It should not be difficult to condemn, without equivocation, the violence we have seen on our streets in the past week. The perpetrators belong behind bars.
For the line between civilisation and chaos is thin, and public order is a public good too often taken for granted. Once lost, it can be difficult for the police to regain control, which is why the response to disorder must always be unequivocal and uncompromising, swift and tough.
Courts should, as the Government proposes, sit through the night, and judges must be prepared to hand down tough sentences, as they did to good effect during the riots of 2011. The police will need to use sophisticated capabilities – some covert, some utilising open-source information – to identify and round up rioters before the violence resumes.
On the streets, policing a violent crowd is a difficult and dangerous job, with the best tactics to restore order resembling those of medieval battles. Officers need to box the mob into confined spaces, and numbers, physical strength and a willingness to deploy force determine victory or loss. Exceptional circ*mstances dictate that leave be cancelled, officers called in to support affected areas, and rioters confronted with an overwhelming police presence.
Unfortunately, we live in a polarised age in which too many in positions of power let their politics trump the vital principle of equality before the law. On Friday, when Nigel Farage released a video saying he did not support the violence but added, “What you’ve seen on the streets of Hartlepool, of London, of Southport, is nothing to what could happen over the next few weeks”, he appeared to revel in anticipated vindication.
In condemning the “breakdown” of law and order preceding the riots, but not the riots themselves, and by failing to back the police officers dealing with the rioters, Farage flunked the test of leadership. Whatever you think about immigration or multiculturalism, there is no place in Britain for street violence. Almost all voters agree, but Farage sought not to use his position to quell the violence but to equivocate.
He is not alone. Nick Lowles – who runs Hope Not Hate, an advocacy group with the stated objective of promoting race equality – has said “those fanning the flames” are “just as guilty” as the rioters and should be investigated. But the day before, Lowles himself had promoted rumours on social media – declared to be without current basis by the local police – that acid had been thrown at a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough.
And the Prime Minister stands accused of advocating “two-tier policing”. Comparisons between the disorder this week and offences committed during the Black Lives Matter protests, the anti-Israel marches and so-called direct action by radical environmentalists are not precise. There is a difference between public protests in which some of the protesters turn violent, and disorder started deliberately by those intent on violence. There is a difference, too, between blocking a road and physically attacking people because of their race or religion.
Yet there is, nevertheless, some validity in the criticism. Starmer took the knee in support of BLM two days after the protests in London turned violent, leaving 27 police officers injured. He praised Extinction Rebellion for its disruptive protests and accepted party donations from Dale Vince, who helped bankroll Just Stop Oil. Labour MPs have consorted with organisations such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Muslim Engagement and Development, known as Mend.
The police also deserve scrutiny. Officers were quick to act when campaigners wanted to protest at the King’s Coronation, but showed no such resolve in dealing with deliberately disruptive eco-protestors. When officers took the knee before BLM protestors, they later claimed privately that they had been encouraged to do so by their seniors. When, last year, an autistic boy was threatened by a mob for lightly scuffing a copy of the Koran, local police were present at a show trial held in a nearby mosque. The Met’s justification for not intervening when anti-Israel protestors appear to blatantly break the law is that they do not want to risk more serious public disorder. This is not policing “without fear or favour”.
All these examples – and now the latest disgraceful violence across England – should prompt us to ask sombre questions about what sort of society we have become. There is no future for a multiracial country in balkanising itself into a series of ethnic enclaves existing side by side but entirely separately from one another. And there is no time for us to continue the official denialism that dominates parts of the media and public sector.
For the policy of multiculturalism – of promoting difference between “communities” rather than national unity and shared citizenship under one civic identity – is visibly failing. As inter-ethnic tensions play out in cities from Leicester to Liverpool, sectarian politics enters the House of Commons, and the politicisation of white identity begins – with agitators promoting the grievance politics that appears to have borne fruit for extremists from other backgrounds – the failure is there for all to see. The recent tendency to sweep acts of extreme violence under the carpet, and to obfuscate about the identities and motives of the perpetrators, is now backfiring, manipulated by those who, in some cases knowingly, spread false information.
We should be honest about what all of this means for our future, and what we can do to change it now. The danger is that the Government – wedded to its belief in multiculturalism and abetted by the wider Left – continues the denialism and responds only in political fashion. Already, the signs are there that they see an opportunity to tar all those with mainstream conservative views – about immigration, violent crime and policing policy – with the same brush as the rioters and the instigators.
This would certainly be easier than confronting the true extent of our failure. A failure that can be seen in the burnt-out shops and vehicles strewn across our streets, and in the Rotherham hotel with migrants barricaded inside, but most damningly in the failure to properly mourn the appalling killing of three innocent little children.