The collapse of governmental legitimacy in the UK

Peter has a long and well thought out post concerning the jailing of UK activist Tommy Robinson:

At the time, Robinson's supporters tried to claim that his arrest and (suspended) sentence were violations of his right to free speech.  They were not, as the judge made clear.  He violated British laws, he ignored common practice concerning interfering with defendants and/or witnesses in a criminal trial, and he arguably jeopardized the defendants' right to a fair trial by his conduct.  I have no issue with the sentence given him.

Peter is correct and puts together a strong argument for following long established social norms - which is after all, what the legal code is supposed to encapsulate.  You should go RTWT because I am going to pose a number of questions, all pointing to the same meta question: has the UK government lost its claim to legitimacy, and if so, do any of these long held social norms still apply.

Question 1: Is justice being served in the UK?

Technically, it is a "Court of Law", but when we speak in terms of governmental legitimacy the view is broader.  It must be a Court of Justice if society is to keep to the old bargain negotiated 1000 years ago.  Back in the Dark Ages, "justice" was the responsibility of the people - specifically their extended family.  Clan feuds were the norm - and this has echoed faintly down to our own times with stories of the Hatfields and McCoys.  Government was weak then and so justice was rough.  The deal that was negotiated between the states and their subjects over the next 600 years was that the State would administer justice, but do it as fairly as it could, making blood feud unnecessary.

Is justice being meted out in Her Magesty's Scepter'd Isle?  For those who haven't been paying much attention, there have been dozens of arrests (perhaps hundreds) of adult men who have gang raped under age girls.  This has occurred in many locales throughout the land.  It has been doing on not for years, but for decades.  The number of victims is not reported, but is certainly in the tens of thousands.  In each case, the State knew what was happening.

As far as I can tell, none of the State officials - local, county, or national - have lost their jobs over this.

Remember, the deal was that the State would enforce justice fairly so that blood feud would no longer be needed.

Question 2: Who is speaking the truth here?

Sharp-eyed readers will note that I referred to Robinson as an "activist" while Peter refers to him as "Alt-Right".  I used this journalistic technique intentionally, partly because it highlights what the left-wing media does all the time when referring to Left Wing terrorists like Earth First! and the like.  But it also cuts to the heart of this question.  If we don't look at who the messenger is and whether we like him, and instead look at who is speaking the truth, things start to look grim for the UK establishment.  The Government certainly did not speak the truth, and in fact covered up these crimes for decades.  The media did at least publish the stories when they came out, but there is a strange soft peddling of the story.

The alleged perpetrators are described as "asian males", as if some of them were from China or Korea.  This leads to more questions, as we try to peel the onion to get to, you know, the truth.

Are the "asian males" actually Pakistani immigrants?  Are they all muslim?  Is their muslim identity a key factor in why they chose English girls as victims?  To simply ask these questions is to answer them.

The Government officials damn themselves by their silence here.  It's actually worse - one single person in a position of power (a Shadow Cabinet Secretary - the Cabinet of the out of power party) actually did speak the truth here, and was promptly sacked.

It seems very unhealthy that the only people who appear to be speaking the truth here are what we're told is an "Alt-Right" fringe.

Question 3: Is the root cause of all these crimes the fact that Europe is really bad at assimilating different cultures?

This is the Question That Must Not Be Asked, whether in Leeds Crown Court, in Cologne or Berlin, or in Paris.  If Europe does a particularly poor job at assimilating immigrants from other cultures into a collective Body Politick, then the Europe-wide governmental policy of massive immigration from the 3rd World assumes a very different perspective.

You might get, you know, mass instances of gang rape.

This is a particularly ugly question, and it the question that all European governments (and their lap dog media) are trying desperately to suppress.

Because if the State will not protect the public, then the whole deal is off.  Blood feud may be the only option.

Question 4: Is this worse than the Child Abuse done in the Catholic Church?

Peter has written eloquently about the crimes that were committed by many, many priests, and covered up by their bishops.  I myself lived outside Boston when the scandal broke, and saw Cardinal Law recalled to Rome (and promoted) by the Pope himself - a more stark depiction of institutional rot is hard to imagine.

But now consider that membership in the Catholic Church is voluntary.  If you don't like their church, you are free to go to a different one.  But if you don't like your local UK Council (local government), you have to move away from your family and friends.

I guess you could try to vote them out, but what are your chances making this an election issue when there's a chance that some Judge will throw you in jail for talking about it?

Question 5: Is Justice being served in the UK?

Yes, I already posed this question, but want to bring it back into focus after the discussion above.  Certainly some people think that the answer is no:

Even if everything done by the police or the court was perfectly legitimate and reasonable, the problem is that many people in England believe that Tommy Robinson is being unjustly persecuted by his government. The fact that he was arrested so shortly after his successful Day for Freedom event, where he gathered thousands of people in support of free speech, strikes many as a little bit more than a coincidence.

Discussion

This is what a collapse of legitimacy looks like.  The answers to the questions are more or less irrelevant; the fact that they can be posed without being dismissed out of hand is the point.  Societies are remarkably resilient: Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country, and Roman political and social institutions outlived the fall of the Western Empire by a century or more.  But that was because everyone more or less agreed that those institutions still deserved support even though the Emperor had been replaced by the Rex of the Goths.

That's not we're looking at here.

Things get ugly when the government, as the Chinese say, loses the Mandate of Heaven.  We are seeing political signs pointing to this all over the place: the election of Donald Trump, BREXIT, the waxing of nationalist political parties across Western Europe, the alliance in Italy of left-wing and right-wing nationalist parties.  Everywhere you look the populations are rejecting the existing governments.  Each of the governments are desperately trying to suppress this rejection.  And so the air is going out of the legitimacy balloon.

But remember, a millennium of expectations do not go softly into that good night.  The deal was that blood feud would be replaced by the State using its monopoly of force to ensure justice.  What happens when a big enough portion of the population thinks that the deal has been broken?  How big does that group need to be?

I certainly don't have answers to any of these questions, but the answers are not important.  What's important is that the questions can be asked and not be rejected out of hand.

UPDATE 1 June 2018 12:42: Via Brock Townsend, I see that I'm not the only one who sees things this way.