The current UK situation is fascinating, because it is the first Western regime to face the problem faced by Eastern European Communist regimes in 1989—the extreme dissatisfaction of much of the population, which it has become obvious to them can never be resolved through the parliamentary system, aka “democracy.” What will happen? It is hard to tell, but some thoughts:
1) The Communist regimes fell because they lacked the will to put down spontaneous public protests by force. (This was also true in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, but there the Soviet Union stepped in, which it refused to do in 1989.) Does the UK regime lack this will as well? We cannot know unless and until there are such protests.
2) The UK regime is certainly aware of this danger; the so-called Online Safety Act is primarily directed at preventing the spread of information and the organizing of protests.
3) This suppression will fail. Especially in cities, it is impossible to control the flow of information by person to person contact (as the Communist regimes found out). Thus, the regime will most likely be paralyzed if, for example, fifty thousand people marched in London demanding an end to migrant outrages and the state replacement of indigenous Britons with foreigners. It will both be unable to ignore such an event, and unwilling to violently suppress it.
Its most likely reaction would be to arrest and imprison many of people involved, as it did last s summer. If protests, as they did in Eastern Europe, develop a life of their own, this strategy will not work. It did not work in 1989.
4) Protests do not need to aim at violent overthrow. In this context, their existence, spread, and growth (if it happens) inherently destroy the legitimacy of the regime if the regime does not suppress them.
As in Eastern Europe, it is not necessary for pre-existing recognized leaders among protestors to exist. (Except in Poland, “dissidents” played no role in overthrowing Communist regimes.) Leaders develop automatically, and such men will stand ready to take over the state. They always exist. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
5) There are differences, however. In the Communist societies, perhaps ten percent of the population supported the regime. In the UK, it is thirty to forty percent, leftist true believers, migrants who have already invaded, and regime apparatchiks. This suggests overnight collapse is less likely than war among the populace, perhaps with the regime participating, perhaps not.
Other differences include a hugely feminized and otherwise-degraded society; the passivity induced by drugs and entertainment; lack of the religiosity with drove much of the 1989 protests; and an aged populace of indigenous Britons. These things are not likely to be determinative, because it is always a core of young men, not that many, who initiate disturbances and protests, which quickly develop a life of their own.
6) The Communist regimes were still run by true believers, just as in the UK. This is irrelevant; it is a myth that the reason for the events of 1989 were because “nobody was Communist anymore.” Similarly, poorly-informed midwits tell us that the Eastern European regimes fell because they wanted to, or because the ruling class figured they could come out on top with a restructuring, or because the people wanted blue jeans and rock music. These silly ideas are well-addressed by Stephen Kotkin in his Uncivil Society.
7) I predict that such protests, more organized than the street unrest of last summer, will develop once the next migrant outrage, probably directed against British girls, happens, and that they will quickly grow to become unmanageable without violence unprecedented in any Western society since the 1930s.
8) The root problem is one Carl Schmitt identified as a fatal defect of parliamentary democracies—the urge of those in power to deny “equal chance” to their opponents. Inevitably this leads to some form of violence.
9) I think I will write a longer piece on this. But in short, it strikes me the UK regime is very much on borrowed time.