Ruth Dudley Edwards: The UK is an astonishingly tolerant country - it is too easy to blame the current tensions on the 'far right'

Since I came to live in London more than 50 years ago, I’ve always marvelled at the astonishing tolerance of its residents. The Irish, like the Windrush generation, were largely welcomed for providing necessary labour.

Still, the IRA murdered about 50 people in London over the decades and their arrogance and blood lust including killing MPs and trying to blow up Number 10 Downing Street. Yet I never experienced much anti-Irish feeling and Irish broadcasters were much loved.

Meanwhile, there were rising immigrant levels that people were powerless to resist. Thousands of neighbourhoods were transformed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the ‘Africa for the Africans’ movement saw tens of thousands of people of south Asian heritage stripped of their possessions and expelled. Over 70,000 of them came to England — the majority to London — and some neighbourhoods became unrecognisable to those whose families had been there for many generations.

It took a few decades, but grumbling about smell of spices disappeared as curry became the favourite dish of the English. And because they worked hard and wanted to integrate, many from those Asian and African backgrounds would become senior politicians.

South Ealing, where I used to live, was a peaceful place despite many changes. Although there were tensions because local authorities had a tendency to order the needs of the residents to take second place to the incomers (the local council was so keen on diversity that it hired people with execrable English), there was little violence.

And then Tony Blair opened the floodgates and while most Eastern Europeans who turned up in huge numbers were peaceful, in Ealing we resented the fact that local shops rapidly became predominantly Polish, and young seemed to live in parallel culture.

We also thought it dangerous that so few of the incoming Muslims seemed inclined or equipped to integrate and their women seemed to be second class citizens in their own community. And there was the cover-up of the widespread grooming gangs who preyed on vulnerable white girls.

There was too an arrogance about their grievance-mongering spokesmen and their entitled lawyers that seemed to imply that the future was Islamic and we’d better submit.

What became worryingly the norm was the Establishment stamping on open debate about high levels of immigration, and how often people looked over their shoulder and said ‘You can’t say that.’

The sheer numbers of pro-Palestinians frightened and the many of us see double standards Keir Starmer’s rhetoric

The suppression of free speech was one of the primary causes reasons why so many voted to leave the EU. They had been sneeringly dismissed as bigots when they were in fact fearful about losing British sovereignty.

After the horrifying murder, torture and rape of young Israelis on October 7, the streets where I live have seen hundreds of thousands of anti-Israeli marchers with banners calling for the destruction of Israel regularly marching through our streets. The sheer numbers of noisy pro-Palestinians frightened the police into looking the other way. All of that increased resentment of Muslims.

It was widespread unaddressed rumours that the children were murdered by Muslims that lit the powderkeg of the recent riots. And now it has suited our prime minister and many others to blame it all on far-right white people, without ever alluding to the context.

When this awful period is over, it will be time for honest debate and a respite from the hectoring, anti-white self-righteousness of our government.