Sparks: Europe’s far right seizes on protest violence to push authoritarian anti-immigration agenda

The politician who has never stood in a breadline learns quickly that hungry men make convenient monsters, and the cold that froze the immigrant's hands will freeze his voters' hands just the same.

Count the arrests by district, note the nationalities of the accused, tally the property damage against the welfare cuts, and the pattern emerges: disorder is manufactured where the budget was first slashed, then blamed on the people it was slashed from.

The man who demands law and order while having burned every law that protected the stranger has not asked for order but for silence, and silence is the first thing tyranny purchases.

If the immigrant's presence causes disorder, then removing the immigrant ends disorder; if the disorder was caused by those who profit from his removal, then removing him multiplies the cause, and no house divided against itself by such arithmetic can stand.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and call it order, so when a few shout in the street the desperate mistake the noise for the cause and vote away the last of their own liberty to silence it.

They offer order in exchange for liberty, and the exchange is no reform at all but the preservation of the same property relations in a harsher uniform, since the disorder they fear is not the riot but the organised worker.

They say the stranger cannot be trusted with our laws, and I ask, who wrote the laws that made the stranger a stranger, and did that hand ever tremble when it signed?

Order and disorder are the same river seen from two banks: the violence they condemn is the violence they require, and the strongman who promises to still the water is the current wearing a crown.

Consider the small shopkeeper whose window was broken: his insurance will rise, his customers will stay home, and the party that promises to protect him will cut the police budget and call it economy.

We won independence and discovered we had inherited the colony's habits; Europe now wins its elections and discovers it has inherited the same appetite for a strongman wearing the language of the republic.