LONDON — The streets of Belfast smouldered under a sky thick with smoke and fury, as home burnings and unrest convulsed a city already scarred by decades of sectarian strife. Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn, in a gesture of bureaucratic theatre, has summoned police chiefs to account for a night that laid bare the fragility of a peace built on forgetting. But let us not pretend: this is not a crisis of policing. It is a crisis of identity, of a social contract rotting from within, and of a political class that long ago traded conviction for comfort. We stare into the embers of a fire that has been kindled not by a single spark but by the slow, patient erosion of belief in the institutions that bind us.
The scenes from Belfast recall, to the historian's eye, the twilight of the late Roman Republic. When the legions could no longer guarantee order, men turned to demagogues and neighbourhood gangs; when the law became a farce, the mob reclaimed the streets. Here, in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement was our Augustus: a grand settlement that imposed peace but failed to forge a common moral purpose. It is a peace of exhaustion, not conviction, and exhaustion always gives way to something darker. The arson attacks on homes, the missiles thrown at police lines: these are not the actions of ordinary criminals. They are the gestures of a populace that has lost faith in the pageantry of crown and parliament, and finds solace in the primal rituals of violence.
One must ask: what is the substance of national identity when the flag can be reduced to a weapon? The Unionist and Nationalist communities, each cloaked in their own historical narratives, have forgotten that these narratives require constant tending. They have allowed their traditions to ossify into relics, and relics do not nourish the soul. The result is a generation that knows only the iconography of grievance. The burning of a home is an icon too: it says, 'I cannot build, so I shall destroy.' This is not the restoration of ancient rights but the tantrum of an infant civilization.
Hilary Benn's summons is the inevitable bureaucratic response: call a meeting, issue a statement, promise a review. It is the response of a political class that believes management can substitute for leadership. But management cannot quell the hunger for meaning. The Northern Ireland Office, like its counterparts across the West, suffers from a paralysis of vision. They imagine that security camera footage and community outreach programmes will stitch together a social fabric that has been torn by decades of neglect. They are wrong. The fabric is not torn; it has been chemically weakened by the acids of relativism, consumerism, and the cult of the self.
We would do well to recall the Victorian era, that age of moral certainty which, for all its faults, understood the importance of public virtue. Lord Palmerston once said that a nation's character is built on its citizens' sense of duty. In Belfast, as in much of the United Kingdom, duty has been replaced by entitlement, and citizenship by the insatiable demand for identity validation. The police cannot arrest their way out of this. The Secretary of State cannot legislate his way out of this. Only a revival of the civic faith, a rekindling of the belief that we are part of something larger than our own grievances, can save us. And where is that to be found?
The answer, I fear, is nowhere in our current political landscape. The great parties have become marketing firms, offering products designed to offend no one and inspire no one. The intellectuals, myself included, have retreated into irony and abstraction. The churches have emptied. The pubs have become gastropubs. The working men's clubs have closed. The social infrastructure that once taught people how to be citizens has been dismantled, and we are left with a wasteland of lonely individuals connected only by their screens. The violence in Belfast is the scream of that loneliness.
We must face the truth: the United Kingdom is not just in crisis. It is in decay. The institutions that survived the Blitz and the Troubles are now threatened by a soft rot more insidious than any bomb. The rot is an indifference to the common good. The rot is the belief that the nation is a machine to be managed, not a soul to be nurtured. Until we recover the sense that this island, North and South, East and West, is a sacred trust, the fires will keep burning. The only question is whether we will watch them together, or hide in the ruins.
As the ashes cool in Belfast, I am reminded of the Roman poet Horace, who wrote of his own decaying republic: 'We are but dust and shadow.' Yes, but the dust can still be shaped into something noble. The question is whether we still possess the ambition to shape it.
