The Belfast Race Riots

Educating the Brits about their own state, vol. 754

Nobody should be surprised by what has happened in Belfast in recent days. Disgusted, certainly. But surprised? Only if you’ve been paying no attention to the past hundred years of Irish and British history..

Much has been written in recent days about Brexit, economic marginalisation and the baleful influence of Elon Musk and the new right in the rest of the UK as explanations for the violence. These things matter, but there’s much more to it. Plenty of communities across Britain have been ground down by deindustrialisation and the steady withdrawal of the state. They don’t have a tradition of burning their neighbours out of their houses.

What happened in Belfast was similar in some ways to Southport or Rotherham a couple of years ago, but quite distinct in others.

It was neither Catholics nor middle-class Protestants (is it still ok to call them ‘garden centre Prods’ ?) who did the burning and terrorising; it was lower-class loyalists, people within the orbit of residual loyalist paramilitary organisations.

“Loyalist” means loyal to the British crown. The mere idea of Irishness repulses them. They are, in their own self-understanding, the truest of true Britons, the unappreciated bearers and protectors of the national essence. And they have a long, well-documented history of collusion with elements of the British security forces, confirmed by official inquiries, police ombudsman reports and judicial findings. Loyalism has also maintained extensive links with white supremacist organisations in Britain and beyond.

Loyalist violence has always presented itself as defensive. In practice it has always been pre-emptive and coercive. From the expulsion of Catholics from the Belfast shipyards in 1920, through the attacks on civil rights marchers in the late 1960s, loyalist organisations have repeatedly justified targeting civilians by invoking an existential threat that the civilians in question posed no part in. The British state has only sporadically interfered.

The role of republican violence in the Troubles is widely understood in Britain. The history of collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries is considerably less well known, despite the volume of official documentation. That asymmetry shapes how episodes like this one get interpreted. If you don’t know the history, you reach for the nearest available framework, which in England tends to be: violent Irish people doing violent Irish things to each other, with Britain nobly stepping in to keep the peace.

Belfast’s Catholics are now harder to get at than they once were. The peace walls and population exchanges have made the old loyalist targets less accessible, and more confident in their rights than previously. So the targets have shifted. Immigrants are more vulnerable, less protected, not sure where they stand.

There is another factor that doesn’t get discussed enough. One of the unwritten understandings underpinning the Good Friday Agreement was that terrorists on both sides of the sectarian divide would be permitted to rebrand themselves as “community activists” and the like. . Skills developed for intimidation and the maintenance of social control do not simply evaporate, they have found new applications.

The Provisional IRA and its political supporters are many things, none of them good, but unlike their loyalist “colleagues”, sympathy for white nationalism plays no part in their self-image.

The people who burned those houses were not a random eruption of nativist sentiment. They were the inheritors of a specific political tradition, coddled and protected by the British state since the foundation of Northern Ireland a century ago. Their violence has always had institutional cover. This is what English commentary on all this largely keeps missing.

The loyalists’ tragedy, if one can call it that, is that none of this has brought them any affection. The average Brit sees them as being every bit as Irish as I am.

All that loyalty, and that is what it gets them.