MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: The Left hates its own voters. Now the nation is paying the price (original) (raw)

And still the squalid, witless and dangerous violence persists. Good people can and do clear away the physical mess, but the damage done to peace of mind and security cannot just be swept up or hosed down.

Britain suddenly seems a less settled and reasonable place, thanks to these outbreaks.

As for the injuries to police officers, these are shocking and disgraceful. We, the citizens of this country, rely on these men and women to guard us while we sleep.

Those who launch physical attacks on them and hurl dangerous missiles at them, who burn down police offices and overturn police cars, are showing a dangerous contempt for civilisation itself.

And they are forgetting the key principle of policing in this country, that these officers are citizens in uniform, not some ironclad regiment of lethally armed repression.

Rioters let off flares in scenes of violence in Sunderland city centre on Friday evening

MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Britain suddenly seems a less settled and reasonable place, thanks to these outbreaks of squalid, witless and dangerous violence

Those who launch physical attacks on them and hurl dangerous missiles at them, who burn down police offices and overturn police cars, are showing a dangerous contempt for civilisation itself.

They have families, children, private lives and feelings. They do not, any of them, have to stand in the angry darkness in outnumbered groups, fighting off the forces of stupidity and thoughtlessness, taking blows and kicks and being pelted with chunks of masonry. They do it out of duty to us.

We have a similar duty to them. This is not Russia or China, or some other despotism where the ordinary citizen has no voice or redress.

Attacking the police of a free country is a stupid, criminal self-indulgence, and the excuses these morons make for their behaviour are empty and worthless. The prisons will never be so full that there is no room for those convicted of these crimes.

The Prime Minister’s response has been mixed at best, missing the point of much that he has seen.

He still tends to view events as cases to be prosecuted, rather than as problems to be solved. The police can probably cope with violent disorder without any special new measures or so-called ‘national capability’.

The original plan for British policing – that it should remain as local as possible – is good for both effectiveness and democracy.

The radical police force mergers of the 1960s did not in fact lead to significantly greater effectiveness, and nor has the creation of Police Scotland north of the border.

Governments should be careful about this issue. But there is a fundamental political problem, in which a general mistrust of the state has grown like an infestation of weeds.

The actions of the mobs in Southport, London, Sunderland and elsewhere are inexcusable, and we condemn them without any reservation.

But the London elite’s refusal to grasp the dangers of its migration policies has, alas, created circumstances in which dangerous internet rumours and crude rhetoric can spread and ignite.

Sir Keir Starmer and his woke Cabinet are ill-equipped to cope with this because their metropolitan attitudes are so far removed from those of ordinary people.

Police remove a badly beaten man rounded on by violent protesters in Manchester on Saturday

Sir Keir Starmer and his Cabinet are ill-equipped to cope with this because their metropolitan attitudes are so far removed from those of ordinary people

The vast majority will continue to cope peacefully with levels of immigration never previously seen in this country. But they need to know that their worries are understood in Downing Street.

Are they? This discontent found its democratic voice in the Leave victory in the 2016 referendum, and then in Boris Johnson’s 2019 electoral triumph, later squandered by Tory infighting.

By contrast, Sir Keir and his party have remained complacent through this whole period. Even now they show no sign of seeking any effective answer to the migration crisis, legal or illegal.

As Gordon Brown showed so clearly in his scornful dismissal of the fears of the Labour voter Gillian Duffy in 2010, calling her ‘a bigoted woman’ when he thought she was out of earshot, the Left-wing upper crust despise their own voters.

This was always an arrogant, foolish attitude, bad for democracy and bad for the Labour Party. Now it is bad for the nation as well.