𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Burning lorries, waving flares, chanting mobs, flying bricks, injured police officers and water cannon sweeping the streets. It’s sickening to watch. This is Keir Starmer’s Britain, and it’s going up in flames. The PM rightly condemned the violence as “shocking and completely unacceptable”. It is. But as ever, his feeble response is nowhere near enough, and onlyshows that he’s lost control of the situation. It will do nothing to stop the violence.

In Belfast, they’re enflamed by the horrific attempted public beheading of Stephen Ogilvie by a Sudanese asylum seeker. In Southampton, riots followed the nightmarish Henry Nowak murder case. Last year, the horrendous Southport murders triggered unrest in London, Manchester, Hartlepool, Sunderland, Liverpool, Blackpool and Rotherham. We’re reaching the point where every random stabbing risks sparking yet another riot. And there will be more stabbings and sexual assaults. Unless our politicians take decisive action, there will be more riots too.

The Government can jail those responsible. But unless Britain regains control of its asylum system and stops the boats, the anger will keep building. A government that cannot control its borders is failing at the most basic level. Only one senior Labour figure appears to recognise the danger. Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has pushed for a tougher approach, but faces internal resistance at every turn.

Britain is arguably the most successful multiracial society in Europe. We should be proud of that. Today though, many voters feel immigration is out of control.

The so-called Boriswave stretched public feeling to breaking point, with 2.6million arriving in just a few years. Starmer’s pledge to “smash the gangs” and bribe the French authorities to stop the small boats are laughable. Unless Labour gets a grip, public anger aimed at asylum seekers could turn against black and Asian Britons whose families have lived here for generations. It also needs to make Jewish people feel safe in the UK, as Middle East hatreds are imported from abroad. This could turn very ugly, very quickly. So what is Labour doing?

Just as the country needs Westminster to focus on this divisive issue, Labour has chosen to descend into civil war. If Andy Burnham wins next week’s Makerfield by-election, he could trigger a leadership contest that could drag on for at least three months.

Candidates will compete for the votes of Labour MPs, activists and trade unions by making increasingly extravagant promises to the left. Not just on tax and spending, but on immigration too. That’s more likely to inflame tensions than reassure voters that somebody is listening.

There’s also a real risk that Mahmood’s tougher approach gets watered down, or that she is sidelined altogether. Once again, Angela Rayner is pushing back. Labour infighting couldn’t be happening at a worse time.

It might be justified if Burnham was going to get a grip on things. But he isn’t. He U-turns as often as Starmer. Worse, he hasn’t got a clue how to revive the economy. His answer is more spending, more taxation, more state intervention and more EU. Maybe more immigration too.

As the wars in Iran and Ukraine drag on, oil prices rise, inflation climbs and youth unemployment surges, Britain is facing a summer of discontent. There’s excitable talk of a civil war. There’s certainly a civil war in Labour. The party is fighting over whether it wants Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham to do the flip-flopping in Downing Street. They’re fiddling while Britain burns.