Nothing much works in Britain these days, but the machinery that churns out armed shitstorms is working perfectly. Why might that be? Consider the dismally familiar pattern of recent events.

Every year since the Knowsley riot in February 2023, which targeted asylum accommodation after footage circulated of an asylum seeker chatting up a fifteen-year-old girl, there has been a new outburst of popular violence against migrants. In summer 2024, after a mass stabbing incident falsely blamed on an asylum seeker said to be on an “MI6 watch list,” riots and pogroms broke out in Hull, Sunderland, Rotherham, Liverpool, Aldershot, Leeds, Middlesborough, Tamworth, Belfast, Bolton, Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster, and Manchester. Last summer, as racist protests descended on asylum hotels nationally, loyalists (the term for right-wing Protestants loyal to the British crown) in Ballymena reacted to the prosecution of a pair of adolescents for attempted rape by descending on Clonavon Terrace, where many refugees were housed, and setting fire to homes. Two-thirds of the Roma community were forced to leave the town.

And now, again in the summer months, Belfast has gone up in flames. The occasion for the violence was a grim stabbing attack on Stephen Ogilvie, reportedly by a Sudanese refugee who had leave to remain. The attack happened on Kinnaird Avenue in north Belfast, a Catholic street not far from the Crumlin Road. Once again, Ulster’s peace-loving bampots determined that such violence could only have been brought to Northern Ireland by brown-skinned interlopers. Never mind that the province has its own gory history of knife violence. Never mind that Ogilvie himself had previously been tortured by a gang linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force, the loyalist paramilitaries that murdered Catholics with the collusion of the British state during the “Troubles.” Although the stabbing happened on a Catholic street, the pogrom that ensued was largely carried out by loyalists and young men from loyalist parts of north and east Belfast.