“In practice, this means appeasing the most volatile “communities”, while the most law-abiding are also the most harshly constrained, simply because they offer the least resistance.”
This may work for now, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. Even the most well-behaved citizen will start to act up once they realize good behavior is punished and bad behavior is ignored or tacitly rewarded.
It will never happen. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen someone predict a white backlash that never came.
The indigenous people are down to about one third of Londoners, which is too late for any meaningful backlash. Look at yesterday’s St. George’s Day demo for an example of what happens if they ‘act up’.
The rest of Britain will go the same way, but at locally varying speeds.
The St George’s day attendees didn’t act up. They were kettled by the police who arrived with belligerent attitudes, police horses, riot shields and vans. The police were spoiling for a fight and tried to provoke a reaction. There are livestream videos available, not the curated content shown on MSM. How long will it be until even law abiding people start chanting ACAB?
It is time to realise that the police and the legal system are now the enemies of the native population of this country weaponised against us by a malignant state.
Witness the way the BLM demonstrations and Palestinian marches were policed, witness how the powers that be are obsessed by the imaginary right wing threat while playing down and even pandering to Islamic extremism, witness how the law, including sentencing, is applied unevenly to cower the natives.
I noticed how the Met had no qualms about wading in and sticking the boot into whitey yesterday.
Linda M Brown
10 days ago
Sorry Mary you’ve missed the boat. One of Peel’s basic tenants was: To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all ..
Impartial means if you break the law or commit a crime you get the same treatment treatment from the police regardless of your skin colour regardless of your ethnic background or political’ beliefs.
We have clear evidence of two tier policing; they no longer demonstrate <em>impartial service to the law’. The police rolled up to the St George’s day parade with horses, vans and a belligerent attitude, provoking the attendees by kettling them – as they did at the armistice day service. They, the police gave every appearance of spoiling for a fight with the St George’s day celebrants. Meanwhile at the pro-Hamas protests (intimidation marches), or the Just Stop Oil, or Extinction Rebellion, protests etc… crickets.
Yesterday also saw the charges against Tommy Robinson dismissed, he was cleared of breaching a dispersal order after a judge ruled the power had not been legally authorised by police. His arrest last Armistice day while eating breakfast in a cafe and subsequent pepper spraying at point blank range while handcuffed was, fortunately for him, live streamed. Twenty (+?) officers for one man and not one of them had body camera footage(?). Love him or hate him, it was an attempted stitch up by the MET. They had no right to insist on him leaving, there is no legal definition of what a journalist is, and he kept telling them he was attending as a journalist, with a camera man
in the past we saw police refusing to investigate the Muslim rape gangs who targeted white girls and minority ethnic non-Muslim girls for fear of being called racists. This is all of a piece.
People, regular law abiding people, have lost faith in the police and until Rowley is fired and someone installed that will instruct officers to apply the law evenly rather than going after the weakest target to intimidate, people will continue to lose faith and God help the police if they ever need help, because at this rate they’re not going to get it.
Nell Clover
10 days ago
In the Home Office you can say multiculturalism is multiple cultures, and you can even say those cultures are different, but you cannot think let alone discuss how those cultures might be different.
Similarly, you can talk about a community group identity, and you can even talk about that community having some group beliefs, but you cannot think let alone discuss how those beliefs might result in group patterns of behaviour.
There is even a rationale provided for all of this: if we just ignore the differences, there won’t be a problem; tolerance of the disagreeable behaviour will slowly grow until it is unremarkable. Quite literally, there is an elephant in the room only if we acknowledge its presence. That’s the governing principle of the state managing your country today.
If the policing model was to change, that would acknowledge the elephant. Instead, there needs to be an even more determined effort to ignore the elephant and diminish any reports of the elephant. In policing terms, that means less policing, literally turning a blind eye. For you, it means becoming accustomed and accepting of criminal behaviour. And you see it on the streets of every town and city in the UK today. It is for this reason that what we say and share on social media is seen by the state as the greatest threat.
Yes, but hang on! Police it how? “Appeasing the most volatile community” is simply a launch-pad for rule by might. Your analysis is excellent but you leave the question unanswered which, if you’d even mentioned that there still is a question, would not be so bad. But how the question is answered is the vital thing.
The key is addressing a factor you haven’t mentioned and it’s this. A tactic of “protest” has emerged—or more likely reemerged (since the 1960s)—it started recently with Brexit and Trump—of “protestors” disrupting public life as opposed to assembling in some park or public arena, to make their views known. The tactic is not just to speak and chant slogans. It is to get in everyone else’s way. That is the point. And it includes getting in the face of the public, motorists, Jews (see also Columbia University). We see it with JSO. We saw it with George Floyd, the anti-Trump demonstrations, and now with the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Policymakers have to understand that this is not simply a surfeit of “feelings”. It is an intimidatory tactic perfected by the Nazis in the 1930s. Cause mayhem, sow fear, and public policy will bend in your direction. The ostentatious leniency shown by judges to JSO vandals is reminescent of the leniency shown by nationalist judges in Germany in the late 1920s, early 1930s to Nazi vandals and thugs.
The solution is quite simple. Political demonstrations must not be allowed to disrupt public life. They should, by law, be allowed only in spaces where disruption is not likely, or much less likely, to happen: public parks, sports arenas, and so forth.
Free speech does not include your right to scream abuse in my face as I go about my business in London, or blocking the road as I try to drive my kids to school.
There has been a failure to draw a distinction between “protest” ie I will visibly demonstrate my support for a policy I favour and “disruption” ie I will disrupt civil life to such extent that I force you to adopt the policy I favour. Any protest that disrupts the citizen going about his lawful way should be prevented by the police or the army if that is needed. Asking for something is different to demanding it with menaces or by blackmail.
I almost agree except that there’s a big difference between lying down in a road to stop traffic (because you genuinely believe _all_ of humanity is under threat from climate change) & screaming for a Global Intifada, to kill Jews & other Nazi-like behaviour. I would like to see a lot of these pro-Hamas protesters locked up for incitement to violence.
The difference is not as great as you think. Both are signs of a regression to millenarian, catastrophism and the minting of premises to take away your freedom. The manipulation of information and publicity around climate is as dishonest as that around Israel-Palestine. The green agenda is about control. The urgency that poorer countries improve their economic output is far greater than climate change. The proof of this is that the burden of proof is falling on the so-called “climate deniers”. Why? The only “evidence” that the climate zealots have is occasional bad weather which, today, is killing fewer people than ever before. Global warming is not a threat. More people die of cold every year than of heat.
The tactics of JSO and other environmental activists is unscientific bullying, pure and simple.
The fact that you’ve written ‘more people die of cold every year than of heat’ tells me everything I need to know about your understanding of climate change. Global warming does not mean the temperature is uniformly going up. It means a large number of the complex earth systems upon which all life on this planet relies, are being deleteriously affected:
‘Climate change means not only changes in globally averaged surface temperature, but also changes in atmospheric circulation, in the size and patterns of natural climate variations, and in local weather. La Niña events shift weather patterns so that some regions are made wetter, and wet summers are generally cooler. Stronger winds from polar regions can contribute to an occasional colder winter. In a similar way, the persistence of one phase of an atmospheric circulation pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation has contributed to several recent cold winters in Europe, eastern North America, and northern Asia.
Atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns will evolve as Earth warms and will influence storm tracks and many other aspects of the weather. [However] Global warming tilts the odds in favour of more warm days and seasons and fewer cold days and seasons. For example, across the continental United States in the 1960s there were more daily record low temperatures than record highs, but in the 2000s there were more than twice as many record highs as record lows. Another important example of tilting the odds is that over recent decades heatwaves have increased in frequency in large parts of Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. Marine heat waves are also increasing.’ https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-11/#:~:text=Global%20warming%20is%20a%20long,even%20as%20the%20climate%20warms.
I’m not sure what is your evidence for the fact that the ‘green agenda is about control.’ Either way, and whatever your disagreement about solutions, protesters tactics, etc., the scientific consensus on climate change is clear. 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/do-scientists-agree-on-climate-change/.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is measurable and alarming and based on evidence – no need for the scare quotes. The last time there was this much of it in the earth’s atmosphere was during the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event (approximately 251.9 million years ago), otherwise known as the ‘Great Dying.’
The effects of similar amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere built up over the last two centuries have caused just 0.8 degrees warming of the world (since pre-Industrial times) which has so far led to the following (again) measurable and scientifically known examples of ‘bad weather’ (to use your term):
– deadly heat waves – in every continent, but especially bad in Sub-Saharan Africa and across Asia;
– water shortages leading to crop failures and famines, including the first famine ‘officially’ recorded as having been caused by climate change in Madagascar;
– extreme ‘once in a lifetime’ disasters occurring several times annually throughout the globe, such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes and extinctions;
– large-scale diebacks in forests, especially the Amazon Rainforest – the ‘lungs of the planet’ – which we need to absorb greenhouse gases, especially Co2, and sequester it in the soil;
– massive melting of the polar ice caps, and other glaciers, including the rapid melting of Asia’s glaciers upon which millions of people rely for water;
– ocean acidification – leading to the death of coral reefs (including the Great Barrier Reef), upon which millions of people rely for food;
– a sea level rise of just 8 centimeters in the last 25 years.
A further 15-25cm of sea level rise is expected by 2050. If unchecked, this would put large parts of many of the world’s most populous cities and countries under water, including: London, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Georgetown, Guyana, Basra in Iraq, Kolkata, India, Amsterdam, Osaka, Japan, Shanghai, Bangkok, New Orleans, New York, Ho Chi Minh, Venice, Savannah, USA; large parts of mainland China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Caribbean. It would also result in the disappearance of whole island nations: the Atolls, the Maldives, Tuvalu, Fiji, and the Marshall Islands.
Indeed, some nations have already lost islands and begun relocating communities. Five of the Solomon Islands have already disappeared due to the combined effects of sea level rise and extreme winds. Across the South Pacific, small island countries are experiencing the loss of fisheries that drive local economies and ensure food security. Some countries could literally disappear from maps. https://time.com/5478446/climate-change-vulnerable-countries/
As for your rather imperious suggestion that ‘the urgency that poorer countries improve their economic output is far greater than climate change’ again, what is _your_ evidence?
The Horn of Africa recently saw almost three years of some of tge worst drought conditions in history, according to the Famine and Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). Ethiopia and Somalia have had five failed rainy seasons since late 2020, which have displaced 1.4 million Somalis and killed 3.8 million livestock.
Politicians and heads of state have been meeting to discuss the greenhouse gas effect and the dangers of global warming since the 1970s. Since then, CO2 emissions have increased by approx 90%.
At the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009, a non-binding target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees was agreed upon, despite it also being agreed that 2 degrees (as opposed to 1.5) was a ‘death sentence’ for low-lying islands and Sub-Saharan Africa. At the much-celebrated COP21 in Paris 8 years ago, after much lobbying by African and Pacific Island delegates, the Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau, got everyone to agree on (again a non-binding) limit of 1.5 degrees’ warming. Do you think the African and Pacific Island delegates know less about their countries’ needs than you?
Even if the Paris accord signatories kept to their agreements, a big if, it will lead to a 3°C rise in temperatures in the next couple of decades. Failure to implement even those would leave our planet on track for a 4 to 5°C rise within our children’s lifetime, at which point some of the world’s most densely populated areas will become uninhabitable.
COP26 in Glasgow was described by some as the ‘best last chance for humanity’. Yet of all the countries who had representation at the summit, the fossil fuel industry had the largest delegation, according to Global Witness, Corporate Accountability and others.
Overall, they identified 503 people employed by or associated with fossil fuel interests at the summit. They also found that:
– The fossil fuel lobby is larger than the combined total of the eight delegations from the countries worst affected by climate change in the past 20 years: including Madagascar, Nigeria, Kenya, Haiti, Yemen, the Philippines and Kitribati.
So don’t tell me about agendas and control.
Climate change is a demonstrably provable, scientifically measurable problem of immense complexity. There is a serious lack of consensus on how to fix it but not on whether it’s even happening in the first place…
Explain changes in climate since the last Ice Age, the last 2.6M years, 5M years and 50 M years. CO2 levels were 6 to 7 times what they are today at end of Jurassic/Cretaceous.
How does phytoplankton vary ?
Climate varies, why did it start cooling 5M years ago ? How and why do Ice Ages start and end?
“Explain changes in climate since the last Ice Age, the last 2.6M years, 5M years and 50 M years.”
Work in progress and if a bunch of scientists weren’t concerned about the rate of climate change we are experiencing right now the necessary research to answer these questions wouldn’t be going on.
“CO2 levels were 6 to 7 times what they are today at end of Jurassic/Cretaceous.”
Due to dissocaition of methane clathrates (geologic records)
Changes in the geography of the oceans
“How does phytoplankton vary ?”
The Ocean carbon cycle. The best description I have found was on 5.10.23 In Our Tme – Plankton BBC Radio 4. Free. Available to everyone.
“Climate varies, why did it start cooling 5M years ago ?”
Panama seaway closure
Southward shift of the North Atlantic current
Collapse of permanent El Nino
Uplift of Rocky Mountains and Greenland’s west coast
Decreased CO2 levels because of changes in the Southern Ocean surface and deep circulation
“How and why do Ice Ages start and end?”
