Ugly scenes in Belfast expose a broken politics | Letters

Readers respond to nights of rioting in the city fuelled by anti-migrant rhetoric I agree with John Harris’s analysis (Cars burn in Belfast, bricks fly in Southampton – and the ubiquitous cry of ‘civil war’ goes up again, 10 June). He misses one obvious point, though. Since the election of the first Thatcher government in 1979, there has been a continuous attack on the rights and living standards of working-class people, such that we are now seeing a decline in healthy life expectancy for the poorest in the UK. We might think of this as a civil war which only one side is waging. Because the language of class has been erased from our politics, the “white working class” only hear themselves being spoken about when Nigel Farage or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon tell them how the system has failed them. As was the case in Germany in 1933, a political class that has no answers to the problems its politics have created is considering turning to a demagogue stirring up civil war as the way out of its dead end. When people hear talk of “civil war” or the need to make “white lives matter”, it fits with their recognition that their own lives don’t matter, and in the absence of any analysis that puts