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As stiff jail sentences are handed down to rioters (with the judge saying that decent people will have been “appalled, horrified and deeply disturbed” by what has happened), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, looks at how for him this falls into a familiar shocking pattern, after reporting on many huge protests and extreme violence against the police during his 41 year career in journalism.
Unfortunately I have witnessed it before.
In the past I have seen plenty of huge demonstrations against a perceived injustice.
I have also reported on lots of extreme violence committed against (as well as BY) the police.
So, regrettably, the present riots (although bigger in scale) are nothing new, and this is underlined for me by the jail sentences which have now been handed down to three of the rioters (and this is likely to be just the start of them).
Not all of those who took part were teenage thugs either.
For example Derek Drummond, is 58 and from Southport, but pleaded guilty to violent disorder as well as assault of an emergency worker last Tuesday.
His fellow accused (now convicted) Liam Riley, is 41, from Kirkdale, and also admitted violent disorder along with a racially aggravated public order offence in Liverpool on Saturday night.
Meanwhile Declan Geiran, is 29 from Liverpool, and said that he, too, committed violent disorder as well as arson in his home city.
The judge who sent them to prison, Andrew Menary KC declared: “every decent member of the community affected by these events will have been appalled, horrified and deeply disturbed about what had taken place in their neighbourhoods”.
Apart from emphasising the protests and fights with the police that I have witnessed, the historical background to these spasms of violence by the far right should also be understood.
Until recently people like this appeared a diminished force in the UK, caught between a decline in racist attitudes and a winner-takes-all electoral system that favours big political parties.
Throughout the 20th century the far right tried, and largely failed, to combine street activism with success at the ballot box.
The British Union of Fascists (BUF), founded by Oswald Mosley, a moustachioed aristocrat and antisemite, attracted some 50,000 supporters in the 1930s but failed to make any electoral headway.
After the Second World War, Mosley turned to aggressive street campaigning in migrant communities.
That was a tactic continued in the 1970s by the National Front (NF) with their provocative marches.
In an infamous clash, in 1977, 500 NF members marched through Lewisham, under a banner that read “clear the muggers off the streets” before brawling with police.
In the 2000s a successor outfit, the British National Party (BNP), won a handful of council seats and two places in the European Parliament (EP).
The electoral market for such extreme views, never that large, has steadily shrunk.
Only 17 per cent of people now say that it is very important for being truly British to have been born in the UK, down from 48 per cent in 1995.
As a result a distinction has emerged between what academics term the “extreme right”, explictly racist outfits like the NF or the BNP (other looser groups may be behind the riots), and the “radical right”, electoral movements whose ranks include populists like Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK.
Mind you, all of this scholarly study and historical background, will be of little consolation to those who had their businesses torched, or police officers who have been attacked.
As the judge said, decent people will be “appalled”.
The memories of Phil’s decades-long award-winning career in journalism (when seeing violent scenes were commonplace), as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Regrettably publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – a leading education expert in Wales has condemned as “bizarre and disgraceful” comments from the head of a Welsh university declaring that she is “proud” of her organisation, when it has come bottom of ALL similar institutions in the UK.
