Today I think I ought to go back to something I wrote in this entry a couple of days ago. My dad called me up on it when we were speaking the day after, and as usual he had a good point: I shouldn’t have dismissed everyone who attended the protest on Saturday as morons or idiots. Many would have understood full well what they were doing – which, if anything, makes things even more frightening. At the same time, it’s frankly difficult for me not to suspect that most of the people I encountered on Saturday would have had a considerably lower education than those who watched it aghast from the sidelines.

Perhaps I should try to qualify that. I grew up going to a special school, and have done voluntary work at one. Over the years I have met numerous people with learning difficulties, often quite profound, as well as people with severe autism. Obviously, there is no correlation between such people and the people I encountered on Saturday. To equate one group with the other is as erroneous as it is lazy. People with LD can be as kind, gentle and open-minded as anyone else; what we witnessed on the streets of central London on Saturday boiled down to pure thuggery and hooliganism born of anger. Nonetheless, while I do not want to make baseless assumptions or lean too heavily on stereotypes, it was quite clear simply from the vocabulary and sentence structures I was hearing those around me using, as well as the content of the conversations I overheard, that these were people that the education system had to a large extent bypassed.

Yet that leaves an obvious question: how can we account for such behaviour and the wider feeling of discontent we’re currently seeing, not just here but in America? It seems to be being channeled more and more into a kind of vehement nationalism, with people being drawn towards simplistic ‘us and them’ mentalities. People seem to be feeling disenfranchised and left behind by an increasingly articulate, educated, technologically-astute society: perhaps those left by the wayside amid the ‘dash for degrees’ fifteen or twenty years ago now feel a need to strike back at those they see as ‘elites’. They do not have the vocabulary – the cultural capital – to participate in public discourse at the same level as those they see around them, and channel such alienation into a heady mixture of fury and pride. At the same time, I also think their frustrations are being deliberately mischannelled by social leaders such as Farage or Yaxley-Lennon who use such anger for their own political gain. Such charlatans have not only pinned the blame for people’s woes on members of other socioeconomic minorities, but have now managed to make it look like being openly discriminatory towards such minorities is an act of strength, independence and courage. We have seen such usurpation countless times throughout history, and it has seldom ended well.

Of course I am only speculating here. I would like to go much deeper into these issues though, into what is causing the social unrest and stratification we are currently witnessing. It is far too simplistic to dismiss those currently sliding to the right, shouting their heads off about immigrants as just stupid or misguided. Yet to ignore them is equally dangerous. They are clearly extremely angry, but their anger is being misdirected into something abhorrent. History teaches us that if we don’t do something about the root causes of such feelings soon, something utterly sickening can only follow.