What is particularly striking to me, as an Irishman, is seeing parts of the Midlands coming to resemble Lisburn or Bangor. These territorial markers (make no mistake that\u2019s what they are) are common in Ireland\u2019s occupied six counties; for decades, Protestant towns and streets have been lined with scores of Ulster Banners, Union Jacks, and paramilitary flags.<\/p>\n
Markers of areas where reactionary ethnopolitics have taken precedence over functional institutions, and shady figures use fear of\u00a0the other\u00a0to keep their fiefdom under the boot. Seeing them spring up in England, I can\u2019t help but wonder if they portend another of the Empire\u2019s chickens coming home to roost, and with it the division, repression, and political paralysis once reserved for the colonies.<\/p>\n
The British Far Right has long been infatuated with Ulster Loyalism, exalting it as an aspirational form of super-patriotism long extinct in Britain.<\/p>\n
Loyalism\u2019s ruthless violence and flag-waving pomp echo the idealised Postman Pat past that the British Right imagines it can resurrect.<\/p>\n
Naturally, groups like the BNP, National Front, and Combat 18 forged close ties to organisations across the Loyalist ecosystem throughout the Troubles, with key players sometimes holding dual membership.<\/p>\n
However, for the most part, direct involvement with militant Loyalism was something only the truly fanatical stumbled upon through right-wing literature obtained via mail order, prisoner welfare associations like the LPWA, or football hooliganism.<\/p>\n
Today, organisational links are no longer necessary. Disseminating tactics and ideology, previously the sole preserve of dangerous bald men on either side of the Irish Sea, can now be done through TikTok or via the travelling band of right-wing content creators who routinely document the ongoing arrest. June\u2019s riots in Ballymena<\/a>, Co. Antrim, saw Loyalist youth burning homes, cars, and public buildings in response to the sexual assault of a young girl by two Romanian nationals.<\/p>\n What started as a violent protest quickly escalated into a full-blown pogrom, seeing immigrants in the town scramble to drape their homes in Loyalist symbols in the hope the mob would pass peacefully by their door. Numerous livestreams on TikTok and Instagram showed the violence live.<\/p>\n Anglos cheered the violence on in comment sections as houses in Ireland were petrol bombed and pelted with bricks. And it worked \u2014 Ballymena has seen over 60% of its 1200 Roma residents leave<\/a>, and you can bet the British far right are taking notes and praying for a breakdown in public order.<\/p>\n Such a breakdown, particularly civil war, has been the subject <\/a>of dozens of right-wing podcasts and YouTube videos for the past six months, regularly featuring Professor David Betz, a King\u2019s College London War Studies expert.<\/p>\n While Betz\u2019s and others\u2019 personal hard-ons for civil war are likely alarmist and darkly hopeful, unrest and violence are almost guaranteed to worsen.<\/p>\n As they do, wounds will be gouged in the sinew of Britain that will tear open again and again, things will break that will take decades to mend, and people will die. The only way out is to be honest and look for solutions.<\/p>\n The first thing to admit is that Westminster\u2019s long-botched handling of irregular immigration has turned disasterously ugly. Asylum hotels are generally placed in disadvantaged areas with little thought for the well-being of local residents or the migrants, whilst the private companies that operate the hotels receive around \u00a32.1bn<\/a> of public money annually.<\/p>\n This creates the now weekly fixture of a baying mob tailed by a gaggle of Hope Not Hate activists \u2014 often parachuted in from more cosmopolitan areas for a tone deaf appeal to the community to be nice in the wake of disturbing crimes by migrants against locals, as was the case in\u00a0Epping<\/a>,\u00a0Nuneaton,<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Sutton in Ashfield<\/a>.<\/p>\n This mass panic around asylum hotels, which many decent people now perceive as a threat to their children \u2014 a perception not helped by the 200 asylum hotel residents charged with crimes this year \u2014 is not going away. This is further compounded by perceived lax sentences for serious offenders and the tsunami of online misinformation.<\/p>\n This fear is then carefully manipulated into anger against Britain\u2019s 3.9 million Muslims by Britain’s Zionist-infiltrated right-wing commentariat. Who gleefully bundle British Muslims, Palestine, and irregular immigration into a single three-headed hydra to be lanced by flag-draped patriots.<\/p>\n Additionally, British law enforcement\u2019s failure to combat grooming gangs, as well as allegations of \u2018two-tier policing\u2019 during last year\u2019s Southport riots, have created the impression among the white working class that they are under attack, or worse, being replaced. Their British identity is intrinsically tied to a state that no longer cares about them. For a demographic that has been systemically disenfranchised and demonised for decades, any further loss of status in their homeland is too much to take.<\/p>\n In response, many of Britain\u2019s \u2018socialists\u2019 only seem capable of offering sneering clich\u00e9s about eating Indian curries and driving German cars, statements which ironically underscore the UK\u2019s transition to a service economy that many are not adequately educated or empowered to participate in.<\/p>\n The incessant cries of \u2018Nazi\u2019 and \u2018racist\u2019 have rendered those words meaningless, now just unhelpfully washing over people who are too angry, scared, or radicalised to care.<\/p>\n Following victories in Ballymena, Epping, and Canary Wharf, the flag-shagging Jihad is unlikely to lose momentum. Groups like Britain First and Reform UK will only continue to grow as people abandon traditional politics in favour of anyone who promises an end to irregular immigration.<\/p>\n The more England\u2019s fractured society comes to resemble the North, the more its policing will as well. The tactics perfected in the North in the 1970s were later deployed against striking miners in the 1980s. Westminster will tramp militarised policing in from its closest colony like shit on its shoe.<\/p>\n Unleashing\u00a0surveillance technology<\/a>\u00a0tested in its Ulster laboratory (often alongside states like\u00a0Israel<\/a>) on their own people. This slide toward authoritarianism can already be seen in the hundreds arrested for protesting genocide or the 13-month imprisonment<\/a> of a child-minder for venting her rage online after the murder of three children.<\/p>\n The cross-pollination of decades of British frustration over immigration and Loyalism\u2019s pathological siege mentality may bear poisonous fruit. In a worst-case scenario, the delineation of Saxon territory, if it intensifies, will incite Britain\u2019s Muslims and others to follow suit \u2014a true Island of Strangers.<\/p>\n On this new island, Whitehall can act as the colonial administration it was born to be, managing the decline and the inevitable tribal and sectarian unrest from its satrapy on the Thames \u2014 the once proud towns of England reduced to \u2018flegs\u2019, Greggs, and Turkish barbers, heavy with tension and self-partitioned like a thousand tiny colonies.<\/p>\n For many in Britain, like their cousins in Ulster, the only way to reach the future is by way of the past. People are tired. Years of austerity, skyrocketing house prices, stagnant wages, and record immigration have left millions with nothing to call their own but their flag.<\/p>\n Adam Doyle is an Irish artist and political commentator working under the moniker \u2018Spicebag\u2019. Doyle\u2019s work around Irish culture, politics and Palestinian solidarity has garnered international coverage.<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Join](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Whatsapp-TNA-desktop.webp.webp\"\/)
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