A chilling warning of the dangers of Britain’s ever-more fractured society
IT WASN’T only a bus that went up in flames in the Harehills suburb of Leeds on thursday night. so did any remaining sense that our society is secure or that the police can be relied on to keep the peace.
The scenes were truly shocking. Liberal commentators primly referred to what took place as ‘disturbances’, but to the rest of us, it looked like sick, thuggish violence.
Gas canisters and even a fridge were thrown on bonfires. a police car was flipped over and a delivery van was looted. Feral youths were seen kicking police vehicles in chilling contempt for the social order. Grown men wielded scooters and bikes as weapons, using them to smash the windscreens of abandoned cars.
By yesterday morning, Harehills resembled a mini-war zone, with charred, twisted wreckage, upturned cars, lethal shards of shattered glass and black craters where fires had raged.
As the Mail went to press last night, some feared further violence was set to erupt.
So what was the trigger for this spasm of fury and destruction? It seems to have been an attempt by social workers to take children from a Roma family into care.
Police were initially called to deal with ‘pockets of disorder’ after a crowd had gathered to protest the children’s removal. Outnumbered, the officers retreated.
Riot police then arrived, and apparently took the children into care. But that was only the start.
As the night progressed, an increasingly frenzied mob – comprising men and women – formed, intent on violence. No doubt many didn’t have a clue why the rioting had started in the first place.
Harehills is what they call a ‘diverse’ area – and one of the poorest places in Britain. Large swathes of its population are of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage, but there are smatterings of more recently arrived immigrant communities, too, including Romanians and others from Eastern Europe.
Many, no doubt, live fine, productive lives, contributing much to their adopted country. Others, perhaps, less so.
Almost 20 years ago, before he became Prime Minister, David Cameron raised the alarm about communities in Britain that, he argued, seem to live ‘parallel lives’. He described groups that appeared to exist in their own bubbles, in which their own morality, culture and language ruled the day.
Too many of these communities, Cameron argued, lack the ‘emotional connection’ that ‘binds a country together’.
Well, if he could say that in 2006, in the intervening years, Britain has imported – at a rough estimate – over five million people from wildly differing cultures, many settling in the same enclaves. the problems the then-tory leader identified are unlikely to have softened.
None of us knows whether the state was right to seek to take those Roma children into care, but that is not the issue. Far more important is that everyone in a single society should accept the norms and structures that make the country what is: foremost among these, the rule of law.
That some in Harehills seem not to accept this – and instead respond to a child-protection visit with furious violence – suggests that they see themselves as somehow outside society instead.
And that is not only a danger to public order. It is a disgraceful contempt for the state – and the country. which is why I fear that the significance of these riots extends beyond a few arrests and insurance claims.
Yes, some of the rioting was no doubt purely opportunistic – a case of collective madness driven by a charged situation on a hot summer’s night.
However, in the fire and fury of Harehills this week, we may also have glimpsed something deeply troubling: a community, or communities, that appear to show little sense of having any meaningful connection to broader British society.
The whole thing was made worse, of course, by the abject fleeing of the very people paid to stop this kind of thing from happening.
West Yorkshire Police stepped back and allowed the riot to play itself out for hours. assistant Chief Constable Pat twiggs said officers were withdrawn ‘as it was evident’ that police were the ‘sole target’ of the troublemakers. He added: ‘this allowed for further community mediation to take place to calm the situation.’
Indeed, it was even left to members of the Harehills community to put out the fires that local thugs had started.
Green Party councillor Mothin ali – last seen screaming ‘we will raise the voice of Palestine! allahu akbar!’ on his election to local office in May – deserves credit for begging the rioters to stop.
Yet despite his efforts, this was clearly a catastrophic failure of our state institutions. who now in that benighted community, or anywhere else in Britain for that matter, believes the police can be relied upon to protect them when mobs are coursing through the streets?
In fiddling while Harehills burned, west Yorkshire Police essentially admitted that the area was, for several hours at least, a no-go zone.
I should note, too, that this was the very same force caught up in the ludicrous and self-inflicted ‘lesbian nana’ scandal last year. this was when an autistic 16-yearold girl in Leeds was arrested for saying that a female police officer looked like her ‘lesbian nana’.
When police officers come down like a ton of bricks on ‘unwoke’ speech – but run a mile from a literal riot, you can see just how warped their priorities are.
This can’t go on. we need to wake up and have a bracing, honest discussion about the dangerous fraying of our society. Or Harehills will only be the start.
A disgraceful contempt for the State
Can the police be relied on to protect us?