This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Those who claim that Britain is “broken” and in precipitate decline have had a good week, and are swift to proffer enticing but lethal cures for the national ills.

In Belfast, a nurse named Chinonso Uche, who came from Nigeria five years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic, told Irish News she is considering leaving the country. During last summer’s riots she was hit on the head with a rock hurled by a rioter as she walked in her white uniform to put in a 12-hour shift in her care home. When she related her experiences online she found that “people are still attacking [me] and telling [me] to go home” – and following this week’s unrest, she believes she has no option but to do just that.

People in Britain avoid thinking about Northern Ireland because they view it as a weird and dangerous place, and one which has no relevance to their lives. But it has just experienced the worst race riots in recent UK history, inspired by hatreds that are also welling up in the rest of Britain.

Burnings and forcing minorities to flee for their lives is not new in the north, but the latest outbreak is the worst since the burning of Bombay Street in West Belfast in 1969. The targets half a century ago were Catholics and today they are non-whites, though in both cases the perpetrators were loyalist/Protestant mobs. Racial identity has replaced religious allegiance as the enemy. Any bus or truck driver of colour is at risk of being dragged by masked men from their vehicle which is then set ablaze.

In much of Protestant/loyalist Northern Ireland, racism is as basic as in Mississippi and Alabama. This is more dangerous nationally than during The Troubles because anti-Catholic hatred was never going to spread from Northern Ireland to secular Britain, but the racist microbe based on colour and ethnicity is much better adapted to make the infection leap from one national host to another.

Some of this racism is blatant, as with the man caught on CCTV in Bolton this week igniting a petrol bomb and throwing it at an imam’s house. At other times, it is spread under the guise of pained but reasoned argument giving a patina of respectability to anti-immigrant and xenophobic grievances. Distinctions are made between legal and illegal migrants, but the Nigerian nurse Uche found to her cost that none of those who attacked her had the slightest interest in what she did or her legal status, only in the colour of her skin.

During the 30-year-long Troubles – in practice a fierce low-level war – Northern Ireland had grim experience of those who might denounce some hideous atrocity, but then pull their punches by emphasising the strong feelings of the community from which the perpetrators had come. Condemnation of sectarian assassinations and bombings was seldom total, and something of the same happened during last week’s pogrom, as........

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