Eccentric shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun (affected by Jupiter) 96,000 year cycle
Changes in the tilt of the Earth on a 41,000 year cycle
Wobble of Earth’s tilted axis (like a spinning top) 20,000 year cycle
The movement of tectonic plates affecting how much land is above water and wind and ocean currents
Volcanism
Big meteorites
The positive and negative feedback effects produced by all these affecting albedo
It’s complicated. That doesn’t mean it’s a fairy story.
There is no right to block traffic. If drivers are stuck and unable to access an alternate route, a strong case can be made for false imprisonment under the laws of most anglophone countries.
Yes. We didn’t seem to hear anything from other police forces re St. George’s Day celebrations. Policing to avoid conflict does seem, of necessity, to involve a level of pragmatic compromise. I think these ‘compromises’ would be more acceptable if the police, particularly the Met, remained demonstrably impartial. They were obviously partisan about JSO, BLM and LGBTQ. For the latter they even painted their squad cars to ’give confidence’. One could accept this if it didn’t actually appear that, by contrast (ref. St. George’s Day, London) they seem to almost provoke reaction from anybody they perceive as ‘nationalist’ or even patriotic in order, one could suspect, to support some far right narrative.
Tyler Durden
10 days ago
The elephant in the room here is that the Jewish chap in question was wearing his religious skullcap and would quite likely have been ‘savaged’ by the sociopaths (or worse) participating.
Hence the police were protecting the security of the individual and, on a small level, public order. The real issue is the permissiveness of Britain’s modern liberal state in allowing this blatance promotion of terrorism to occur consistently in public over the last 6 months.
Have you actually seen the entire transcript rather than simply the edited version?
The man was pulled aside because he stepped off the path and deliberately walked through the protest against the flow of people in an attempt to antagonise the situation and get some juicy footage. The bobby pulled him aside and offered to escort him to the other side of the road (where the man claimed he’d been trying to go) but the man refused and instead started to berate the copper while his entourage filmed it.
After seeing the full story my opinion on the matter changed entirely, the police did nothing wrong in my eyes and the man was simply there looking for trouble
It was an organised stunt by him in order to provoke that reaction. I’m not saying he was wrong to do it but he’d probably have come off a lot worse storming across that march if the police had missed him
You cannot “provoke” a demonstrator who is determined to be peaceful – even with a film crew present; ask Ghandi.
The demonstrators had a right to protest peacefully, without molestation or interference from any bystanders, and he had a equivalent right to carry out his lawful activity with same consideration. It is the job of Police to ensure both have that opportunity.
The best weapon against the rolling organized stunt of weekly rallies of anti-semites is another organized stunt designed to expose them. Good for him.
‘The best weapon against the rolling organized stunt of weekly rallies of anti-semites is another organized stunt designed to expose them.’
An ‘organised stunt designed to expose them’. That sounds mighty close to entrapment. It sounds like a good way to cause a reaction that the police would then have to deal with. Do you agree with endangering police officers then.
Do you not think the police have enough to deal with, without people organising stunts designed to cause a reaction?
The police are unable to arrest those behaving badly and shouting illegal slogans as they, and the marchers, know the sheer numbers are unassailable. If they tried to pull anyone out of the march there would be a running riot – in a very expensive part of town with big plate glass windows. They can only do some evidence gathering by cameras and try to ID the perps later.
‘The police are unable to arrest those behaving badly and shouting illegal slogans’
What is your definition of ‘behaving badly’.
I’m not sure I think any slogans should be illegal as I believe in freedom of speech. What ‘illegal slogans’ were being shouted and can you link sources please.
‘If they tried to pull anyone out of the march there would be a running riot – in a very expensive part of town with big plate glass windows. They can only do some evidence gathering by cameras and try to ID the perps later.’
I’m not sure you understand how riot police work in the UK. If there was a’ running riot’ our police would have water cannons out and goodness knows what else. London riot police actually don’t normally mess about.
Do you have any evidence that the only thing the police can do is gather evidence by cctv.
Are you aware that facial recognition technology is now normally in use at such protests. So the police would be able to identify troublemakers quite easily.
You say the numbers are ‘unassailable’. Do you have any evidence for this. The police are equipped with water cannons and riot vans, riot gear, horses and truncheons to give them an advantage when outnumbered.
What ratio of police to protesters do you consider proportionate and what was the ratio at the demonstration under discussion. To say the numbers were unassailable, you would need to provide both these figures and take into account all the specialised vehicles, water cannons, horses and personnel London riot police have access to.
Fair point, I didn’t realise we had sold them. I just googled apparently we had three that never got used, bought by boris and sold at a loss.
Another waste of taxpayers money by the sound of it.
The way he was carrying on the police should have stood back and let him antagonise the mob protesting, although no doubt then he would have complained that the police let him come to harm
The “openly Jewish” guy was being a disingenuous pr*&k and obviously trying to provoke the police for effect. I feel sorry for the officer who really kept his cool, while having to make sure an organised, official but large march was able to pass through without trouble. I would have arrested Mr Gideon Falter if it had been me on duty; the guy is a w@nk3r and a s**t-stirrer.
Mike Michaels
10 days ago
It’s a shame those lads in the Riot squad don’t appear to work Saturdays.
UnHerd Reader
10 days ago
Great article. I think the idea of colonialist tendencies turning in inwards is powerfull. Our modern elites seem keen to destroy the pillars of our culture with literal and figurative attacks on family, religion, culture and historical archetypal hero figures. I think this is well explained as the colonial instinct turned inwards.
David L
9 days ago
The Met is now the paramilitary wing of the Guardian.
Anthony Roe
10 days ago
The English are simply abandoning London and the wealthy will soon follow.
Alan Melville
10 days ago
Mary, the police did not lose control of the streets. They CEDED control due to the moral cowardice of their leadership (d**k, Rowley & Khan mainly but others too).
They need to un-cede that control fast, and apply the Common Law of England, without prejudice or fear, to those who break it.
Otherwise, we will end up using the army on the streets.
Alex Lekas
10 days ago
But is it fair to castigate the police? —-If that is our thesis question, then allow me to posit a qualified yes. Qualified because the police are likely only doing what they are told to do. It’s very easy to criticize the enforcers of the rules while giving a pass to those who make them.
The officer in question recognized the real problem but is powerless to act upon it. If the presence of a Jew is enough to drive a group into a near-homicidal frenzy, then perhaps the problem is the group. That should be evident given the conduct of the pro-Hamas people vs. the conduct of everyone else.
Human psychology is simple to understand – you always get more of what you allow. It’s why college students trample campuses screaming death threats to people with impunity. They know nothing will happen to them. Because nothing happened to people who engaged in far worse activity, from the BLM grifters to antifa mobs to all the anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian rhetoric that preceded the current anti-Jewish tone.
The Met is not trying to “keep peace.” It is avoiding its core function of law enforcement in the name of public safety. The principles that guided the Met back in 1829 are no longer applicable because the landscape is no longer the same. Maintaining order over a homogeneous group of people with a great deal in common is far easier than doing so with a new cadre of residents who care nothing about the old ways.
mike otter
10 days ago
Things have changed a lot since Peel and the police have changed in some ways but not in others. As well as their violence against St George types i note they were violent against the women protesting the murder of Sara Everard and they often get violent with hippies and peaceful anti-war /anarchists demos. So in some cases it seems they are more violent against peaceful or defenceless groups, in other cases groups who they disagree with politically. I doubt the average cop is a fan of ISIS/Hamas and their Labour fellow travellers BUT their bosses are now very left wing with all that that implies in terms of trendy support for terrorists, “national liberation” movements etc etc. My biggest concern is that they are not gathering intel at the Hamas marches because these people are effectively confessing to the support of terrorism and as such are a threat to civic order in the UK and anywhere else outside of Iran and he Palestinian territories.
Rose D
9 days ago
Summation: The Met is outdated and must be replaced. It can no longer do the job it is nominally charged with because the precondition for its uniquely genteel form of law enforcement, namely a culturally homogenous and more or less law abiding population, no longer holds.
UnHerd Reader
8 days ago
Time to defund the police and judiciary and go back to night watchmen and rough justice.
The police and the judiciary are not on the side of the native British people and only have an interest in their special groups and people who think like them.
Why should anyone abide by laws specifically designed to disadvantage them? Better to create your own.
Jim Veenbaas
10 days ago
Thoughtful essay for sure, and I think it largely explains the behaviour of the Met. But what about the Covid protests? I don’t think the Met had an issue cracking down hard on those protests. Maybe I’m wrong.
That famous photo was definitely a set-up. And sisters uncut are antifa who also turn out against “let women speak” events and harrass peaceful women talking about their rights.
Allen Z
10 days ago
Interesting to read of the history of the Met. But we’re in 2024 now. It’s way past time that the UK Military or National Guard be brought in to supplement the Police in handling the pro-Hamas mobs taking over the streets of London.
Are you posting from the US? We don’t have a National Guard here.
The point of the article is that the authorities don’t want to crack down on the Islamists or their fellow travellers. They go soft on the factions most likely to go violent.
It’s my understanding that the Territorials are more analogous to the National Guard. They have their own units(e.g. The Royal Yeomanry is a light cavalry formation) . The US Army Reserves are individuals that would be used to fill out regular units. The National Guard has it’s own formed unit, so is the correct analogue.
I’m no expert on the US but I think the National Guard are used on natural disasters and major civil disturbances. The TA never do that. Aren’t the TA intended as reinforcements for the Army in time of war?
What? And impose some kind of martial law?
I don’t think so, our police state has done enough creeping thank you, the last thing we need is to militarise it any further.
You do realise that then, next time there is any type of mass protest, by any faction of society, the state would be like well we rolled out the military to clear the last lot, let’s do that again. That would be a really fast way for an over zealous state to kill popular dissent. Imagine if they had rolled out the military to crush the covid protests, or the trucker protests.
You get the ‘I just want to have my rights removed’ badge.
If the London Police can’t or won’t confront the Hamas inspired demonstrators/mobs, and and since the Police report to Mayor Kahn, who is sympathetic to the demonstrators, then what else can be done?
Why do they need to ‘confront them’. It’s not really the polices job to stage a pitched battle.
It’s their job to keep the peace and arrest people breaking the law.
Who said they wouldn’t confront them? Do you have examples of times when the police have failed to arrest people breaking the law at these demonstrations?
Christopher Barclay
10 days ago
An enlightening article. Mary Harrington however jumps from the 19th century to the 21st century. No mention of the Met’s performance in the the post-Windrush 20th century, when police officers were openly racist, murdered black men in police stations, protected racists when they made provocative marches and showed no interest in protecting black and brown people from murder let alone more minor crimes. That is why older black and Asian people have so little faith in the Met.
More recently many white people have experienced the same disinterest from the police when reporting crime. Sarah Everard was murdered and the brutality of the police officers at the vigil for her was due to the police’s anger that the broader public had become aware how many serving police officers were psychopaths and criminals.
Phil Rees
10 days ago
I found this article first rate as a seemingly original contribution to this problem. Until the final paragraph where I think she goes wrong. The whole drift of her argument is surely that we need a completely different approach to policing in a place like London (and, by extension, many other cities like Luton, Bradford, Batley, etc). Perhaps that’s what she meant by her final paragraph, but it is ambiguous and can also be read as saying the government should simply support exactly what the MET are doing. That seems a recipe for more, and worse, trouble .
Betsy Warrior
5 days ago
Don’t forget about the Kray brothers who were big celebrities in circles rife with corruption, or Cyril Smith whose prolific crimes of sexual abuse of children were covered-up at the highest levels, or Profumo”s sleezy behavior or Jimmy Saville who was idolized, knighted and a hero of the BBC or the admired Gary Glitter or Leon Brittain and a cast of thousands who were/are protected coddled and had their many crimes unpunished, covered-up for decades. That’s only the tip of the iceberg – the corruption goes deep into the heart of the upper crust.
David McKee
10 days ago
Oh dear. Civilian policing by consent vs. armed paramilitary, colonial Irish policing… No, this is a gross distortion of what happened. The whole point of colonial policing was to not to require the army for riot control. As Brigadier Dyer inadvertently demonstrated in Amritsar in 1919, this this was a wise policy.
In Britain before the first world war, the army was regularly used in riots in Britain. It used lethal force, and people were killed. Belfast, 1886; Trafalgar Square, 1887; Yorkshire, 1892; Belfast again, 1907; Llanelli, 1911; Liverpool, 1911. The army was used in this way because the unarmed police lost control.
So the history of our policing does _not_ explain what happened to Gideon Falter. Mary Harrington is barking up the wrong tree entirely.
The downvotes are because it goes against the preferred narrative of many on here. They don’t want their opinions challenged (hence the constant whining every time a writer who is vaguely left leaning writes an article), they just want an echo chamber where they’re pre conceived opinions are cheered on by others
Any one who is more interested in learning what actually happened should click on this link. The video and transcript don’t really jive with the story as it’s been presented to us. Mr. Falter was clearly trying to provoke a violent response, the result(s) of which are easily predictable.
You might want to study the history of English behavior towards the Irish, Catholics, and Highland Scots from the Tudors through the Potato famine. If it wasn’t genocidal, it only stopped a hair short. They were actively trying to destroy people’s culture and religion, and often the people as well.
