The lanyard class is imploding – and it can't blame Musk

Spectator

4 days ago

I was surprised to read a report by Sunder Katwala's thinktank British Future saying the UK is a 'powder keg' of community tensions and warning of further unrest this summer. In a foreword by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, who are co-chairing a commission looking into last year's riots, Britain is described as 'fragmented' and 'fragile', seemingly only one newspaper headline away from descending into civil war.
Aren't these the same public intellectuals and politicians who, until ten minutes ago, were cheerleaders for multiculturalism? I thought the arrivalof hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year was enriching our street life, improving our cuisine and revitalising our art and literature? Isn't the absorption of millions of foreign nationals, many from countries with very different customs to ours, a great British success story? Diversity is our strength, don'tcha know. Now, suddenly, our cities are hellscapes, riven with ethnic and religious tensions that could erupt into violence any minute. Enoch Powell was a prophet all along.
This loss of faith by our metropolitan overlords seems to have happened overnight. Have they all had their iPhones ripped from their hands by gangs of marauding cyclists? Their rose-tinted view of mass immigration has been replaced by a pathological fear of social disorder: anarchophobia.
That was brought home to me when it emerged that one reason the government suppressed the news about rehousing 24,000 Afghans was the fear that it would light the blue touch paper and… kaboom! Our lords and masters really do think that ordinary people are a bunch of angry troglodytes milling about on street corners looking for the slightest excuse to start setting emergency vehicles ablaze.
Needless to say, there's only one solution to this combustible state of affairs: more censorship. Forget about stopping the boats or doing anything about the grooming gangs. No, the reason the proles are on a hair trigger is 'misinformation'. It's all Elon Musk's fault! That was the conclusion of a cross-party group of MPs on the Science, Innovation and Technology select committee who issued a report two weeks ago claiming the Online Safety Act is basically useless because it hasn't given Ofcom the power to force platforms to remove fake news. 'The viral amplification of false and harmful content can cause very real harm – helping to drive the riots we saw last summer,' said the chair, Dame Chi Onwurah.
No wonder Lucy Connolly has been banged up for 31 months. It was her tweet after the Southport attack saying people could set fire to asylum hotels for all she cared, and implying an illegal immigrant was responsible for the murders, that was single–handedly responsible for the worst outbreak of social disorder since 2011. If only Musk had trained his algorithms to delete such dangerous 'misinformation', we'd have had a summer of multicultural street parties with Progress Pride flags and big banners saying: 'Refugees Welcome.'
I've been trying to work out the mental gymnastics behind such an 'analysis' and I think it goes something like this: 'We have no regrets about promoting mass immigration despite the electorate repeatedly telling us not to. That policy has absolutely nothing to do with the growing cynicism about politicians, collapsing trust in institutions and fraying social cohesion. Our vision of a rainbow Britain would have come to pass were it not for that pesky Musk and his hateful algorithms.'
I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. Listen to Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a pro-censorship lobby group. 'One year on from the Southport riots, X remains the crucial hub for hate-filled lies and incitement of violence targeting migrants and Muslims,' he told the Guardian. Incidentally, Imran has fled to Washington, so great is his anarchophobia.
At some point you'd think it would occur to these geniuses that the aggressive policing of social media posts – more than 30 people a day are being nicked for speech crimes– isn't having the desired effect. Last time I checked, Reform UK was riding high at 34 per cent in the polls. Maybe the real reason these people don't like their policies being attacked online is that, deep down, they've lost faith in them themselves and don't want to be forced to defend them. It's not British society that's on the verge of imploding. It's the lanyard class.