In Belfast, like in the Republic, a housing crisis has met increased immigration and created a tinderbox. In England, the Boriswave, asylum hotels, the X accounts chronicling every instance of urban decay, have tumbled into one throbbing ball of energy. When Nigel Farage said last year that no one realised how close the country was to civil disobedience “on a vast scale”, perhaps he was right, though, it is important to say, we are not there yet. Rioting is now regular, but it is not – yet – widespread. More than anywhere, Northern Ireland should have a readymade rhetorical framework to describe ethnic conflict, though its establishment was quick to try to deflect the crisis elsewhere. “The horrific scenes in North Belfast should not be used by the English, right-wing politicians to further their own end” said one centrist Northern Irish MP; “This has nothing to do with community” said Michelle O’Neill, the First Minister. Meanwhile, the burning cars of the previous night’s pogrom continued to smoulder. Ireland – North and South – is unique in its absence of a coherent political force on the right to channel all this energy at the ballot box. Sinn Fein has long departed from its republican, working-class roots – embracing the liberalism of its political rivals in the Republic, at least. Without anyone to ventriloquise the rage, protesters on the island will keep searching for political expression they can’t find in the mainstream – for now, in stochastic, sporadic episodes of pitchfork wielding on the streets. But one thing is clear – moments of extreme violence, like the attempted beheading in North Belfast on Monday night or the Southport stabbings – are having a flattening effect. England is not just transforming into a flag-wielding, rioting nation; but Northern Ireland looks like England in its own ways too; a burnt-out bus in Dublin looks remarkably like a burnt-out bus in Belfast. For the first time in its existence, Northern Ireland may be parsable to an England that has long found it alien, weird and foreign. By @finn_mcredmond newstatesman.com/politics/uk…