The recent riots in the UK over immigration have shown themselves to be a stain in the social order of among communities that were once known for their harmony or attempts at it. Since Brexit or the moment when the vote happened that allowed the United Kingdom to abandon the European trade block anti-migrant sentiment has been on the rise. A lot of the times this sentiment has turned on British nationals with not so British ancestry such as South Asian, African, Middle Eastern and even Eastern European. For the longest time this sentiment was approached with turning up of the nose among the supposedly sane populace who would look to this as a smear on their British character.

However, this was the beginning of a missed opportunity. You could argue it was intentional. A large part of the British population, the traditional British population (white men and women) were starting to feel out of place economically. There was a sense that they would not be able to survive in their own homeland. The promises of the likes of Nigel Farage exploited this sentiment to the fullest in the hopes of obtaining long sought after political power. The opportunity here was that of just addressing the suffering. Whenever social programs that help address the needs of the struggling population patience wears thin and blame runs amok. However, instead of resolving this sentiment, it was exploited for political expedience. To what end?

On the other hand, you have people flooding in from other parts of the world who very much look like the British nationals whose families may have come from those same part but have been in the UK for generations. These were families that arrived in the UK after the colonial experiments in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and South Asia had hit a point of no return. The empire needed a new way to maintain it hammer over the territories and it offered access to the seat of empire. Thus people arrived the UK from families in other parts of the world who had also been deprived of an honorable path to prosperity and just plain scarcity of resources. And unlike their native British counterparts kicking out immigrants did not exactly lead to prosperity because the governing policy was also flawed. They too came from societies where their agony was exploited for political expedience. While Brexit and its aftermath has been simmering in the UK for the past nine years, the political and economic instability in the countries the immigrants (new and old) hail from have been going on for over sixty years. That is about two generations and if you add the colonial experiment make that centuries.

Survival is tested in necessity and discontent. A hungry person is an angry person. And if you notice, hungry people are seldom polite. In their attempts to generate energy, they may resort to some sort of anti-social behavior such as a display of rudeness, bad temper or just a plain cold attitude. Then there is the starving person who has grown used to hunger. This person does not expect food necessarily but often faces a descent into amoral behavior in order to obtain food. The rules of decency and economic fairness slip further and further off his conscience as he realizes his chances of nourishment are wearing thin. Hungry people will indicate their hunger through flashes of behavior but starving people will punch through with their resolve. In their resolve, a starving person will rob a market, climb a fence, shoplift at a supermarket, run through a desert, take a boat into the high seas… Once a person is in starvation mode, their consideration for their safety and that of others increasingly wears thin.

Thus when we see the people in the streets in UK protesting migrants after the murder of three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance event, we see the consequences of the irrationality of starvation. The horror of the crime cannot be undermined of course. However, this issue cannot solely be made into conversation on discontent with migrants or descendants of migrants. The quality of life in the city where these murders took place have been steadily on the decline and people have been losing their sense of consideration for their neighbor. When there is scarcity, resources can only be gained through competition. The longer a person loses out on that contest the thinner their patience gets. Neighbors go from collaborators to enemies. When both are at the mercy of incomplete history lessons that would show that their suffering may have been brought about by the same forces, they do not often realize fighting to the death is not act of honor but a mere opportunity cost.