UnHerd Reader
10 days ago
“…1922, the year Britain gained the Mandate for Palestine from the UN”.
This needs correcting – the UN was a post WWII creation.
Slightly pedantic there. It was called the League of Nations but it was basically the precursor to the UN
A D Kent
10 days ago
We now have ample video evidence that the version of events of Gideon Falter, the ‘obviously Jewish’ individual who created such a furore this weekend, was, to say the least, rather partial. His exchange with the officer in question was rather lengthy and not as he desscribed it. His little group had similar interactions with numerous officers. He has previous for making similar claims whilst trying to drive through a demonstration in a van (shown in a video with cars clearly passing by in the back ground). Finally, and get this, his little group of ‘just happened to be walking by’ chums included a current member of Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s security detachment – not the kind of person to worry about feelig ‘unsafe’ anywhere I’d have thought.
I think the officers in question behaved extremely well given the circumstances.
I’m of the opinion that it’s time for the Charity Commission to look at both his conduct and the CAAS’s funding to get to the bottom of this.
That Gideon needed security to feel safe near a PSC march should set off some “compassion “ inside you but you clearly will reserve that for terrorist sympathisers and Jew haters instead.
His story was that he was just out for a walk after a service. Re him feeling unsafe – I suggest he’s a bit of a snowflake. There were indeed dozens of ‘obviously Jewish’ people around that day – many can be seen in pictures with him – who were happy to be there and felt no threat at all.
“Feeling unsafe” is a perception that it is impossible to gainsay, much less disprove. What do you usually think of “snowflakes”, “safe spaces”, and “hurty words”?
Irrelevant. He’s perfectly entitled to do all those things in a free democratic society. Or are you suggesting he should be arrested for being “rather partial”?
I agree, in principle. Personal sympathy is somewhat reduced when it is revealed that it was, I believe, his or his organisation’s complaints that gave the Met the excuse to arrest and remove Tommy Robinson, illegally as it now transpires, from an anti-semitic march in London. What’s sauce for the goose…
The Police are sending out retired senior Officers, as they do when they themselves cannot say these things in public, to point out that the ceasefire marches could and would be banned if there were risk of serious disorder, so Gideon Falter set out to provoke that and should therefore have been arrested. The apology that is due is to the marchers, for the suggestion that it would have been unsafe to have been openly Jewish in their midst. Falter had in fact been in their midst for hours, trying unsuccessfully to stir up trouble long before a synagogue service would have concluded, until in despair he turned his attention to the Police instead. It would be very funny if he were to be charged under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. One-person demonstrations are now illegal. What would be his defence? That he had gone at the head of a gang, one of whom was his cameraman? That would be in addition to the charges of assaulting a Police Officer, breach of the peace, and wasting Police time.
Falter has been allowed to get away with suggesting that the Met would never target a black man. What world does he or any of his interviewers inhabit? But not even John Mann is siding with Falter. Within an Anglo-Jewry that has long been familiar with his stunts and which does not take kindly to a youngish man who tries to short circuit the communal system by getting himself on television to proclaim himself King of the Jews, Falter’s only backer is something that calls itself the National Jewish Assembly, which is a one-man vanity breakaway from the Board of Deputies, and notable only for its heavy financial losses.
Falter’s Campaign Against Antisemitism is also little more than a sole trader. Yet it can field a two-time Home Secretary to bat for it on the Today programme, it can secure at least a fairly high level meeting with the Metropolitan Police merely by demanding one and despite having called at the same time for the Commissioner to be sacked, and it is lavishly funded by the Jewish National Fund, which is the Israeli State’s engine of the settlement activity that His Majesty’s Government recognises to be illegal. How, then, is the JNF not illegal in the United Kingdom? Is it only that that has never been tested in court?
The CAA gets away with pretending to the Charity Commission that it is not funded by the JNF, which is a foreign state pursuing an illegal enterprise within the understanding of the British State of which that Commission is an institution. The CAA’s accounts claim that the money comes from something called “The Jewish National Foundation”. There is no such thing. But Falter is a director of three companies connected to the JNF. He is also the CAA’s only employee paid more than £60,000, and as an employee who is also a trustee he is identified as such in the accounts, even though the CAA has otherwise talked the Charity Commission into keeping its trustees’ identities secret on grounds of “safety”. There is no evidence that anyone has been anything more than made to “feel unsafe”, a perception that it is impossible to gainsay, much less disprove. What do the CAA’s allies usually think of “snowflakes”, “safe spaces”, and “hurty words”? Who in Parliament is going to raise the case of the special treatment of registered charity number 1163790? Why has no one yet done so?
Martin Bollis
10 days ago
Is it not more to do with our current insistence on ‘perfect world’ individual rights?
In theory I should have the right to watch football from the Stretford End in my Manchester City shirt. In practice I know to do so would incite violence.
In theory a woman should be able to get drunk and walk round a city late at night with a lot of flesh on show. In practice it’s high risk.
I’m no supporter of the Palestinian demonstrations but this chap set out in search of a headline and successfully manipulated one.
I don’t disagree but attending a tribal gathering of one tribe, wearing the insignia of an opposition tribe, all the while attended by bodyguards and a photographer, is conscious sh*t stirring.
Would you have been so forgiving if a Muslim in full ceremonial robes had filmed themselves walking straight through the middle of a pro Israeli rally in an attempt to incite a negative reaction from the crowd? As that’s what happened in this instance
There used to be a feature on The Word called The Hopefuls, with the catchphrase, “I’ll do anything to be on television.” That is where Gideon Falter belongs. Along with Laurence Fox, who yesterday uploaded a video of himself abusing a Police Officer. Arrest both Falter and Fox.
Katharine Eyre
10 days ago
The reason Britain has been so successful at absorbing people from different cultures into its national life is because the British identity is so malleable and flexible. Ask any Brit what makes him/her British and they’ll probably scratch their heads a good long while before saying something vague like “errr…speaking British English?” The bar to joining in and integrating in Britain is pretty low. And, for a long while, that was a good thing and everyone rubbed along nicely. That was the Britain I grew up in, was formed by, and was proud of – despite the imperfections, tensions and bumps we’ve had along the way.
However, that sort of vagueness about what constitutes Britishness – a lack of what Germans and Austrians called “Leitkultur” (i.e. an overarching cultural and moral framework in a country…which we’re having feverish debates aswell in these times of mass migration) is fast becoming a real threat as it makes the fundamental functions of state (e.g. policing) impossible.
The Met vs. the Jewish community clip came off very badly, but I understand why the police act that way – Mary (as usual – bravo) explains it so well. The friendly, by-consent policing just can’t happen in the absence of a uniform moral framework among the policed which is a prerequisite to that consent.
So, the choices for the future are as follows (repetition of the article content only for the purposes of completeness):
Nr. 1: The containment strategy as applied by the police now. Might keep a superficial peace but isn’t sustainable in the long run as the selective application of control towards those groups which are law-abiding and are deemed as less threatening (i.e. Jews) will generate massive resentment, lessen other groups’ willingness to comply with the law (why should I?) and tangle with constitutional principles of equality (Austria’s constitution has a clause to this effect, the Gleichheitssatz).
Nr. 2: You decide on a certain Leitkultur, and enforce it. This would mean throwing the consent-based model of policing out the window and cracking down on any behaviour not in line with the Leitkultur. This also won’t work in the long run, as a) in a multicultural society like Britain, it’s nigh-on impossible to define what the Leitkultur is and any definition is going to have quite arbitrary effects, and b) if if you do define a Leitkultur, enforcing it will generate a lot of resentment among people who fall foul of it and are thus made to feel unwelcome in their own country. In Austria we’ve had several tentative discussions about a “Leitethik“, i.e. a common ethical framework instead of common cultural norms to abide by but that also runs into the same sort of problems.
So, we come to default option Nr. 3, which is…drum roll…escalating internal strife, as the country stops being a place where people abiding by common cultural norms live together and starts being just a piece of land where a number of warring groups face-off against each other.
The future’s bright, everybody!
Option 4: Apply the longstanding, existing common law uniformally across all people and “communities” without exception. The working model we foolishly chose to abandon. Still used in some countries around the world, where you would expect – and accept – as a visitor or settler to conform to the local laws.
If that means having to say that historic British culture is the “Leitkultur” and that upsets some people, so be it. There’s no way out of the mess now without upsetting some people.
Probably true. Except that we don’t really need the culture stuff. I’d argue there’s no decision to make in choosing a culture. Just revert to the previously “known good” (in engineering speak) model.
Absolutely do not try to synthesise some new common culture to try to please everyone. That’s guaranteed to satisfy no one.
Not really. Option 4 differs significantly from Nr.2 in that it doesn’t assume that a “Leitkultur” is impossible to have as a societal foundation because it is likely to upset some people.
Peter B’s citing of common law as a starting point is correct. We should enforce common law across the board. No exceptions for different customs, beliefs, or ‘communities’, if these go against the common law. That would be a start.
It is always interesting to hear an external perspective.
I wonder which period you would point to in which Austria can be said to have shared or acheived a truly common Leitkultur ?
It strikes me that the grand theme of Austrian history stretching back to the the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 is a standing demonstration the quixotic appeal and repeated and disastrous failure of such a a program.
So hows about in the UK a bonafide written constitutution as opposed to the current “organic” evolving by legal precedent / habit constitution ?
I appreciate that this mechanism for fixing in aspic, a particular set of values and aspirations, has not been working too well in the USA of late but their originator document is now over 200 years old and even their most recent amendment is over 30 years old.
If something is written down for all to see and promulgated particularly in schools, and upheld within the legal system, then I would argue there is some hope, in a generation or two or three for the evolution of a more culturally homogeneous society.
There will always be outliers / rebels / naysayers / professionally discontented in any society. How you deal with these individuals will wax and wane according to the politics of the day.
I have huge sympathy with the police – asked to make decisions in the moment on behalf of a theoretical majority, undefined.
Britain does, emphatically, have a written constitution. It is written in a number of famous documents including the Bill of Rights 1689, Acts of Union 1707 and 1800, The Act of Settlement 1701, The Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, Human Rights Act 1998 and The Scotland Act, Northern Ireland Act and Government of Wales Act 1998 Parliamentary Sovereignty is it’s defining practical principle.
The idea that we don’t have a written constitution is put about by those who would like to re-write it, all at once, from top to bottom and for the benefit of their own faction – The Manageriate. The friends of liberty agreeing to re-write our ancient constitution at this point in the history of the Managerial State would be like the old tale of the fox and the chicken sitting down to decide what’s for dinner.
The idea is is sold to you, most often, by those who dislike the free and open Parliamentary system of government.Their real target is Parliamentary Sovereignty and free and open debate. They would like Judges and expert panels, appointed by closed commitee, to arbitrate on what is constitutional rather than the King-in-Parliament, with the elected representatives of the Commons of England in the driving seat.
Beware!
So how many people do you think in the UK can quote verse and chapter from these 10 Acts ?
If the fundamentals aren’t written down in simple English and taught in primary schools how could you possible expect a population to voluntarily get on board ?
As for Parliamentary Sovereignity – well it looks pretty dysfunctional to me right now.
Immigrants bring in their conflicts such as Hindu/Muslim, Muslim/Jewish and Muslim/Sikh? What about muti, female genital mutilation, honour killings, anti-semitism . What about standards of honesty ? Do certain religions accept everyone is equal ? You need to analyse every religious, cultural, tribal, ethnic and linguistic conflict.
Linda M Brown
10 days ago
Sorry Mary you’ve missed the boat. One of Peel’s basic tenants was: To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all ..
Impartial means if you break the law or commit a crime you get the same treatment treatment from the police regardless of your skin colour regardless of your ethnic background or political’ beliefs.
We have clear evidence of two tier policing; they no longer demonstrateimpartial service to the law’. The Covid lockdown protests were heavily handled by the police, hell individuals going about their business were stopped & questioned by the police. The police rolled up to the St George’s day parade with horses, vans and a belligerent attitude, provoking the attendees by kettling them – as they did at the armistice day service. They, the police gave every appearance of spoiling for a fight with the St George’s day celebrants. Meanwhile at the pro-Hamas protests (intimidation marches), or the Just Stop Oil, or Extinction Rebellion, protests etc… crickets.
Yesterday also saw the charges against Tommy Robinson dismissed, he was cleared of breaching a dispersal order after a judge ruled the power had not been legally authorised by police. His arrest last Armistice day while eating breakfast in a cafe and subsequent pepper spraying at point blank range while handcuffed was, fortunately for him, live streamed. Twenty (+?) officers for one man and not one of them had body camera footage(?). Love him or hate him, it was an attempted stitch up by the MET. They had no right to insist on him leaving, there is no legal definition of what a journalist is, and he kept telling them he was attending as a journalist, with a camera man.
In the past we saw police refusing to investigate the Muslim rape gangs who targeted white girls and minority ethnic non-Muslim girls for fear of being called racists. This is all of a piece.
People, regular law abiding people, have lost faith in the police and until Rowley is fired and someone installed that will instruct officers to apply the law evenly rather than going after the weakest target to intimidate, people will continue to lose faith and God help the police if they ever need help, because at this rate they’re not going to get it.
