THIS week’s riots in Southport and elsewhere were, of course, reprehensible.
To attack a mosque where ordinary Muslims go to pray would have been wrong even if it had been in response to an attack by Islamic terrorists.
That those lobbing bricks at the police and setting their vehicles alight were acting on disinformation makes them look foolish as well as disgraceful.
But if Britain’s liberal elite had been deliberately trying to drive people into the arms of the rabble-rousers they could not have done a better job if it.
They have done everything they can to fuel the underlying sense that the white working class is being treated very differently from the rest of the population.
On Thursday, the Prime Minister held a press conference in which he lost no time in asserting that the Southport riots were “clearly driven by far-right hatred”.
He refused to acknowledge that any of those who took to the streets might have been motivated by reasonable concerns about the safety of children.
No, each and every one of them were just “far-right” thugs trying to spread hate.
Nor, by the way, did Keir Starmer mention in his press conference other recent cases of public disorder which had nothing to do with the far right, such as the machete fight in Southend on Tuesday night, the attack on police at Manchester Airport last week nor the riots in the Harehills area of Leeds.
Those equally concerning events don’t seem to feature even nearly as prominently on the radar of the liberal left because they don’t feed its preferred narrative that Britain is a happy, diverse community spoiled only by hate mongering on the part of the far right.
Starmer, to be fair, did condemn the Leeds riots at the time they happened two weeks ago, but he studiously avoided blaming any group.
On the contrary, a Downing Street statement demanded that people did not rush to speculate on the reasons behind the riots — which seem to have started after social workers removed children from a Roma family.
We know what to expect, because it has happened many times before.
Riots in neighbourhoods with high ethnic populations tend to be followed by inquiries which seek to settle the grievances which lie behind them — after the Brixton and Toxteth riots in 1981, for example, we had the Scarman report, while Michael Heseltine was dispatched to Liverpool to shower the poorer parts of the city with money.
Those efforts were warmly praised across the political spectrum.
Yet how has the Government responded to the Southport riots?
Not by calling an inquiry into what lies behind them, only by announcing stronger powers for police to track down perpetrators — all stick and no carrot, in other words.
The same seems to have happened on multiple occasions when working-class communities have protested, whether it be against low-traffic neighbourhoods, London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone or Covid lockdowns.
All have been dismissed as being incited by “far-right” conspiracy theorists.
Think what you like about councils erecting bollards and installing cameras to stop people driving to the shops, but those who oppose such measures hardly deserve to be treated like Nazis.
The Government needs to recognise that the Southport riots did not happen in a vacuum
I haven’t heard anyone in power admit it, but there is an unfortunate backstory which may explain why people reacted to the killing of three girls (not to mention the injuries and mental trauma inflicted on many others) by seeking out a mosque.
For years, police, social services and other agencies failed properly to investigate gangs of men of Pakistani heritage who had been raping and sexually exploiting girls in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere.
Again, it cannot be emphasised strongly enough that it is very wrong to project the crimes of the rapists on to Britain’s Pakistani population as a whole — that is the point at which legitimate demand for justice spills over into racism.
But when these gangs were eventually brought to justice, it became clear from their trials that police and social services had been doing the opposite — they had been influenced by what the then Home Secretary Theresa May called “institutional political correctness” in failing to take the victims’ allegations seriously enough.
As the former Labour minister Denis MacShane put it “there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat”.
But it is that sort of attitude which hands over the issue of violence and sexual exploitation of children to the far right.
If people feel they cannot trust what the police and other authorities do and say they will end up gravitating towards other voices who do appear to be representing their interests.
Racists are to be condemned, and it is quite right that the Prime Minister should want police to have the power to tackle thugs, whoever they are and wherever they come from.
We could do with a latter-day Lord Scarman to investigate what lies behind the riots and how best this can be addressed
But the Government needs to recognise that the Southport riots did not happen in a vacuum.
We could do with a latter-day Lord Scarman to investigate what lies behind the riots and how best this can be addressed.
