This video I took in Leeds sums up why white communities are bubbling with rage.
Elites who cannot comprehend these violent uprisings should spend time in parts of this country that are impoverished and disenfranchised
ISABEL OAKESHOTT6 August 2024 • 
The dirty mattress at the top of Back Belbrooke Terrace had a brief second lease of life as a gym mat cum daybed. Small children with dirty faces, tatty clothes and nowhere else to play used it for wobbly headstands or just lay there watching the world go by.
Apparently it was thrown out because it was riddled with bed bugs, but parasites are the least of the worries for kids on this street. Scampering about in worn-out shoes, they navigate broken glass, overflowing bags of rubbish, stinking piles of old tissues and all manner of other unmentionables. According to locals, dirty needles and human excrement are standard health hazards.
Welcome to Harehills, the inner city area of Leeds where the first of this summer’s riots kicked off. It may be 2024, but these backstreets are Dickensian. No youngster should be playing amid such squalor; certainly not in a civilised country with the sixth largest economy in the world.
Then again, as simmering tensions over immigration boil over in cities across the country, the UK has not been at all civil of late. Indeed, to the outside world, our great country has looked such a violent mess that certain overseas governments are warning their citizens against travelling to the UK.
How has it come to this? That is, of course, a long story, which (despite the Government’s best efforts) cannot credibly be reduced to talk of “far-Right thugs”. Swastika-tattooed skinheads have certainly played their ugly part, but while their behaviour is inexcusable, it is not inexplicable. In the wrong way, these rioters are expressing a bewilderment and mounting rage felt by vast numbers of quiet, law-abiding people.
Impoverished white British communities, in particular, feel abandoned and disdained by politicians who appear to have little to no understanding of – and even less interest in – how it feels to live in places like Harehills.
Elites who cannot understand why this country has exploded into violent uprisings need only spend a few hours in places like this – whether in Rotherham, Hull, Peterborough or Plymouth – to sense the anger and despair of hopelessly fractured and shockingly deprived communities. In Leeds, the rioters were not “far-Right thugs” but Roma families, who, as has now been widely reported, went on the rampage when police and social services removed some children and took them into emergency care.
In marked contrast to far-Right riots, which saw mass arrests, during two days of violent protests in Harehills, only a handful of people were apprehended – among them Nicky Wilcox, a gentle mother-of-one who made the mistake of going outside during the trouble and found herself surrounded by the mob. Told to go home by police, she stood her ground – and somehow ended up in handcuffs.
What happened next to this woman, who has no interest or involvement in politics and has never had any run-in with the law, raises questions about two-tier policing and the allocation of desperately limited law-and-order resources.
Having gone outside to offer police officers ice lollies, she panicked as demonstrators thronged around her. Her only crime appears to have been swearing in front of police, for which she spent 13 hours in a police cell. In a so-called “out-of-court disposal” punishment, she has now been ordered to attend an “anti-social behaviour” course.
The bitter irony is that the former singer, who used to live in a £1.5m house in London’s Muswell Hill before moving to Leeds to be with her student daughter, is a quiet pillar of the community, acting as a kind of surrogate grandmother to the children on Back Belbrooke. Traumatised by the way she has been treated, in between bouts of tears, she still radiates sunshine on these mean streets, cheerfully handing out pieces of fruit, colouring pencils and plasticine to these children who have nothing and are drawn to the “posh” lady who shows some interest in their welfare.
The 50-second video of Back Belbrooke Terrace that I filmed and posted on X last week (which you saw at the top of this column) has now had more than 7.2 million views. As I walked down the alleyway, hollow-eyed locals tossed fast-food containers into the gutter and blasphemed in their yards. A Roma woman languidly rifled through a pile of discarded clothes on the ground.
Such desperation is, of course, commonplace in the slums of developing countries but is a stain on modern Britain – as is the widespread inability among many of those living in such dreadful conditions to speak a word of English. Small wonder communities are hopelessly divided, if people of different heritage and religion literally cannot communicate with each other.
Perceiving that asylum seekers and other migrants who do not speak the language or integrate are given special treatment by the authorities, some of our own people have come to feel like second-class citizens.
In going to Harehills, I knew I’d be accused of creating “poverty porn”, when arguably such research should be the base level expectation of anyone who worries about the way our society is splintering. Among thousands of other responses to my video are many shrug-shrug comments about streets like Back Belbrooke being totally “normal” in the north of England – as if that is not even more of a scandal.
Shortly before I left Harehills, the council came to remove the dirty mattress. The children were crestfallen, running after the truck as it trundled away with the only toy they had. None of this is remotely okay.
West Yorkshire Police has been contacted for comment . DT.