Lennon Ó Náraigh
10 days ago
Two thousand years ago, the imperial forces of law and order in ancient Rome struggled to keep the peace in a restive province. On one occasion, they had to choose between pacifying an angry mob, and scapegoating a solitary Jew. They chose the latter. Some methods of colonial policing never change.
Scapegoating? Jesus was convicted of blasphemy for claiming to be God, which he did indeed claim, and which was indeed a capital crime under Jewish law. Whether the conviction was just of course depends on your religious beliefs.
Carefully now! If Jesus had been convicted of blasphemy under Jewish law he would have been stoned, not crucified (Leviticus 24:16; Acts 6:11; 7:59).
It appears that he was instead executed for treason by the Roman authorities. In this, he was both a scapegoat for all of us and more narrowly for the sins of his own contemporaries.
Barrabas, called a brigand, and Judas, a Zealot looking for a warrior-king, were both spared the penalties of their worldly treason while the Prince of Peace, the man who rejected the sword the crown and the kingdom if this earth was executed for rebellion.
It is interesting to think about the relationship between claiming-divine-religious-authority-under-Jewish-law (Jewish blasphemy) and claiming-divine-political-authority-under-Roman-law (Roman treason, you call it).
But it doesn’t matter for my point. Either way, Jesus claimed Lordship over his followers, which neither Jews nor Romans would accept, and which each used to justify his execution. As I say, Jesus did actually say and do the things he was accused of saying and doing. That’s very different from what we mean by scapegoat today.
The Romans didn’t ‘scapegoat’ Jesus. Pontius Pilate found him innocent of any crime under Roman law, but chose to appease the mob by allowing it to be the judge and decide his fate.
Only in the same sense that the men that killed Socrates are called ‘Athenian’. Or the men that killed Charles I were ‘English’.
We know that the 12 Apostles were also Jewish and that the Apostle Paul was “Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews”
The label is incidental to their crime, not the crime to the label.
Is that the way you read it? I’m always wary of reading the Gospels as if they were a deposition in court or a secular syllogism. History they may be, but divine history. There is another level to what is going on.
I have always seen myself in the mob. Just as I see myself in the Apostles who flee Gethsemane, deny Christ with oaths and avoid the place of crucifixion. The Jewishness, (or Pharisaism, or Zealotry) of the mob is scarcely relevant, what we are seeing is the reaction of fallen men to political disappointment.
They had expected a warrior King, instead they get a gospel of peace. And it enrages them.
William Amos
10 days ago
Open the pages of any Punch magazine of the second half of the 19th Century and you’ll see that the Peelers were always quite prepared to hand out a hiding when the mob got rowdy. The Garibaldi riots of 1862 pitted Irish Catholics against English Protestants and Whigs. There were riots later in the 1860’s about Reform and Socialist riots in the West End in the 1880’s.
The idea that the Old Bill policed by broad consent anywhere East of Aldgate Pump or in the working class neighourhoods of Southwark, Lambeth or North Kensington is highly questionable. Music Hall songs, the great repository of working class history in London are replete wit references to corrupt and violent coppers.
Added to that, the phenomenon of recreational protesting untroubled by Police response is really quite recent. Up until the 1960’s even the most innocuous rallies could usually expect to end with a good hiding off Old Bill.
Our view of daily politics may well be distorted by many ephemeral and transient notions and concerns which history will show to be baseless.
London may have been 97% White British in 1960’s but how many of them were of Irish Catholic stock? The Irish constituency had once had its own politics and religion and a national myth even more wholly insoluble with wider ‘English’ (as it was known then) identity than now the ‘British Muslim’ seems.
Counterintuitive though it may seem, the prospect for Muslim participation and reconciliation to the British commonwealth seems to me far brighter than once seemed conceivable for the Irish Catholic of the Fenian period or International Socialist Working Class of the 1930’s.
The main stumbling block it seems, to me, is the unspoken belief among the indigenous peoples of this Island that ‘these people’ and ‘their culture’ do not really belong here. If that is what one feels then one admit it, not least to oneself.
I for one, as a child of Empire and the Commonwealth think that is a fond, foolish view of our shared history.
Great post — except you don’t explain how to square the circle. If ‘those people’ are to fit in here… how do you achieve it? The answer is simple: to stop pretending that it is wrong to prioritize traditional British norms. If you come here you can keep your cultural distinctives that don’t conflict with those of your new home but must discard the bits that don’t fit.
But things get curiouser and curiouser. The norms of most conservative Muslim families, at least in the their concepts of family honour, public decency, charity, the ‘good life’, deeply ritualised customary respect for age and sex and so forth are markedly closer to the ‘British Norms’ of our grandsires than is the materialism, individualism and hedonism of many, perhaps the majority, of the true-born, native, Sons of Hengist
There is a strange irony, first noted in the 1970’s East End, that the values of many immigrant Muslim families were actually far closer to the native working class with whom they were in such bitter daily strife, than with the liberal progressive left who positioned themselves as their benevolent champions. If material circumstances had been different they could even have been allies.
I cannot help but think that the conflict between Islam and ‘traditional British values’, at least in the civic sphere, is one of accent and emphasis. The conflict with liberal progressivism is existential.
The future will inevitably involve a synthesis of all the customs of all the peoples of these islands. It’s important to keep in mind that statecraft is ‘the art of the possible’. There will be strange bedfellows in the future commonwealth, whatever arises.
I cannot help but think that the conflict between Islam and ‘traditional British values’, at least in the civic sphere, is one of accent and emphasis.
Different groups having similar values is a significant point.
But that does not address the question – separate from overlappingvalues – of group identity and loyalty. The problem is especially great where, within a given country, members of a particular group have a greater loyalty amongst themselves than to the country as a whole.
All the more so when their primary loyalty is to members of that group in other countries.
Doubtless at critical points in European history catholic and protestant Christians had greatly overlapping values and beliefs. But their group loyalties caused hostilities within countries and among countries.
Their loyalty lies not to Britain, but to Islam; leaked docs show Home Office Islamic Network say they aim to recruit Muslim staff and “influence policymakers” to support “Muslim needs”.The Islamic Network has recruited 700 Home Office staff so far. Only muslims can become “full members”.
Norms like ‘honour killings’, the sexual grooming & rape of children; deeply ritualised customs concerning sex like FGM, stoning for adultery & crucifixion for homosexuality; death for not wearing the burka correctly or trying to leave the religion? That sort of thing?
UnHerd Reader
10 days ago
Multiculturalism was introduced as “a good thing” and an end in itself only when integration of certain ethnicities and certain religion groups systematically refused to integrate into British society.
Diversity is our strength is as much a lie as Orwell’s War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery. Diversity is a sure way to civil conflict.
“…A sure way to civil conflict”? Doesn’t work that way in Brooklyn. Or even in Jerusalem.
Nathan Ngumi
10 days ago
Very insightful! Policing in UK ought to evolve like it has elsewhere.
B Emery
10 days ago
‘Here, the priority is maintaining superficial peace. In practice, this means appeasing the most volatile “communities”, while the most law-abiding are also the most harshly constrained, simply because they offer the least resistance.’
Laugh my arse off. If that were really true our prisons would be full of middle Englanders. They are not.
‘ The officer correctly identified Falter as representative of one London “community”, and the protesters as a different, potentially hostile “community”. Tasked with preventive policing, he foresaw a potential breach of the peace should these come into collision.’
Obviously. It’s actually a lot easier for the police officer to ask one person to move on than it is for them to move an entire demonstration. It’s not the mets fault that these people can’t get on with each other. They can only do the best they can do. Policemans job is to keep you safe. That’s all he was trying to do. He’s probably asking himself why he even bothered.
‘Thanks to the policy choices of Britain’s (largely London-based) political leaders, the capital is now too diverse for the historic Met policing model’
Why. We have laws. The police know what the laws are and are trained to implement them. Why can the law not be applied equally to all citizens regardless of their culture, religion or country of origin. I mean it’s not like the police go up to a criminal and they be like ‘Can I ask what country you are from? It’s just we apply the laws differently depending on your heritage.’
This is another incident that has been blown out of all proportion by the press, all that happened was that one, probably tired and stressed out officer that to be honest couldn’t probably explain the many complexities of the Israel/ Palestine issue anyway, probably doesn’t have many strong opinions on the issue either way, asked one guy to please just move on.
Maybe he could have used better words, but this is being blown out of all proportion.
It has spawned multiple news articles, TV coverage and endless streams of academic nonsense.
Like this article.
Jerry Carroll
9 days ago
London needs to continue on his present path of Muslimization, which will solve the problem in a decade or two. Whites and people of colour who don’t pray five times a day will be free to go about their business outside the metropolitan limits.
0 0
6 days ago
I saw the whole 13 minutes of the officer and Falter and I recommend it. The officer’s forbearance is manifest, and the impression given there by Falter’s words and actions that he was some kind of agent provocateur has been confirmed by his subsequent actions as well as previous attacks on Gaza protests which have come to light.
The episode reveals the quest for dominance to be the ineluctable adversary of civil liberties and equal treatment under law. Falter acted on behalf of those horrified that public manifestation challenging their established presumptions was permitted, setting about to attack that directly and indirectly. However sensitive police may be to differing standpoints in society they are not in a position to erase difference and have practically limited means to channel conflict.
The Imperial legacy of policing means one thing when deployed in an established hierarchy of divide and rule. It’s deprived of that anchor to the extent equal treatment under the law is observed and political process of some kind of other is invoked. Falter seems to have understood that to some extent, trying to play politics to restore the rightful presuppositions of his group. As he saw them.
Last edited 6 days ago by 0 0
Stephen Pearson
3 days ago
One of the best and most perceptive articles I’ve read on here recently.
Champagne Socialist
10 days ago
She seems to have missed the part where a bunch of racist scumbags attacked the police yesterday. Oh look, there’s that clown Laurence Fox taking a break from getting annihilated in every election he stands in to show his racist credentials.
Hopefully the boys from the Met dished out a couple of cracked skulls while regaining order.
The English skulls get cracked by batons, while the pro-Hamas faction are free to march.
When this is a Muslim land you won’t be getting champagne you know; alcohol is haram.
David Lindsay
10 days ago
The reason why yesterday’s event in London, whatever it was, elicited the Police response that it did, whereas none of the Gaza peace marches has done, is because no one has rioted at any of the Gaza peace marches. Yesterday’s lot were rioting from an hour before their function was due to start. Rioting about what? Just for the sake of it? On Armistice Day, they had stabbed nine Police Officers at the Cenotaph, with bladed articles that had been brought specifically for the purpose. Since then, organisations had been proscribed for less. But flanked by an agent of a foreign power, a bodyguard to the President of Israel, one Vicentiu Chiculita of two former Mossad officers’ SQR Group, Gideon Falter assaulted a Police Officer and attempted to incite a riot on the streets of London. It took him more than a week, but he does seem to have got his way.
While Falter’s Campaign Against Antisemitism turns out already to have been a pariah, or at least an embarrassing stepchild, even within the strongly pro-Israeli world of what might called official Jewishness in Britain, he and it were behind the greatest British political hoax of the post-Iraq age, “Labour anti-Semitism”. The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases in its entire report, neither of them involved Jeremy Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of the Labour Party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.”
Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed. But it does now. Labour has expelled more Jews under Keir Starmer than under all its previous Leaders put together, most or all of them for what has been found to be the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism; there would not be enough time left in this Parliament to change the law on that. It is no wonder that Andrew Feinstein is standing against the Leader who has turned Labour into an anti-Semitic party.
Every week, listen to Starmer and Rishi Sunak “clashing” under parliamentary privilege over whether or not Starmer had tried to put an anti-Semite into Downing Street, and whether or not he had changed the Labour Party from one in which anti-Semitism had been “rife”. Pure fiction, but what else would they have to “clash” over? If they have any point of political disagreement, then it is that Sunak has not handed over the health portfolio to someone who was still a paid lobbyist for the privatisation of the NHS, but had appointed a Foreign Secretary who was at least occasionally willing to criticise Israel.
Nine police officers were NOT stabbed on Armistice Day. The police kettled those who wanted to attend the Cenotaph ceremony, and the attendees were justifiably annoyed. The videos are out there showing the police trapping the attendees. The same thing happened at the St George’s Day celebration, the police arrived with horses, riot gear and spoiling for a fight attempted to kettle the attendees and charged at them with horses. Again the videos are available on line.
Matt B
6 days ago
London is not secular nor tolerant. It is a mix of global religions and otherwise opinionated people in political, preaching, practice and policy terms. It is, however largely peaceful for now – beyond crime.
“In practice, this means appeasing the most volatile “communities”, while the most law-abiding are also the most harshly constrained, simply because they offer the least resistance.”
This may work for now, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. Even the most well-behaved citizen will start to act up once they realize good behavior is punished and bad behavior is ignored or tacitly rewarded.
It will never happen. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen someone predict a white backlash that never came.
The indigenous people are down to about one third of Londoners, which is too late for any meaningful backlash. Look at yesterday’s St. George’s Day demo for an example of what happens if they ‘act up’.
The rest of Britain will go the same way, but at locally varying speeds.
The St George’s day attendees didn’t act up. They were kettled by the police who arrived with belligerent attitudes, police horses, riot shields and vans. The police were spoiling for a fight and tried to provoke a reaction. There are livestream videos available, not the curated content shown on MSM. How long will it be until even law abiding people start chanting ACAB?
