Before we go there, it's worth remembering that responsibility for the disgusting scenes and racist thuggery lies primarily with them. They made the choice to demonise immigrants and asylum seekers. They chose to present them as an existential threat to public services, security, and the British way of life. No one forced the Tories to slander Palestinian solidarity protests as hate marches, pretend Muslims are the enemy within, nor were they compelled to call the far right onto the streets. This is on them, their press, and the shit stirrers on their fringes. The question in front of our leadership hopefuls is how they turn a crisis, which Labour seems incapable of benefiting from politically speaking, into an opportunity that will net them their party's top job.
We already noted Priti Patel's surprising statement. Considering she was the architect of the Rwanda plan, and oversaw the most authoritarian anti-protest legislation seen in this country since the mid-19th century, the former Home Secretary made a splash by rounding on Nigel Farage's running commentary ("two-tier policing!"), and defended the right to protest, distinguishing between Palestine solidarity and fascist violence. That adds her to the ever-growing list of Tories Ian Dunt finds "impressive", but those of us somewhat less beholden to the delusions of liberalism will note there's a contest going on in which there is little to distinguish between our Tory Tweedie-Dees and Tweedie-Dums. She now has a selling point.
Contrast this with Robert Jenrick. Following a lacklustre launch, he's pitched for the fash-adjacent membership vote. On Wednesday he stoked tensions by saying Muslim demonstrators shouting "Allahu Akbar" should be arrested. Angela Rayner rightly replied that this was stirring up trouble, a point echoed by the contest's most anonymous entrant, Mel Stride. He said Jenrick's comments were "unhelpful and unwise", which is a very diplomatic way of saying reckless and stupidly self-serving. Still, none of this stopped Team Jenrick claiming they were responsible for ending the riots because their "hard truths" were like so many tablets of stone cast onto the fascist mobs from atop Mount Sinai. A joke response from a leadership campaign doubling as an unfunny parody of the Tory party itself.
Speaking of Mel Stride, following where Patel chose to tread he's attacked Farage directly for spreading conspiracy theories around the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings, and by linking this to an attack on an army officer in Kent stirred the pot further. "We need moderation, level heads, and very firm action" he concluded. That's the Reform leader told.
Last weekend, Kemi Badenoch made no bones about what she's selling on her stall. More racism. It was the repackaged moans about "integration" that are to blame for the riots. If such a problem exists, it's on the part of a tiny minority of lumpenised white men. But apart from her soft soap interview with last Sunday's Telegraph where she expounded her repugnant views without challenge, she hasn't commented further on the biggest issue in British politics at of the moment. This plays second fiddle to a social media feed is full of look-at-me photo opps and endorsements. A dereliction of duty by any reckoning.
What about James Cleverly? He's the only candidate to have ventured criticisms of Keir Starmer's approach to the riots. Zeroing in on the roving band of anti-riot specialist coppers the Prime Minister promised after Southport, Cleverly wonders aloud about what the unit is going to do when there are no riots, and it might take them a while to travel from London to trouble spots. Without wanting to defend Starmer, it's pretty obvious he was talking about a mobile intelligence unit and not hands-on crowd control cops. But this contrasts unfavourably with the money the Tories put into policing and the extra powers showered on them. And today, Cleverly has boasted that the policies he oversaw are working - visa application for work and study are significantly down. Well done that man for fuelling care industry shortages and chucking universities further into the red.
Lastly, where is wee Tommy Tugendhant? Before the riots, the leading "centrist" contender came out hard against the UK's continued membership of the European Convention, just so the government can be beastly to refugees in exchange for flattering headlines. Nevertheless, it's quite significant that - unlike Badenoch, Jenrick, and Cleverly - he at least issued a strong condemnation of the riots, albeit assuming an apolitical this-is-a-law-and-order issue stance. He later tweeted about these being "dark days" for our country, and urged Starmer to "get a grip". Why he attached a clip of young Muslim men in Birmingham and not any of the ample scenes of racist mobs attacking mosques, hotels, looting shops, and fighting the police is something for readers to make their minds up about.
