Authoritarian politicians and obedient police commanders may pretend that flooding the streets with heavily armed riot units, armoured vehicles and water cannons will crush the protests and solve the underlying national problems that caused the unrest.
They will not.
And they know it.
Their real objective is not to address the root causes of the massive unrest now spreading across the United Kingdom. Their true intention is to crush dissent, suppress criticism, intimidate citizens and render the population voiceless.
This approach will not end the protests. It will accelerate them.
Every display of state force against its own citizens produces a counter-reaction of equal or greater strength. Every baton, every water cannon and every armoured vehicle sends the same message: the state has run out of arguments and now rules by brute force alone.
History is clear. Sustained coercion against large numbers of people does not resolve a political crisis. It deepens it, radicalises it and, if the pressure continues, can push events beyond anyone’s control.
Major political changes in Europe and the United States have rarely been delivered by polite agreements reached around negotiating tables. More often, they have emerged from pressure on the streets, from open confrontation, from bloody battlefields and from moments when the ruling class could no longer ignore the bitter reality in front of them.
If establishment parties continue to treat the protesters as the problem while refusing to confront the real causes, above all the brutal consequences of mass immigration, imported violence, two-tier policing, censorship and collapsing public order, then any prospect of peaceful resolution shrinks rapidly.
The best outcome would still be change at the ballot box through new elections and a clear political reversal. Yet in Britain, France and Germany, the ruling classes are already delaying, blocking or preparing to obstruct that route.
Labour refuses to call new elections in the United Kingdom. In France, legal manoeuvres and institutional tricks are used to delay the will of the voters. In Germany, the Federal President might refuse to dissolve the Bundestag in order to preserve the status quo. Similar tactics are already appearing in other countries, all following the same establishment playbook.
When electoral change is blocked through authoritarian procedural tricks, the pressure on the streets grows instead.
What begins with thousands can become tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and eventually millions. Against thousands, and perhaps even tens of thousands, the state may still believe it can prevail with riot police, batons, armoured vehicles and water cannons.
But once those numbers reach hundreds of thousands or millions, no police force, and not even the military, can maintain control indefinitely through physical force alone. At that scale, the rulers will no longer be able to govern against the people. They will be forced to listen to vox populi.
That is when the real turning point arrives.
Some police and military units, especially those led by commanders who still have a conscience, will eventually have to decide whether they are protecting the public or protecting a failing regime.
Some will refuse to strike their own population. Some will refuse to march against their own brothers and sisters. Some will refuse to be used against the very people they swore to protect.
And when those units stand down, listen to their conscience and side with the people rather than the regime, the system will lose its ability to enforce its will.
Belfast may prove to be the first major domino in this sequence. The people there have shown before that they will not be subdued easily, and history records that Northern Ireland has forced political realities upon London before.
If Belfast does not break, other cities across the United Kingdom could follow. From there, the pressure can spill onto the European mainland. What starts in one place can spread like wildfire through France, Germany and beyond, forcing the political changes that the current ruling classes have so far refused to deliver through normal democratic means.
Belfast has been tested before.
It was not broken then.
It will not be broken now.