Indigenous people were chased off these lands long ago by the Germanic immigrants.
Cancelled
It is time to realise that the police and the legal system are now the enemies of the native population of this country weaponised against us by a malignant state.
Witness the way the BLM demonstrations and Palestinian marches were policed, witness how the powers that be are obsessed by the imaginary right wing threat while playing down and even pandering to Islamic extremism, witness how the law, including sentencing, is applied unevenly to cower the natives.
I noticed how the Met had no qualms about wading in and sticking the boot into whitey yesterday.
Sorry Mary you’ve missed the boat. One of Peel’s basic tenants was: To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all ..
Impartial means if you break the law or commit a crime you get the same treatment treatment from the police regardless of your skin colour regardless of your ethnic background or
political’ beliefs.impartial service to the law’. The police rolled up to the St George’s day parade with horses, vans and a belligerent attitude, provoking the attendees by kettling them – as they did at the armistice day service. They, the police gave every appearance of spoiling for a fight with the St George’s day celebrants. Meanwhile at the pro-Hamas protests (intimidation marches), or the Just Stop Oil, or Extinction Rebellion, protests etc… crickets.We have clear evidence of two tier policing; they no longer demonstrate <em>
Yesterday also saw the charges against Tommy Robinson dismissed, he was cleared of breaching a dispersal order after a judge ruled the power had not been legally authorised by police. His arrest last Armistice day while eating breakfast in a cafe and subsequent pepper spraying at point blank range while handcuffed was, fortunately for him, live streamed. Twenty (+?) officers for one man and not one of them had body camera footage(?). Love him or hate him, it was an attempted stitch up by the MET. They had no right to insist on him leaving, there is no legal definition of what a journalist is, and he kept telling them he was attending as a journalist, with a camera man
in the past we saw police refusing to investigate the Muslim rape gangs who targeted white girls and minority ethnic non-Muslim girls for fear of being called racists. This is all of a piece.
People, regular law abiding people, have lost faith in the police and until Rowley is fired and someone installed that will instruct officers to apply the law evenly rather than going after the weakest target to intimidate, people will continue to lose faith and God help the police if they ever need help, because at this rate they’re not going to get it.
In the Home Office you can say multiculturalism is multiple cultures, and you can even say those cultures are different, but you cannot think let alone discuss how those cultures might be different.
Similarly, you can talk about a community group identity, and you can even talk about that community having some group beliefs, but you cannot think let alone discuss how those beliefs might result in group patterns of behaviour.
There is even a rationale provided for all of this: if we just ignore the differences, there won’t be a problem; tolerance of the disagreeable behaviour will slowly grow until it is unremarkable. Quite literally, there is an elephant in the room only if we acknowledge its presence. That’s the governing principle of the state managing your country today.
If the policing model was to change, that would acknowledge the elephant. Instead, there needs to be an even more determined effort to ignore the elephant and diminish any reports of the elephant. In policing terms, that means less policing, literally turning a blind eye. For you, it means becoming accustomed and accepting of criminal behaviour. And you see it on the streets of every town and city in the UK today. It is for this reason that what we say and share on social media is seen by the state as the greatest threat.
Indeed, but the model also needs more hate speech laws to sustain it. They will come under Starmer.
Animal Farm.
Yes, but hang on! Police it how? “Appeasing the most volatile community” is simply a launch-pad for rule by might. Your analysis is excellent but you leave the question unanswered which, if you’d even mentioned that there still is a question, would not be so bad. But how the question is answered is the vital thing.
The key is addressing a factor you haven’t mentioned and it’s this. A tactic of “protest” has emerged—or more likely reemerged (since the 1960s)—it started recently with Brexit and Trump—of “protestors” disrupting public life as opposed to assembling in some park or public arena, to make their views known. The tactic is not just to speak and chant slogans. It is to get in everyone else’s way. That is the point. And it includes getting in the face of the public, motorists, Jews (see also Columbia University). We see it with JSO. We saw it with George Floyd, the anti-Trump demonstrations, and now with the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Policymakers have to understand that this is not simply a surfeit of “feelings”. It is an intimidatory tactic perfected by the Nazis in the 1930s. Cause mayhem, sow fear, and public policy will bend in your direction. The ostentatious leniency shown by judges to JSO vandals is reminescent of the leniency shown by nationalist judges in Germany in the late 1920s, early 1930s to Nazi vandals and thugs.
The solution is quite simple. Political demonstrations must not be allowed to disrupt public life. They should, by law, be allowed only in spaces where disruption is not likely, or much less likely, to happen: public parks, sports arenas, and so forth.
Free speech does not include your right to scream abuse in my face as I go about my business in London, or blocking the road as I try to drive my kids to school.
There has been a failure to draw a distinction between “protest” ie I will visibly demonstrate my support for a policy I favour and “disruption” ie I will disrupt civil life to such extent that I force you to adopt the policy I favour. Any protest that disrupts the citizen going about his lawful way should be prevented by the police or the army if that is needed. Asking for something is different to demanding it with menaces or by blackmail.
This is exactly right. Thank you for that clarification.
I almost agree except that there’s a big difference between lying down in a road to stop traffic (because you genuinely believe _all_ of humanity is under threat from climate change) & screaming for a Global Intifada, to kill Jews & other Nazi-like behaviour. I would like to see a lot of these pro-Hamas protesters locked up for incitement to violence.
The difference is not as great as you think. Both are signs of a regression to millenarian, catastrophism and the minting of premises to take away your freedom. The manipulation of information and publicity around climate is as dishonest as that around Israel-Palestine. The green agenda is about control. The urgency that poorer countries improve their economic output is far greater than climate change. The proof of this is that the burden of proof is falling on the so-called “climate deniers”. Why? The only “evidence” that the climate zealots have is occasional bad weather which, today, is killing fewer people than ever before. Global warming is not a threat. More people die of cold every year than of heat.
The tactics of JSO and other environmental activists is unscientific bullying, pure and simple.
The fact that you’ve written ‘more people die of cold every year than of heat’ tells me everything I need to know about your understanding of climate change. Global warming does not mean the temperature is uniformly going up. It means a large number of the complex earth systems upon which all life on this planet relies, are being deleteriously affected:
‘Climate change means not only changes in globally averaged surface temperature, but also changes in atmospheric circulation, in the size and patterns of natural climate variations, and in local weather. La Niña events shift weather patterns so that some regions are made wetter, and wet summers are generally cooler. Stronger winds from polar regions can contribute to an occasional colder winter. In a similar way, the persistence of one phase of an atmospheric circulation pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation has contributed to several recent cold winters in Europe, eastern North America, and northern Asia.
Atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns will evolve as Earth warms and will influence storm tracks and many other aspects of the weather. [However] Global warming tilts the odds in favour of more warm days and seasons and fewer cold days and seasons. For example, across the continental United States in the 1960s there were more daily record low temperatures than record highs, but in the 2000s there were more than twice as many record highs as record lows. Another important example of tilting the odds is that over recent decades heatwaves have increased in frequency in large parts of Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. Marine heat waves are also increasing.’ https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-11/#:~:text=Global%20warming%20is%20a%20long,even%20as%20the%20climate%20warms.
I’m not sure what is your evidence for the fact that the ‘green agenda is about control.’ Either way, and whatever your disagreement about solutions, protesters tactics, etc., the scientific consensus on climate change is clear. 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/do-scientists-agree-on-climate-change/.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is measurable and alarming and based on evidence – no need for the scare quotes. The last time there was this much of it in the earth’s atmosphere was during the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event (approximately 251.9 million years ago), otherwise known as the ‘Great Dying.’
The effects of similar amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere built up over the last two centuries have caused just 0.8 degrees warming of the world (since pre-Industrial times) which has so far led to the following (again) measurable and scientifically known examples of ‘bad weather’ (to use your term):
– deadly heat waves – in every continent, but especially bad in Sub-Saharan Africa and across Asia;
– water shortages leading to crop failures and famines, including the first famine ‘officially’ recorded as having been caused by climate change in Madagascar;
– extreme ‘once in a lifetime’ disasters occurring several times annually throughout the globe, such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes and extinctions;
– large-scale diebacks in forests, especially the Amazon Rainforest – the ‘lungs of the planet’ – which we need to absorb greenhouse gases, especially Co2, and sequester it in the soil;
– massive melting of the polar ice caps, and other glaciers, including the rapid melting of Asia’s glaciers upon which millions of people rely for water;
– ocean acidification – leading to the death of coral reefs (including the Great Barrier Reef), upon which millions of people rely for food;
– a sea level rise of just 8 centimeters in the last 25 years.
A further 15-25cm of sea level rise is expected by 2050. If unchecked, this would put large parts of many of the world’s most populous cities and countries under water, including: London, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Georgetown, Guyana, Basra in Iraq, Kolkata, India, Amsterdam, Osaka, Japan, Shanghai, Bangkok, New Orleans, New York, Ho Chi Minh, Venice, Savannah, USA; large parts of mainland China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Caribbean. It would also result in the disappearance of whole island nations: the Atolls, the Maldives, Tuvalu, Fiji, and the Marshall Islands.
Indeed, some nations have already lost islands and begun relocating communities. Five of the Solomon Islands have already disappeared due to the combined effects of sea level rise and extreme winds. Across the South Pacific, small island countries are experiencing the loss of fisheries that drive local economies and ensure food security. Some countries could literally disappear from maps. https://time.com/5478446/climate-change-vulnerable-countries/
As for your rather imperious suggestion that ‘the urgency that poorer countries improve their economic output is far greater than climate change’ again, what is _your_ evidence?
7/10 of the countries most affected by climate change are in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2050 it’s estimated that there will be 200 million climate refugees… https://time.com/5687470/cities-countries-most-affected-by-climate-change/
The Horn of Africa recently saw almost three years of some of tge worst drought conditions in history, according to the Famine and Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). Ethiopia and Somalia have had five failed rainy seasons since late 2020, which have displaced 1.4 million Somalis and killed 3.8 million livestock.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/151208/heavy-rains-hit-drought-stricken-horn-of-africa#:~:text=The%20Horn%20of%20Africa%20has,and%20killed%203.8%20million%20livestock.
Politicians and heads of state have been meeting to discuss the greenhouse gas effect and the dangers of global warming since the 1970s. Since then, CO2 emissions have increased by approx 90%.
At the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009, a non-binding target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees was agreed upon, despite it also being agreed that 2 degrees (as opposed to 1.5) was a ‘death sentence’ for low-lying islands and Sub-Saharan Africa. At the much-celebrated COP21 in Paris 8 years ago, after much lobbying by African and Pacific Island delegates, the Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau, got everyone to agree on (again a non-binding) limit of 1.5 degrees’ warming. Do you think the African and Pacific Island delegates know less about their countries’ needs than you?
Even if the Paris accord signatories kept to their agreements, a big if, it will lead to a 3°C rise in temperatures in the next couple of decades. Failure to implement even those would leave our planet on track for a 4 to 5°C rise within our children’s lifetime, at which point some of the world’s most densely populated areas will become uninhabitable.
COP26 in Glasgow was described by some as the ‘best last chance for humanity’. Yet of all the countries who had representation at the summit, the fossil fuel industry had the largest delegation, according to Global Witness, Corporate Accountability and others.
Overall, they identified 503 people employed by or associated with fossil fuel interests at the summit. They also found that:
– The fossil fuel lobby is larger than the combined total of the eight delegations from the countries worst affected by climate change in the past 20 years: including Madagascar, Nigeria, Kenya, Haiti, Yemen, the Philippines and Kitribati.
So don’t tell me about agendas and control.
Climate change is a demonstrably provable, scientifically measurable problem of immense complexity. There is a serious lack of consensus on how to fix it but not on whether it’s even happening in the first place…
Explain changes in climate since the last Ice Age, the last 2.6M years, 5M years and 50 M years. CO2 levels were 6 to 7 times what they are today at end of Jurassic/Cretaceous.
How does phytoplankton vary ?
Climate varies, why did it start cooling 5M years ago ? How and why do Ice Ages start and end?
“Explain changes in climate since the last Ice Age, the last 2.6M years, 5M years and 50 M years.”
Work in progress and if a bunch of scientists weren’t concerned about the rate of climate change we are experiencing right now the necessary research to answer these questions wouldn’t be going on.
“CO2 levels were 6 to 7 times what they are today at end of Jurassic/Cretaceous.”
Due to dissocaition of methane clathrates (geologic records)
Changes in the geography of the oceans
“How does phytoplankton vary ?”
The Ocean carbon cycle. The best description I have found was on 5.10.23 In Our Tme – Plankton BBC Radio 4. Free. Available to everyone.
“Climate varies, why did it start cooling 5M years ago ?”
Panama seaway closure
Southward shift of the North Atlantic current
Collapse of permanent El Nino
Uplift of Rocky Mountains and Greenland’s west coast
Decreased CO2 levels because of changes in the Southern Ocean surface and deep circulation
“How and why do Ice Ages start and end?”
Eccentric shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun (affected by Jupiter) 96,000 year cycle
Changes in the tilt of the Earth on a 41,000 year cycle
Wobble of Earth’s tilted axis (like a spinning top) 20,000 year cycle
The movement of tectonic plates affecting how much land is above water and wind and ocean currents
Volcanism
Big meteorites
The positive and negative feedback effects produced by all these affecting albedo
It’s complicated. That doesn’t mean it’s a fairy story.
