate associate Steve Witkoff are his emissaries, though the Iranians say they often do not understand the issues under discussion. This weird and ineffectual pair are an apt symbol of the US state in decline.

Trump is the great decider on what is agreed or disagreed with Iran. The Iranians may hope that a fast-approaching world depression, caused by the continuing closure of the Strait of Hormuz, or fear of Republicans losses in the midterm Congressional elections, might force him into making concessions. But surely it is more likely that, like other totalitarian leaders such as President Vladimir Putin, Trump must always appear victorious. He will never accept failure in his war, any more than he accepted that he had lost the 2020 presidential election. Putin likewise cannot end his war in Ukraine because to do so would be to admit how far he has failed to secure his original goals.

As for Israel, its objective has always been to wage war as a close ally of the US with the aim of degrading or destroying the Iranian state, regardless of who is in charge in Tehran. To this end it needs to reignite the war not end it.

As Daniel Levy, former Israeli diplomat and Middle East commentator, describes in his excellent Substack: “The ways in which Israel is working to be as influential in preventing an end to this war as it was in curating how the war was launched. It may be that negotiations, whether now or later, are doomed irrespective of Israeli machinations. Israel apparently is not convinced of that, given the effort it is putting into operating as a deliberate, committed, and relentless saboteur.”

Beneath the Radar

The sudden surge of resignations by cabinet ministers on points of principle suggests that the good ship Starmer has not long for this world. A curious feature of this exodus is that few people know the names of those departing. How many people, even those who follow politics closely, could have identified John Healey as Defence Secretary before his resignation letter, a prolix document which the media described as “scathing”.

Healey’s political personality appears identical to Starmer’s in its adoption of conventional establishment wisdom when he says: “It is our intelligence assessment, and the assessment of other countries in Nato, that there could be an attack by Russia on Nato as soon as 2030.” Why anybody should take this seriously, given the Russian military debacle in Ukraine – four years and no advance – is a mystery. The explanation is that Western military establishments have always exaggerated the Soviet/Russian threat.

The Pentagon never saw a new Soviet it did not describe as a world beater, which only vast expenditure by our side could hope to counter. At one particularly steamy moment in the Cold War the Soviets were supposed to have 1,500 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). The real figure was just four.

Cockburn’s Picks

I have always liked people from West Belfast and thought of them as smart, articulate and unintimidated by danger – characteristics exemplified by Maitiu Mag Tighearnan, who used his son’s hurling stick to save the life of a man in danger of being murdered by a knife-wielding assailant.