For the vast majority of my life I’ve taken the path of intelligent non-violence and it is a path that has served me well. It has allowed me to talk myself out of trouble in the vast majority of times when faced with bullies at school or aggressive people I’ve encountered as an adult. It’s enabled me to judge which hostile crowds I can safely walk through and which ones I can’t and taught me how to be just the right degree of unthreatening to allow me to sit up at the bar drinking and reading the Daily Telegraph in certain ‘villains’ pubs’ in East London without getting my head kicked in.

As a photojournalist and a court reporter, I mixed with and met as part of my work armed robbers, football hooligans, high level fraudsters, killers and much more and I have come out of these encounters mostly unscathed. When I was a man of the Left decades ago, I lifted up the stone under which resided the truly violent revolutionary Left and after looking at what I found I rejected them and their ideas, because I could see clearly how this particular political current doesn’t build but can only destroy. In my late teens I became an admirer of the non-violence techniques of Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi, although now I can see clearly that these techniques only really work with opponents who are basically fair minded and decent. King and Gandhi’s techniques worked because their opponents were on the whole amenable to peaceful change and those who could see that change was necessary. Also their campaigns were at the right places and the right times. Such techniques would not have worked if they were faced with monsters of the calibre of Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler.

In my own writing, I’ve had as a constant rule the idea that the problems that Britain and the West face should be sorted out peacefully and politically rather than via violent means and I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions the dire consequences of not taking the peaceful political path. Parts of my formative years were filled with news from conflicts in Vietnam, Ulster, Lebanon and elsewhere, conflicts that occurred in some cases because peaceful political means of change had broken down or had become impossible. I’ve tended to take the view of former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan** that ‘“Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” and that it’s better for problems be sorted out at the negotiating table rather than on a battlefield. I’m not a naive pacifist by any means, as I can see that there are some evils such as Communism and Nazism that could only be solved by either engaging them in battle or being so strong that the opponent is loathe to attack. However, where problems can be solved or reduced by debate or negotiation or compromise then they should be.

Because of my background and my views, I have been utterly horrified by the result of a recent survey of 1200 people that has been featured on the podcast of the Lotuseaters. This survey found that 1/3rd roughly of the 1200 people questioned believed that violence was the answer to prevent fake ‘refugees’ being settled in their towns and cities. One of the questions in the survey that got a significant minority of approving responses asked if violence was the only way to get the Government’s attention with regard the ‘refugee’ problems that Britain’s towns and cities are suffering from. The fact that 39% of responders to this survey question agreed that violence was the answer in this context is truly both horrific and appalling. As one of the Lotuseaters guys said in their video (embedded below) ‘in a functioning democracy the amount of people agreeing with this statement would be around 1% to 2%’. That it is nowhere near that figure, is something we should all worry about.

Whilst there are valid critical questions that could and should be asked about this survey, such as the small sample size and the fact that this was an online one where self selection can become an issue, the numbers, if they are in any way accurate should be a concern to anyone who wants a peaceable society. As someone who has observed the extremes of Left and Right over the years, I know that those who occupy these extremes of politics are small in number. Hard core Stalinists, Trotskyists and National Socialists have for decades been electorally a tiny pimple on the face of the British body politic, but to see such acceptance of political violence is very new for Britain. It’s Weimar Germany levels of acceptance of violence and reminiscent of a time where Communists and National Socialists believed that street battles rather than the ballot box was the way to achieve political ends.

Even considering that these figures should be taken with the caveat of questions about their accuracy, it’s still a worrying thing to see. I can’t recall any time in modern British history, at least post WWII history, where so many people have said ‘yes’ to the idea of political violence. We didn’t see this in the years of rapid social change of the mid 1950’s to the end of the 1960’s, nor was it a major factor in the time of economic stagnation in the 1970’s nor did we see it during the years of Thatcherism nor during the tumultuous years of often unwanted change of the Blair and Brown administrations. The fact that we are seeing this now is a symptom that something has gone badly wrong with politics in the UK.

So where does the blame lie for this horrific state of affairs? While those who choose political violence are ultimately to blame for their own actions, a fair bit of blame needs to be laid at the feet of the political classes. For decades the mainstream parties have promised the British public faithfully that they would reduce migration into Britain, improve integration, and cut down on the ways that people who should never have been allowed to settle in the UK get to stay. The political classes have also promised the British public that no group or member of a group is above the law and that we are all equal under that law, but that is beginning to look like both a lie and a sick joke.

I’ve rarely been frightened by the results of a political survey but I’ve been frightened by this one. I was concerned at stuff in the past, such as the rise in homophobia and anti-gay opinion that erupted during the beginnings of the AIDS Crisis of the 1980’s but that viewpoint burned itself out as more people started to understand that mindless viruses don’t discriminate between people but only between behaviours. But this particular survey is indeed frightening. To have so many survey responses approving of political violence is absolutely horrifying for me because the choice to accept political violence from one side raises the prospect of other groups also deciding that political violence is the way to go. This is indicative of the sort of proto-Civil War societal conditions that Elon Musk was commenting about recently.

Can this appalling situation be turned around? I believe it can, but not by rampant oppression, a policy that only creates martyrs among a population cohort that has by now got little left to lose, so excluded are they from the wider society. It can only be changed by way of the ballot box and by voting for politicians who tell the truth about Britain’s many problems and who can be trusted to deal with these problems and not merely scream ‘racist’ or ‘enjoy your enforced diversity suckers’ at those who’ve voted for them once they have achieved political power, something both of the main Westminster parties have done. It’s politics that has got us into this mess and politics that must be the means of getting out of it.