There is no right to block traffic. If drivers are stuck and unable to access an alternate route, a strong case can be made for false imprisonment under the laws of most anglophone countries.
I wasn’t arguing about their ‘rights’, I was speculating about their motivations.
London is not a separate country; it is a part of the United Kingdom where the same rules as to policing should apply uniformly.
London is a separate country. The UK is composed overwhelmingly of British people. In London British people are a small ethnic minority.
Yes. We didn’t seem to hear anything from other police forces re St. George’s Day celebrations. Policing to avoid conflict does seem, of necessity, to involve a level of pragmatic compromise. I think these ‘compromises’ would be more acceptable if the police, particularly the Met, remained demonstrably impartial. They were obviously partisan about JSO, BLM and LGBTQ. For the latter they even painted their squad cars to ’give confidence’. One could accept this if it didn’t actually appear that, by contrast (ref. St. George’s Day, London) they seem to almost provoke reaction from anybody they perceive as ‘nationalist’ or even patriotic in order, one could suspect, to support some far right narrative.
The elephant in the room here is that the Jewish chap in question was wearing his religious skullcap and would quite likely have been ‘savaged’ by the sociopaths (or worse) participating.
Hence the police were protecting the security of the individual and, on a small level, public order. The real issue is the permissiveness of Britain’s modern liberal state in allowing this blatance promotion of terrorism to occur consistently in public over the last 6 months.
I saw it reported he went along with a film crew, suggesting planning – they were the ones filmed the interaction with the police officer.
Good job that he did take a film crew, which by the way is not illegal, so we can see the new policing model in action.
Have you actually seen the entire transcript rather than simply the edited version?
The man was pulled aside because he stepped off the path and deliberately walked through the protest against the flow of people in an attempt to antagonise the situation and get some juicy footage. The bobby pulled him aside and offered to escort him to the other side of the road (where the man claimed he’d been trying to go) but the man refused and instead started to berate the copper while his entourage filmed it.
After seeing the full story my opinion on the matter changed entirely, the police did nothing wrong in my eyes and the man was simply there looking for trouble
It was an organised stunt by him in order to provoke that reaction. I’m not saying he was wrong to do it but he’d probably have come off a lot worse storming across that march if the police had missed him
You cannot “provoke” a demonstrator who is determined to be peaceful – even with a film crew present; ask Ghandi.
The demonstrators had a right to protest peacefully, without molestation or interference from any bystanders, and he had a equivalent right to carry out his lawful activity with same consideration. It is the job of Police to ensure both have that opportunity.
Excellent summary of facts: I’m glad someone finally pointed this out. (Excellent essay by Mary as well, it should be said.)
The best weapon against the rolling organized stunt of weekly rallies of anti-semites is another organized stunt designed to expose them. Good for him.
‘The best weapon against the rolling organized stunt of weekly rallies of anti-semites is another organized stunt designed to expose them.’
An ‘organised stunt designed to expose them’. That sounds mighty close to entrapment. It sounds like a good way to cause a reaction that the police would then have to deal with. Do you agree with endangering police officers then.
Do you not think the police have enough to deal with, without people organising stunts designed to cause a reaction?
The police are unable to arrest those behaving badly and shouting illegal slogans as they, and the marchers, know the sheer numbers are unassailable. If they tried to pull anyone out of the march there would be a running riot – in a very expensive part of town with big plate glass windows. They can only do some evidence gathering by cameras and try to ID the perps later.
‘The police are unable to arrest those behaving badly and shouting illegal slogans’
What is your definition of ‘behaving badly’.
I’m not sure I think any slogans should be illegal as I believe in freedom of speech. What ‘illegal slogans’ were being shouted and can you link sources please.
‘If they tried to pull anyone out of the march there would be a running riot – in a very expensive part of town with big plate glass windows. They can only do some evidence gathering by cameras and try to ID the perps later.’
I’m not sure you understand how riot police work in the UK. If there was a’ running riot’ our police would have water cannons out and goodness knows what else. London riot police actually don’t normally mess about.
Do you have any evidence that the only thing the police can do is gather evidence by cctv.
Are you aware that facial recognition technology is now normally in use at such protests. So the police would be able to identify troublemakers quite easily.
You say the numbers are ‘unassailable’. Do you have any evidence for this. The police are equipped with water cannons and riot vans, riot gear, horses and truncheons to give them an advantage when outnumbered.
What ratio of police to protesters do you consider proportionate and what was the ratio at the demonstration under discussion. To say the numbers were unassailable, you would need to provide both these figures and take into account all the specialised vehicles, water cannons, horses and personnel London riot police have access to.
No water cannons.
Fair point, I didn’t realise we had sold them. I just googled apparently we had three that never got used, bought by boris and sold at a loss.
Another waste of taxpayers money by the sound of it.
The way he was carrying on the police should have stood back and let him antagonise the mob protesting, although no doubt then he would have complained that the police let him come to harm
The “openly Jewish” guy was being a disingenuous pr*&k and obviously trying to provoke the police for effect. I feel sorry for the officer who really kept his cool, while having to make sure an organised, official but large march was able to pass through without trouble. I would have arrested Mr Gideon Falter if it had been me on duty; the guy is a w@nk3r and a s**t-stirrer.
It’s a shame those lads in the Riot squad don’t appear to work Saturdays.
Great article. I think the idea of colonialist tendencies turning in inwards is powerfull. Our modern elites seem keen to destroy the pillars of our culture with literal and figurative attacks on family, religion, culture and historical archetypal hero figures. I think this is well explained as the colonial instinct turned inwards.
The Met is now the paramilitary wing of the Guardian.
The English are simply abandoning London and the wealthy will soon follow.
Mary, the police did not lose control of the streets. They CEDED control due to the moral cowardice of their leadership (d**k, Rowley & Khan mainly but others too).
They need to un-cede that control fast, and apply the Common Law of England, without prejudice or fear, to those who break it.
Otherwise, we will end up using the army on the streets.
But is it fair to castigate the police? —-If that is our thesis question, then allow me to posit a qualified yes. Qualified because the police are likely only doing what they are told to do. It’s very easy to criticize the enforcers of the rules while giving a pass to those who make them.
The officer in question recognized the real problem but is powerless to act upon it. If the presence of a Jew is enough to drive a group into a near-homicidal frenzy, then perhaps the problem is the group. That should be evident given the conduct of the pro-Hamas people vs. the conduct of everyone else.
Human psychology is simple to understand – you always get more of what you allow. It’s why college students trample campuses screaming death threats to people with impunity. They know nothing will happen to them. Because nothing happened to people who engaged in far worse activity, from the BLM grifters to antifa mobs to all the anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian rhetoric that preceded the current anti-Jewish tone.
The Met is not trying to “keep peace.” It is avoiding its core function of law enforcement in the name of public safety. The principles that guided the Met back in 1829 are no longer applicable because the landscape is no longer the same. Maintaining order over a homogeneous group of people with a great deal in common is far easier than doing so with a new cadre of residents who care nothing about the old ways.
Things have changed a lot since Peel and the police have changed in some ways but not in others. As well as their violence against St George types i note they were violent against the women protesting the murder of Sara Everard and they often get violent with hippies and peaceful anti-war /anarchists demos. So in some cases it seems they are more violent against peaceful or defenceless groups, in other cases groups who they disagree with politically. I doubt the average cop is a fan of ISIS/Hamas and their Labour fellow travellers BUT their bosses are now very left wing with all that that implies in terms of trendy support for terrorists, “national liberation” movements etc etc. My biggest concern is that they are not gathering intel at the Hamas marches because these people are effectively confessing to the support of terrorism and as such are a threat to civic order in the UK and anywhere else outside of Iran and he Palestinian territories.
Summation: The Met is outdated and must be replaced. It can no longer do the job it is nominally charged with because the precondition for its uniquely genteel form of law enforcement, namely a culturally homogenous and more or less law abiding population, no longer holds.
Time to defund the police and judiciary and go back to night watchmen and rough justice.
The police and the judiciary are not on the side of the native British people and only have an interest in their special groups and people who think like them.
Why should anyone abide by laws specifically designed to disadvantage them? Better to create your own.
Thoughtful essay for sure, and I think it largely explains the behaviour of the Met. But what about the Covid protests? I don’t think the Met had an issue cracking down hard on those protests. Maybe I’m wrong.
Easy – they were law abiding people so they got pushed around.
BLM protesters left alone during Covid: women protesting the murder of a woman by a police officer set upon. Fits the pattern.
The vigil for Sarah Everard was going fine till the lads from Sisters Uncut came out of the shadows.
That famous photo was definitely a set-up. And sisters uncut are antifa who also turn out against “let women speak” events and harrass peaceful women talking about their rights.
Interesting to read of the history of the Met. But we’re in 2024 now. It’s way past time that the UK Military or National Guard be brought in to supplement the Police in handling the pro-Hamas mobs taking over the streets of London.
Are you posting from the US? We don’t have a National Guard here.
The point of the article is that the authorities don’t want to crack down on the Islamists or their fellow travellers. They go soft on the factions most likely to go violent.
What are the Territorials then?
Analogous to US Army Reserve.
It’s my understanding that the Territorials are more analogous to the National Guard. They have their own units(e.g. The Royal Yeomanry is a light cavalry formation) . The US Army Reserves are individuals that would be used to fill out regular units. The National Guard has it’s own formed unit, so is the correct analogue.
I’m no expert on the US but I think the National Guard are used on natural disasters and major civil disturbances. The TA never do that. Aren’t the TA intended as reinforcements for the Army in time of war?
What? And impose some kind of martial law?
I don’t think so, our police state has done enough creeping thank you, the last thing we need is to militarise it any further.
You do realise that then, next time there is any type of mass protest, by any faction of society, the state would be like well we rolled out the military to clear the last lot, let’s do that again. That would be a really fast way for an over zealous state to kill popular dissent. Imagine if they had rolled out the military to crush the covid protests, or the trucker protests.
You get the ‘I just want to have my rights removed’ badge.
Give London a taste of what they put Belfast through.
If the London Police can’t or won’t confront the Hamas inspired demonstrators/mobs, and and since the Police report to Mayor Kahn, who is sympathetic to the demonstrators, then what else can be done?
Why do they need to ‘confront them’. It’s not really the polices job to stage a pitched battle.
It’s their job to keep the peace and arrest people breaking the law.
Who said they wouldn’t confront them? Do you have examples of times when the police have failed to arrest people breaking the law at these demonstrations?
An enlightening article. Mary Harrington however jumps from the 19th century to the 21st century. No mention of the Met’s performance in the the post-Windrush 20th century, when police officers were openly racist, murdered black men in police stations, protected racists when they made provocative marches and showed no interest in protecting black and brown people from murder let alone more minor crimes. That is why older black and Asian people have so little faith in the Met.
More recently many white people have experienced the same disinterest from the police when reporting crime. Sarah Everard was murdered and the brutality of the police officers at the vigil for her was due to the police’s anger that the broader public had become aware how many serving police officers were psychopaths and criminals.
I found this article first rate as a seemingly original contribution to this problem. Until the final paragraph where I think she goes wrong. The whole drift of her argument is surely that we need a completely different approach to policing in a place like London (and, by extension, many other cities like Luton, Bradford, Batley, etc). Perhaps that’s what she meant by her final paragraph, but it is ambiguous and can also be read as saying the government should simply support exactly what the MET are doing. That seems a recipe for more, and worse, trouble .
Don’t forget about the Kray brothers who were big celebrities in circles rife with corruption, or Cyril Smith whose prolific crimes of sexual abuse of children were covered-up at the highest levels, or Profumo”s sleezy behavior or Jimmy Saville who was idolized, knighted and a hero of the BBC or the admired Gary Glitter or Leon Brittain and a cast of thousands who were/are protected coddled and had their many crimes unpunished, covered-up for decades. That’s only the tip of the iceberg – the corruption goes deep into the heart of the upper crust.
Oh dear. Civilian policing by consent vs. armed paramilitary, colonial Irish policing… No, this is a gross distortion of what happened. The whole point of colonial policing was to not to require the army for riot control. As Brigadier Dyer inadvertently demonstrated in Amritsar in 1919, this this was a wise policy.
In Britain before the first world war, the army was regularly used in riots in Britain. It used lethal force, and people were killed. Belfast, 1886; Trafalgar Square, 1887; Yorkshire, 1892; Belfast again, 1907; Llanelli, 1911; Liverpool, 1911. The army was used in this way because the unarmed police lost control.
So the history of our policing does _not_ explain what happened to Gideon Falter. Mary Harrington is barking up the wrong tree entirely.
Re what happened ot Gideon Falter – You need to read this from Sky News who just happened to be videoing one of Falter’s numerous exchanges with police on that day.
https://news.sky.com/story/sky-news-footage-reveals-new-details-of-exchange-between-police-and-antisemitism-campaigner-called-openly-jewish-13120104?trk=public_post_comment-text
The claim of “completely safe” seemed incorrect by the end of the article. Were you trying to make a different point?
The point I wanted to make about Falter is that he appears to have lied about the event in question. Given his track record, this is not suprising.