We have then an interesting division among the contenders. You have Stride and Patel(!) who are offering the centrist and responsible establishment position on the riots. Cleverly and Tugendhat are in the middle and are trying to face both ways, and Badenoch and Jenrick throwing all caution to the wind and are overtly, crudely adopting the far right's framing of immigration and multiculturalism. It's a position that should see the pair of them drummed out of mainstream politics, but according to the unscientific but often accurate Conservative Home survey of members, these two are in pole position. They've decided that the party's route back is through consolidating the base and squeezing Reform, and at this early stage it seems the dwindling membership agrees. It's a strategy, I suppose, but one that's not going to get the party very far. The long-term decline of the Tories, which ate a banquet of Conservative MPs at the general election, is more or less guaranteed to continue unabated if they stick to this right wing path.
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British arms have killed more than 90 already displaced people at prayer in al-Taba'een school, but the Government's resumption of the funding of UNRWA, its withdrawal of its objections to the International Criminal Court's arrest warrants, and its hints at the restriction of arms sales and at the recognition of Palestine, were all consequences of the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn, of the election of four more Left Independents, of the defeat of Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire, of the halving of Keir Starmer's constituency vote, and of the near-defeat of Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and Jess Phillips. All of those went back in turn to the Gaza ceasefire marches, which had already brought down Suella Braverman. There had not been such a successful movement from the streets in Britain since the Poll Tax and its Prime Minister were swept away.
ReplyDeleteAnd on Wednesday evening, the same movement, complete with the same flag, and again organised by the people who had been driven out of the Labour Party and by their allies, earned the praise of the Police by frightening off the streets the people who, having rioted at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day and injured nine Police Officers, had been rioting for a week until they were told to expect opposition. Faced with that, they ran away and hid.
The rioters were clearly not afraid of the Police, having spent successive days and nights throwing concrete slabs at them, burning their vehicles, and so on. Nor were they deterred by derisory sentences. The Just Stop Oil irritants deserved to go to prison, but these racially aggravated attempted murderers obviously deserved to do so for longer; if the four Green MPs made the complaints that anyone might make about undue leniency, then they would have a point. No, it was when the Left and the unions brought the People to the streets that the streets were reclaimed. They are ours now.
Those who would flatter themselves that they were the counterparts of Continental Cagoules need to be made to explain to those supposed equals why they had decided to watch the counterdemonstrations on television. Meanwhile, the Labour Party had banned its MPs from attending, not that almost any of them would have wished to have done so, because the Government had expected 100 riots, leading to an assault on civil liberties such as had characterised all parties in office in the last 30 years. A classic example lies behind the controversy around the deduction of bed and board costs from the compensation of the wrongfully imprisoned. Even the Liberal Democrats were in the Cabinet when the law was changed so that those applying to be so compensated, and whose appeals had been upheld, would henceforth be required to prove their innocence beyond reasonable doubt, and to do so to a committee of state functionaries.
In providing the excuse for the latest set of such measures, anyone who looked more like a Palestinian than Keir Starmer did would have been collateral damage. Let their hostels burn. As for dead coppers, they would have been grist to the mill. But this time, it was not to be. For having commended the "show of unity from communities" that took back control, Sir Mark Rowley has attracted the ire of Nick Thomas-Symonds, who is a Minister only because Ashworth lost his seat, and who is a Starmer tribute act, another of those suburban headmasters who think that they are Robocop. Unless I am very much mistaken, while he oversaw the paperwork for a few years, Starmer has never appeared at the Bar to prosecute a criminal case. I have met a lot more sometime criminal defendants than the average layman has, and every one of them, including me, would have laughed in his face. As everyone still should, and never more so than now. Whose streets? Our streets.
Well... If David Lindsay's assessment is correct, then it follows that the government probably thinks that they need to work on beefing the right wing thug movements up a bit, because in the crunch they proved far too feeble to be used as the justification for authoritarian power grabs which the Starmer mob were hoping for. So we'd probably better keep an eye out for that, hmmm?
ReplyDeleteNo doubt the weegies of Kenmure St also looked approvingly upon your street retaking efforts.