Labour are gearing up for a moral crusade against the centre-Right.
Starmer’s renewed zeal for law and order is just one front in a wider war against diversity of thought and free speech
TIM STANLEY11 August 2024 •
I see the consensus now is “prison works”. Four weeks ago, Labour said it would let people out of jail early; post-riot, the state has arrested over 700 suspects and threatened sentences of up to ten years. This is the short, sharp shock. It will be followed by a long war on free thinking.
The rioters deserve it, though the sentences are rather stringent. William Morgan, a 69-year-old with no previous, got 32 months for violent disorder and carrying a wooden bat. But then the point is to Send A Message: “join in with this nonsense, laddie, and you’re going down”.
Still it’s odd because I thought justice was blind and, until recently, comically lenient. Steal a Prada coat in peacetime, slap on the wrist; nick a computer monitor during a looting spree, you get 11 months. The establishment has swapped its milk for gall and inverted every axiom we thought it lived by. Crime is no longer the product of poverty. Riots no longer the cry of the oppressed. It turns out theft is not a comment on Liz Truss’s mini-Budget! Now offenders are malicious, far-Right thugs who must feel the full force of a law that hitherto operated at a fraction of its potential.
In Teesside, the lawyer of Steven Mailen, who joined the riot after a heady afternoon at the Bingo, asked the court to go easy on his client because he had experienced discrimination as a gay man. Nice try. It would’ve worked a week ago, but Mailen got 26 months.
Where were these stiff sentences when rapists went down? Where were the mass arrests when knife crime surged? Where was the intolerance for aggressive public behaviour when Jews felt intimidated? This two-tier approach is probably shaped by ideology. To much of our elite, the law is not only a tool for order but also for social engineering. That’s why some groups and categories of crime appear to be handled differently. Though we were all horrified by the riots, the liberal-Left was offended on another level because they were a rejection of their project (multiculturalism) by a constituency they regard as their own (poor whites).
We might expect sociologists to go wild trying to explain this rebellion, maybe identifying addiction – booze played a big part – alienation, loss of jobs or mass migration. The last, however, cannot begin to be considered. As all good citizens have tattooed across their chest, DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH – so the real culprit, in this instance, is whoever seeks to divide the multicultural society. Elon Musk might be to blame. Vladimir Putin, almost certainly; that little tinker gets everywhere.
The bewigged judges dispensing justice-as-revenge – like something from the 1950s – is only the first salvo against dangerous liberty. District Judge Francis Rafferty said that anybody present at a riot can be remanded in custody, even if they were only a “curious observer”. Next will come a trial of social media – posting and hosting – followed, one assumes, by the roll-out of facial recognition and tougher anti-hate legislation.
It’s all gearing up to a moral crusade against the Right, starting with “far” then moving to “centre”. There have already been suggestions that GB News be squeezed, and that Nigel Farage is personally responsible for riots he condemned. Coming soon to BBC1: a groundbreaking drama, The Brexit Riots, starring Stephen Graham as a docker radicalised by Andrea Leadsom.
The elite knows that we are governed as much by our imaginations as by law, so will seek to discredit and delegitimise, to shrink the field of acceptable opinion down to a narrow, carefully curated strip of fake grass.
The same techniques, probably the same agencies, that policed Islam so keenly in the 2000s will now be used to focus on policing opponents of Islamism. Conservatives who previously cheered the state’s war on dissident philosophy might come to regret it.
Will this intellectual lockdown work? Let’s ask the late Tony Benn, an actual socialist.
I recently stumbled upon a speech that Benn gave to the Commons in 1991 on the loss of sovereignty to Europe, and found it prescient. If citizens feel disenfranchised, warned Benn, three things will happen.
“First, people may just slope off” and stop voting (I note that turnout in Sunderland Central in July was a whopping 53 per cent). Second, they might riot: an “old-fashioned method of drawing the attention of the Government to what is wrong.” Third: “nationalism can arise… built out of frustration that people feel when they cannot get their way through the ballot box.”
Modern readers often express surprise at Bennite statements that could’ve come from the mouth of a Tory, but the Old Left and Old Right, survivors of Depression and war, believed in democracy and felt responsible for the descendants of the men who fought at Ypres and Dunkirk. Benn would have excoriated the goons who set fire to an asylum seeker hotel, but would also have had an analysis ready for why they did it – economic and moral, a grasp of what turns desperate human beings into fascists.
What’s missing in Keir Starmer’s transformation into super cop is a unifying vision of Britain or a promise of change.
Why? Because he fundamentally believes everything here is okay. This is a man who watched the 2012 Olympic ceremony and assumed it was a documentary. Questioning the liberal experiment is, to fellows such as him, a sign of madness or deviousness: “weird” as Kamala Harris says in America. From now on, thanks to these stupid riots, Labour can tar critics of the status quo as sympathetic with arson and looting.
A pity, because there’s clearly a state-of-the-nation debate that we need to have. Mid-riot, William Morgan shouted at the police that he was an old man, to which one of them, a consummate professional, replied: “Then... why are you at a f****** riot?” Morgan also yelled “I’m English!” – a fascinating statement, about him, his ethnicity, his perception of rights and fear of “the other” that it would profit us to examine. But I’m reluctant to do it, lest my words are taken down and given in evidence. DT.