Victim blaming is not a good look.
Why all the downvotes on this? ADK has simply offered a link to useful information to understanding the issue more fully.
The downvotes are because it goes against the preferred narrative of many on here. They don’t want their opinions challenged (hence the constant whining every time a writer who is vaguely left leaning writes an article), they just want an echo chamber where they’re pre conceived opinions are cheered on by others
Any one who is more interested in learning what actually happened should click on this link. The video and transcript don’t really jive with the story as it’s been presented to us. Mr. Falter was clearly trying to provoke a violent response, the result(s) of which are easily predictable.
Thanks for that…very informative…
The pace of change is amazing. Calling for the genocide of an ethnic or religious group may become a British Value (again).
Again?
You might want to study the history of English behavior towards the Irish, Catholics, and Highland Scots from the Tudors through the Potato famine. If it wasn’t genocidal, it only stopped a hair short. They were actively trying to destroy people’s culture and religion, and often the people as well.
“…1922, the year Britain gained the Mandate for Palestine from the UN”.
This needs correcting – the UN was a post WWII creation.
Slightly pedantic there. It was called the League of Nations but it was basically the precursor to the UN
We now have ample video evidence that the version of events of Gideon Falter, the ‘obviously Jewish’ individual who created such a furore this weekend, was, to say the least, rather partial. His exchange with the officer in question was rather lengthy and not as he desscribed it. His little group had similar interactions with numerous officers. He has previous for making similar claims whilst trying to drive through a demonstration in a van (shown in a video with cars clearly passing by in the back ground). Finally, and get this, his little group of ‘just happened to be walking by’ chums included a current member of Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s security detachment – not the kind of person to worry about feelig ‘unsafe’ anywhere I’d have thought.
I think the officers in question behaved extremely well given the circumstances.
I’m of the opinion that it’s time for the Charity Commission to look at both his conduct and the CAAS’s funding to get to the bottom of this.
That Gideon needed security to feel safe near a PSC march should set off some “compassion “ inside you but you clearly will reserve that for terrorist sympathisers and Jew haters instead.
His story was that he was just out for a walk after a service. Re him feeling unsafe – I suggest he’s a bit of a snowflake. There were indeed dozens of ‘obviously Jewish’ people around that day – many can be seen in pictures with him – who were happy to be there and felt no threat at all.
https://skwawkbox.org/2024/04/22/evidence-eyewitnesses-challenge-falters-claims-he-was-stopped-for-just-crossing-road/
“Feeling unsafe” is a perception that it is impossible to gainsay, much less disprove. What do you usually think of “snowflakes”, “safe spaces”, and “hurty words”?
Irrelevant. He’s perfectly entitled to do all those things in a free democratic society. Or are you suggesting he should be arrested for being “rather partial”?
I agree, in principle. Personal sympathy is somewhat reduced when it is revealed that it was, I believe, his or his organisation’s complaints that gave the Met the excuse to arrest and remove Tommy Robinson, illegally as it now transpires, from an anti-semitic march in London. What’s sauce for the goose…
Fair point.
The Police are sending out retired senior Officers, as they do when they themselves cannot say these things in public, to point out that the ceasefire marches could and would be banned if there were risk of serious disorder, so Gideon Falter set out to provoke that and should therefore have been arrested. The apology that is due is to the marchers, for the suggestion that it would have been unsafe to have been openly Jewish in their midst. Falter had in fact been in their midst for hours, trying unsuccessfully to stir up trouble long before a synagogue service would have concluded, until in despair he turned his attention to the Police instead. It would be very funny if he were to be charged under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. One-person demonstrations are now illegal. What would be his defence? That he had gone at the head of a gang, one of whom was his cameraman? That would be in addition to the charges of assaulting a Police Officer, breach of the peace, and wasting Police time.
Falter has been allowed to get away with suggesting that the Met would never target a black man. What world does he or any of his interviewers inhabit? But not even John Mann is siding with Falter. Within an Anglo-Jewry that has long been familiar with his stunts and which does not take kindly to a youngish man who tries to short circuit the communal system by getting himself on television to proclaim himself King of the Jews, Falter’s only backer is something that calls itself the National Jewish Assembly, which is a one-man vanity breakaway from the Board of Deputies, and notable only for its heavy financial losses.
Falter’s Campaign Against Antisemitism is also little more than a sole trader. Yet it can field a two-time Home Secretary to bat for it on the Today programme, it can secure at least a fairly high level meeting with the Metropolitan Police merely by demanding one and despite having called at the same time for the Commissioner to be sacked, and it is lavishly funded by the Jewish National Fund, which is the Israeli State’s engine of the settlement activity that His Majesty’s Government recognises to be illegal. How, then, is the JNF not illegal in the United Kingdom? Is it only that that has never been tested in court?
The CAA gets away with pretending to the Charity Commission that it is not funded by the JNF, which is a foreign state pursuing an illegal enterprise within the understanding of the British State of which that Commission is an institution. The CAA’s accounts claim that the money comes from something called “The Jewish National Foundation”. There is no such thing. But Falter is a director of three companies connected to the JNF. He is also the CAA’s only employee paid more than £60,000, and as an employee who is also a trustee he is identified as such in the accounts, even though the CAA has otherwise talked the Charity Commission into keeping its trustees’ identities secret on grounds of “safety”. There is no evidence that anyone has been anything more than made to “feel unsafe”, a perception that it is impossible to gainsay, much less disprove. What do the CAA’s allies usually think of “snowflakes”, “safe spaces”, and “hurty words”? Who in Parliament is going to raise the case of the special treatment of registered charity number 1163790? Why has no one yet done so?
Is it not more to do with our current insistence on ‘perfect world’ individual rights?
In theory I should have the right to watch football from the Stretford End in my Manchester City shirt. In practice I know to do so would incite violence.
In theory a woman should be able to get drunk and walk round a city late at night with a lot of flesh on show. In practice it’s high risk.
I’m no supporter of the Palestinian demonstrations but this chap set out in search of a headline and successfully manipulated one.
If a Jewish person has to hide their kippah while walking to or from synagogue, then we have a society in which no one is safe.
I don’t disagree but attending a tribal gathering of one tribe, wearing the insignia of an opposition tribe, all the while attended by bodyguards and a photographer, is conscious sh*t stirring.
Would you have been so forgiving if a Muslim in full ceremonial robes had filmed themselves walking straight through the middle of a pro Israeli rally in an attempt to incite a negative reaction from the crowd? As that’s what happened in this instance
There used to be a feature on The Word called The Hopefuls, with the catchphrase, “I’ll do anything to be on television.” That is where Gideon Falter belongs. Along with Laurence Fox, who yesterday uploaded a video of himself abusing a Police Officer. Arrest both Falter and Fox.
The reason Britain has been so successful at absorbing people from different cultures into its national life is because the British identity is so malleable and flexible. Ask any Brit what makes him/her British and they’ll probably scratch their heads a good long while before saying something vague like “errr…speaking British English?” The bar to joining in and integrating in Britain is pretty low. And, for a long while, that was a good thing and everyone rubbed along nicely. That was the Britain I grew up in, was formed by, and was proud of – despite the imperfections, tensions and bumps we’ve had along the way.
However, that sort of vagueness about what constitutes Britishness – a lack of what Germans and Austrians called “Leitkultur” (i.e. an overarching cultural and moral framework in a country…which we’re having feverish debates aswell in these times of mass migration) is fast becoming a real threat as it makes the fundamental functions of state (e.g. policing) impossible.
The Met vs. the Jewish community clip came off very badly, but I understand why the police act that way – Mary (as usual – bravo) explains it so well. The friendly, by-consent policing just can’t happen in the absence of a uniform moral framework among the policed which is a prerequisite to that consent.
So, the choices for the future are as follows (repetition of the article content only for the purposes of completeness):
Nr. 1: The containment strategy as applied by the police now. Might keep a superficial peace but isn’t sustainable in the long run as the selective application of control towards those groups which are law-abiding and are deemed as less threatening (i.e. Jews) will generate massive resentment, lessen other groups’ willingness to comply with the law (why should I?) and tangle with constitutional principles of equality (Austria’s constitution has a clause to this effect, the Gleichheitssatz).
Nr. 2: You decide on a certain Leitkultur, and enforce it. This would mean throwing the consent-based model of policing out the window and cracking down on any behaviour not in line with the Leitkultur. This also won’t work in the long run, as a) in a multicultural society like Britain, it’s nigh-on impossible to define what the Leitkultur is and any definition is going to have quite arbitrary effects, and b) if if you do define a Leitkultur, enforcing it will generate a lot of resentment among people who fall foul of it and are thus made to feel unwelcome in their own country. In Austria we’ve had several tentative discussions about a “Leitethik“, i.e. a common ethical framework instead of common cultural norms to abide by but that also runs into the same sort of problems.
So, we come to default option Nr. 3, which is…drum roll…escalating internal strife, as the country stops being a place where people abiding by common cultural norms live together and starts being just a piece of land where a number of warring groups face-off against each other.
The future’s bright, everybody!
Option 4: Apply the longstanding, existing common law uniformally across all people and “communities” without exception. The working model we foolishly chose to abandon. Still used in some countries around the world, where you would expect – and accept – as a visitor or settler to conform to the local laws.
If that means having to say that historic British culture is the “Leitkultur” and that upsets some people, so be it. There’s no way out of the mess now without upsetting some people.
I’d still say that is a variant of Nr. 2.
Probably true. Except that we don’t really need the culture stuff. I’d argue there’s no decision to make in choosing a culture. Just revert to the previously “known good” (in engineering speak) model.
Absolutely do not try to synthesise some new common culture to try to please everyone. That’s guaranteed to satisfy no one.
Not really. Option 4 differs significantly from Nr.2 in that it doesn’t assume that a “Leitkultur” is impossible to have as a societal foundation because it is likely to upset some people.
Peter B’s citing of common law as a starting point is correct. We should enforce common law across the board. No exceptions for different customs, beliefs, or ‘communities’, if these go against the common law. That would be a start.
Very good Katharine.
It is always interesting to hear an external perspective.
I wonder which period you would point to in which Austria can be said to have shared or acheived a truly common Leitkultur ?
It strikes me that the grand theme of Austrian history stretching back to the the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 is a standing demonstration the quixotic appeal and repeated and disastrous failure of such a a program.
So hows about in the UK a bonafide written constitutution as opposed to the current “organic” evolving by legal precedent / habit constitution ?
I appreciate that this mechanism for fixing in aspic, a particular set of values and aspirations, has not been working too well in the USA of late but their originator document is now over 200 years old and even their most recent amendment is over 30 years old.
If something is written down for all to see and promulgated particularly in schools, and upheld within the legal system, then I would argue there is some hope, in a generation or two or three for the evolution of a more culturally homogeneous society.
There will always be outliers / rebels / naysayers / professionally discontented in any society. How you deal with these individuals will wax and wane according to the politics of the day.
I have huge sympathy with the police – asked to make decisions in the moment on behalf of a theoretical majority, undefined.
Britain does, emphatically, have a written constitution. It is written in a number of famous documents including the Bill of Rights 1689, Acts of Union 1707 and 1800, The Act of Settlement 1701, The Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, Human Rights Act 1998 and The Scotland Act, Northern Ireland Act and Government of Wales Act 1998 Parliamentary Sovereignty is it’s defining practical principle.
The idea that we don’t have a written constitution is put about by those who would like to re-write it, all at once, from top to bottom and for the benefit of their own faction – The Manageriate. The friends of liberty agreeing to re-write our ancient constitution at this point in the history of the Managerial State would be like the old tale of the fox and the chicken sitting down to decide what’s for dinner.
The idea is is sold to you, most often, by those who dislike the free and open Parliamentary system of government.Their real target is Parliamentary Sovereignty and free and open debate. They would like Judges and expert panels, appointed by closed commitee, to arbitrate on what is constitutional rather than the King-in-Parliament, with the elected representatives of the Commons of England in the driving seat.
Beware!
So how many people do you think in the UK can quote verse and chapter from these 10 Acts ?
If the fundamentals aren’t written down in simple English and taught in primary schools how could you possible expect a population to voluntarily get on board ?
As for Parliamentary Sovereignity – well it looks pretty dysfunctional to me right now.
Immigrants bring in their conflicts such as Hindu/Muslim, Muslim/Jewish and Muslim/Sikh? What about muti, female genital mutilation, honour killings, anti-semitism . What about standards of honesty ? Do certain religions accept everyone is equal ? You need to analyse every religious, cultural, tribal, ethnic and linguistic conflict.
Sorry Mary you’ve missed the boat. One of Peel’s basic tenants was: To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all ..
Impartial means if you break the law or commit a crime you get the same treatment treatment from the police regardless of your skin colour regardless of your ethnic background or
political’ beliefs.impartial service to the law’. The Covid lockdown protests were heavily handled by the police, hell individuals going about their business were stopped & questioned by the police. The police rolled up to the St George’s day parade with horses, vans and a belligerent attitude, provoking the attendees by kettling them – as they did at the armistice day service. They, the police gave every appearance of spoiling for a fight with the St George’s day celebrants. Meanwhile at the pro-Hamas protests (intimidation marches), or the Just Stop Oil, or Extinction Rebellion, protests etc… crickets.We have clear evidence of two tier policing; they no longer demonstrate
Yesterday also saw the charges against Tommy Robinson dismissed, he was cleared of breaching a dispersal order after a judge ruled the power had not been legally authorised by police. His arrest last Armistice day while eating breakfast in a cafe and subsequent pepper spraying at point blank range while handcuffed was, fortunately for him, live streamed. Twenty (+?) officers for one man and not one of them had body camera footage(?). Love him or hate him, it was an attempted stitch up by the MET. They had no right to insist on him leaving, there is no legal definition of what a journalist is, and he kept telling them he was attending as a journalist, with a camera man.
In the past we saw police refusing to investigate the Muslim rape gangs who targeted white girls and minority ethnic non-Muslim girls for fear of being called racists. This is all of a piece.
People, regular law abiding people, have lost faith in the police and until Rowley is fired and someone installed that will instruct officers to apply the law evenly rather than going after the weakest target to intimidate, people will continue to lose faith and God help the police if they ever need help, because at this rate they’re not going to get it.
Two thousand years ago, the imperial forces of law and order in ancient Rome struggled to keep the peace in a restive province. On one occasion, they had to choose between pacifying an angry mob, and scapegoating a solitary Jew. They chose the latter. Some methods of colonial policing never change.
That’s an insightful, indeed, a brilliant comparison. Nicely done.
Scapegoating? Jesus was convicted of blasphemy for claiming to be God, which he did indeed claim, and which was indeed a capital crime under Jewish law. Whether the conviction was just of course depends on your religious beliefs.
Carefully now! If Jesus had been convicted of blasphemy under Jewish law he would have been stoned, not crucified (Leviticus 24:16; Acts 6:11; 7:59).
It appears that he was instead executed for treason by the Roman authorities. In this, he was both a scapegoat for all of us and more narrowly for the sins of his own contemporaries.
Barrabas, called a brigand, and Judas, a Zealot looking for a warrior-king, were both spared the penalties of their worldly treason while the Prince of Peace, the man who rejected the sword the crown and the kingdom if this earth was executed for rebellion.
It is interesting to think about the relationship between claiming-divine-religious-authority-under-Jewish-law (Jewish blasphemy) and claiming-divine-political-authority-under-Roman-law (Roman treason, you call it).
But it doesn’t matter for my point. Either way, Jesus claimed Lordship over his followers, which neither Jews nor Romans would accept, and which each used to justify his execution. As I say, Jesus did actually say and do the things he was accused of saying and doing. That’s very different from what we mean by scapegoat today.
The Romans didn’t ‘scapegoat’ Jesus. Pontius Pilate found him innocent of any crime under Roman law, but chose to appease the mob by allowing it to be the judge and decide his fate.
Was that a Jewish mob?
Only in the same sense that the men that killed Socrates are called ‘Athenian’. Or the men that killed Charles I were ‘English’.
We know that the 12 Apostles were also Jewish and that the Apostle Paul was “Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews”
The label is incidental to their crime, not the crime to the label.
The point is that although Jesus was executed by the Romans (they were in charge at the time), it was done to appease a Jewish mob.
Is that the way you read it? I’m always wary of reading the Gospels as if they were a deposition in court or a secular syllogism. History they may be, but divine history. There is another level to what is going on.
I have always seen myself in the mob. Just as I see myself in the Apostles who flee Gethsemane, deny Christ with oaths and avoid the place of crucifixion. The Jewishness, (or Pharisaism, or Zealotry) of the mob is scarcely relevant, what we are seeing is the reaction of fallen men to political disappointment.
They had expected a warrior King, instead they get a gospel of peace. And it enrages them.
Open the pages of any Punch magazine of the second half of the 19th Century and you’ll see that the Peelers were always quite prepared to hand out a hiding when the mob got rowdy. The Garibaldi riots of 1862 pitted Irish Catholics against English Protestants and Whigs. There were riots later in the 1860’s about Reform and Socialist riots in the West End in the 1880’s.
The idea that the Old Bill policed by broad consent anywhere East of Aldgate Pump or in the working class neighourhoods of Southwark, Lambeth or North Kensington is highly questionable. Music Hall songs, the great repository of working class history in London are replete wit references to corrupt and violent coppers.
Added to that, the phenomenon of recreational protesting untroubled by Police response is really quite recent. Up until the 1960’s even the most innocuous rallies could usually expect to end with a good hiding off Old Bill.
Our view of daily politics may well be distorted by many ephemeral and transient notions and concerns which history will show to be baseless.
London may have been 97% White British in 1960’s but how many of them were of Irish Catholic stock? The Irish constituency had once had its own politics and religion and a national myth even more wholly insoluble with wider ‘English’ (as it was known then) identity than now the ‘British Muslim’ seems.
Counterintuitive though it may seem, the prospect for Muslim participation and reconciliation to the British commonwealth seems to me far brighter than once seemed conceivable for the Irish Catholic of the Fenian period or International Socialist Working Class of the 1930’s.
The main stumbling block it seems, to me, is the unspoken belief among the indigenous peoples of this Island that ‘these people’ and ‘their culture’ do not really belong here. If that is what one feels then one admit it, not least to oneself.
I for one, as a child of Empire and the Commonwealth think that is a fond, foolish view of our shared history.
Great post — except you don’t explain how to square the circle. If ‘those people’ are to fit in here… how do you achieve it? The answer is simple: to stop pretending that it is wrong to prioritize traditional British norms. If you come here you can keep your cultural distinctives that don’t conflict with those of your new home but must discard the bits that don’t fit.
But things get curiouser and curiouser. The norms of most conservative Muslim families, at least in the their concepts of family honour, public decency, charity, the ‘good life’, deeply ritualised customary respect for age and sex and so forth are markedly closer to the ‘British Norms’ of our grandsires than is the materialism, individualism and hedonism of many, perhaps the majority, of the true-born, native, Sons of Hengist
There is a strange irony, first noted in the 1970’s East End, that the values of many immigrant Muslim families were actually far closer to the native working class with whom they were in such bitter daily strife, than with the liberal progressive left who positioned themselves as their benevolent champions. If material circumstances had been different they could even have been allies.
I cannot help but think that the conflict between Islam and ‘traditional British values’, at least in the civic sphere, is one of accent and emphasis. The conflict with liberal progressivism is existential.
The future will inevitably involve a synthesis of all the customs of all the peoples of these islands. It’s important to keep in mind that statecraft is ‘the art of the possible’. There will be strange bedfellows in the future commonwealth, whatever arises.
Different groups having similar values is a significant point.
But that does not address the question – separate from overlapping values – of group identity and loyalty. The problem is especially great where, within a given country, members of a particular group have a greater loyalty amongst themselves than to the country as a whole.
All the more so when their primary loyalty is to members of that group in other countries.
Doubtless at critical points in European history catholic and protestant Christians had greatly overlapping values and beliefs. But their group loyalties caused hostilities within countries and among countries.
That certainly gives me pause for thought. Thank you.
Their loyalty lies not to Britain, but to Islam; leaked docs show Home Office Islamic Network say they aim to recruit Muslim staff and “influence policymakers” to support “Muslim needs”.The Islamic Network has recruited 700 Home Office staff so far. Only muslims can become “full members”.
Norms like ‘honour killings’, the sexual grooming & rape of children; deeply ritualised customs concerning sex like FGM, stoning for adultery & crucifixion for homosexuality; death for not wearing the burka correctly or trying to leave the religion? That sort of thing?
Multiculturalism was introduced as “a good thing” and an end in itself only when integration of certain ethnicities and certain religion groups systematically refused to integrate into British society.
Diversity is our strength is as much a lie as Orwell’s War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery. Diversity is a sure way to civil conflict.
“…A sure way to civil conflict”? Doesn’t work that way in Brooklyn. Or even in Jerusalem.
Very insightful! Policing in UK ought to evolve like it has elsewhere.
‘Here, the priority is maintaining superficial peace. In practice, this means appeasing the most volatile “communities”, while the most law-abiding are also the most harshly constrained, simply because they offer the least resistance.’
Laugh my arse off. If that were really true our prisons would be full of middle Englanders. They are not.
‘ The officer correctly identified Falter as representative of one London “community”, and the protesters as a different, potentially hostile “community”. Tasked with preventive policing, he foresaw a potential breach of the peace should these come into collision.’
Obviously. It’s actually a lot easier for the police officer to ask one person to move on than it is for them to move an entire demonstration. It’s not the mets fault that these people can’t get on with each other. They can only do the best they can do. Policemans job is to keep you safe. That’s all he was trying to do. He’s probably asking himself why he even bothered.
‘Thanks to the policy choices of Britain’s (largely London-based) political leaders, the capital is now too diverse for the historic Met policing model’
Why. We have laws. The police know what the laws are and are trained to implement them. Why can the law not be applied equally to all citizens regardless of their culture, religion or country of origin. I mean it’s not like the police go up to a criminal and they be like ‘Can I ask what country you are from? It’s just we apply the laws differently depending on your heritage.’
This is another incident that has been blown out of all proportion by the press, all that happened was that one, probably tired and stressed out officer that to be honest couldn’t probably explain the many complexities of the Israel/ Palestine issue anyway, probably doesn’t have many strong opinions on the issue either way, asked one guy to please just move on.
Maybe he could have used better words, but this is being blown out of all proportion.
It has spawned multiple news articles, TV coverage and endless streams of academic nonsense.
Like this article.
London needs to continue on his present path of Muslimization, which will solve the problem in a decade or two. Whites and people of colour who don’t pray five times a day will be free to go about their business outside the metropolitan limits.
I saw the whole 13 minutes of the officer and Falter and I recommend it. The officer’s forbearance is manifest, and the impression given there by Falter’s words and actions that he was some kind of agent provocateur has been confirmed by his subsequent actions as well as previous attacks on Gaza protests which have come to light.
The episode reveals the quest for dominance to be the ineluctable adversary of civil liberties and equal treatment under law. Falter acted on behalf of those horrified that public manifestation challenging their established presumptions was permitted, setting about to attack that directly and indirectly. However sensitive police may be to differing standpoints in society they are not in a position to erase difference and have practically limited means to channel conflict.
The Imperial legacy of policing means one thing when deployed in an established hierarchy of divide and rule. It’s deprived of that anchor to the extent equal treatment under the law is observed and political process of some kind of other is invoked. Falter seems to have understood that to some extent, trying to play politics to restore the rightful presuppositions of his group. As he saw them.
One of the best and most perceptive articles I’ve read on here recently.
She seems to have missed the part where a bunch of racist scumbags attacked the police yesterday. Oh look, there’s that clown Laurence Fox taking a break from getting annihilated in every election he stands in to show his racist credentials.
Hopefully the boys from the Met dished out a couple of cracked skulls while regaining order.
The English skulls get cracked by batons, while the pro-Hamas faction are free to march.
When this is a Muslim land you won’t be getting champagne you know; alcohol is haram.
The reason why yesterday’s event in London, whatever it was, elicited the Police response that it did, whereas none of the Gaza peace marches has done, is because no one has rioted at any of the Gaza peace marches. Yesterday’s lot were rioting from an hour before their function was due to start. Rioting about what? Just for the sake of it? On Armistice Day, they had stabbed nine Police Officers at the Cenotaph, with bladed articles that had been brought specifically for the purpose. Since then, organisations had been proscribed for less. But flanked by an agent of a foreign power, a bodyguard to the President of Israel, one Vicentiu Chiculita of two former Mossad officers’ SQR Group, Gideon Falter assaulted a Police Officer and attempted to incite a riot on the streets of London. It took him more than a week, but he does seem to have got his way.
While Falter’s Campaign Against Antisemitism turns out already to have been a pariah, or at least an embarrassing stepchild, even within the strongly pro-Israeli world of what might called official Jewishness in Britain, he and it were behind the greatest British political hoax of the post-Iraq age, “Labour anti-Semitism”. The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases in its entire report, neither of them involved Jeremy Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of the Labour Party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.”
Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed. But it does now. Labour has expelled more Jews under Keir Starmer than under all its previous Leaders put together, most or all of them for what has been found to be the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism; there would not be enough time left in this Parliament to change the law on that. It is no wonder that Andrew Feinstein is standing against the Leader who has turned Labour into an anti-Semitic party.
Every week, listen to Starmer and Rishi Sunak “clashing” under parliamentary privilege over whether or not Starmer had tried to put an anti-Semite into Downing Street, and whether or not he had changed the Labour Party from one in which anti-Semitism had been “rife”. Pure fiction, but what else would they have to “clash” over? If they have any point of political disagreement, then it is that Sunak has not handed over the health portfolio to someone who was still a paid lobbyist for the privatisation of the NHS, but had appointed a Foreign Secretary who was at least occasionally willing to criticise Israel.
Nine police officers were NOT stabbed on Armistice Day. The police kettled those who wanted to attend the Cenotaph ceremony, and the attendees were justifiably annoyed. The videos are out there showing the police trapping the attendees. The same thing happened at the St George’s Day celebration, the police arrived with horses, riot gear and spoiling for a fight attempted to kettle the attendees and charged at them with horses. Again the videos are available on line.
London is not secular nor tolerant. It is a mix of global religions and otherwise opinionated people in political, preaching, practice and policy terms. It is, however largely peaceful for now – beyond crime.