Coffee House Shots
Is Starmer’s response to the riots enough?
The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis, and unrivaled books and arts reviews. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Alongside that, you get a £20 John Lewis or Waitrose voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk/voucher. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics podcast. I'm Oscar Edmondson, and I'm joined today by Brendan O'Neill and John Woodcock, who previously advised government on political violence and disruption. So police abracing themselves for more violent disorder this weekend, this in the aftermath of the tragic stabbings in Southport, which resulted in unrest in London, Hartleypool and in Southport. Kia Starmer made a statement yesterday condemning the protests and the involvement of far-right actors for stoking up the violence, particularly around mosques and spreading disinformation online. We can hear a clip of that statement now. Let me now turn to the actions of a tiny, mindless minority in our society, because in the aftermath of this attack, the community of Southport had to suffer twice. A gang of thugs got on trains and buses, went to a community that is not their own, a community grieving the most horrific tragedy, and then proceeded to throw bricks at police officers, police officers who just 24 hours earlier had been having to deal with an attack on children in their community, their community, and make no mistake, whether it's in Southport, London or Hartleypool. These people are showing our country exactly who they are, mosques targeted because they're mosques, flares thrown at the statue of Winston Churchill, a Nazi salute at the Senator. And so I've just held a meeting with senior police and law enforcement leaders, where we resolved to show who we are. John, start with you. What did you make of that statement and of Starm's response? I thought the most important thing is that I think he was right to grip this, to leave on the front, and to show personal involvement. The nation is reeling, they're reeling from the depth or the tragedy, and I think there is a symptom of the shared terms of grief, and then what you are seeing in Southport, and then in towns across the country, is horrific, and we do need to understand what we can do to put this violent unrest back in its box, and he put himself at the heart of that, which I thought was good. You look at the substance of what he was saying, there were no easy sort of silver bullets on this, but I thought it was really welcome actually, that he was talking on a number of issues, that I have recommended in the review that this government is, Interplay to Violence, which this government is looking at now, such as being able to do more to assess the intelligence that can sometimes get missed between forces on troublemakers who might be planning to travel outside of our forces' jurisdiction, we're not good enough at the moment as a country at getting all of that together, and then once you've got that intelligence, doing everything within the legal framework that we've got, which has been recently strengthened through the Public Order Act to stop troublemakers from being able to go to the zones of these so-called protests, which in fact just being at the moment used as a platform for rioting. And Brendan, you wrote a blog on Coffee House saying that the people of Southport don't need platitudes from government, and that simply just condemnation is not enough. How have you evaluated St illness response so far? You know, I'm quite worried about it, if I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. I should say that I am utterly opposed to the street violence that we've seen in Southport and Hartley Pool in central London as well. I think it's a betrayal of the quiet dignity that the people of Southport have shown since the massacre on Monday, so I think this violence is completely out of order, of course, and there does need to be a police response to it. But I can't help wondering if there's a double standard here. So Keir Starmer notably did not propose anything like a national violent disorder unit in response to the Hare Hill riots in Leeds, for example, which took place just a couple of weeks ago. Keir Starmer is also someone who took the knee to Black Lives Matter in 2020. He did so at the height of the Black Lives Matter riots, which caused 25 deaths in America and a billion dollars worth of damage. So I am asking myself, why is it that these particular riots have triggered him into action, whereas other riots seem to have either not offended him as much or even won his approval if we're looking at the BLM period. That's a question that I think needs to be answered, and my concern is that it's not just the physical disorder that seems to be offending Starmer and certain sections of the political class as it offends me, but also possibly the people who are carrying it out. White working class, the supposed riff-raff, the people who are very, very angry about knife crime and also other issues as well, like terrorism and disorder, and generally, people to whom we seem to have no answers to their questions. And it seems to me that if we just clamp down on these protesters rather than also engaging with some of the concerns that are coming from those communities, I think that will be a mistake. And so am I right in thinking that your view then, Brendan, is that whilst this has been capitalised upon by certain right-wing actors, we shouldn't ignore that these protests speak to another issue and that these communities feel like they're not being listened to? Well, absolutely. That's right. There are two things going on. I think there is a sense of anger and we know that that culture has existed for a long time. People feel left behind, they feel ignored, they feel that their concerns are not being taken seriously. And that's out there. And that is being exploited by far-right grifters. That is being exploited by the Tommy Robinson's of the world. But I think their ability to exploit that anger is actually accentuated when we refuse to engage with that anger. So if the politicians just have this hands-off approach to certain working class communities, and if they just say, "Well, we're not going to listen to you because we think you're behaving irrationally and we think your fears are unfounded," they're going to contribute to the driving of certain sections of those communities into the arms of grifters like Tommy Robinson. So it's incredibly important that we listen to people, firstly because people deserve to be listened to, and secondly, because I think that's probably the best way to limit the influence of the far-right in certain left-behind communities. Brendan, can I just check what you're saying? Because I thought you started, I was agreeing with you when you started, in saying that actually that the violence that we've seen was not reflective of those communities, and that the Southport, the majority of people in Southport, had expressed a real dignity in the way that they'd been dealing with their grifters. And so if that is the case, then I'm not sure what you're saying, I hope I'm mishearing, but you weren't saying, oh, well, this is only to be expected if we don't listen to people. You're not saying that? I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that the anger that the far-right exploits is the real existing thing. Most people don't express it by setting fire to things. Most people are decent law-abiding citizens. They don't hit police officers, they don't set fire to police vans, they don't destroy their own communities, because they're good people. But I know from speaking to these people, I was in Southport just a year or so ago, and I've been in other parts of the country as well, and I know from speaking to many of these people that they are angry about uncontrolled immigration, for example, and they are angry about some of the failures of integration as they see it. And they are keen to talk about the challenges of multiculturalism, and they don't want to be branded as racist for wanting to have those conversations. So that sense is out there. When it's expressed in a violent form, that tends to be the far-right exploiters coming in and milking that anger for their own hateful ends. So I do think we have to separate these two things out a little bit. Yeah, I agree, and I think people are right to look that there is consistency, and I think there has been a tendency in the past for it, it has felt like an easier topic for people on the centre and the left to get into a very robust response against the far-right than perhaps it has been on Islamist, inspired, unrest, or from some of the extremes of Black Lives Matter. But I think also, I mean, I think if without is the lens which people are going to, people commentators are going to put up, then I think it's also important that we look at our response to this as well, because I don't speak for Kia taking the knee, but I think there was a sentiment within Black Lives Matter that there was a level of injustice which could ought to be engaged with, but you had to have a very robust response against the lawlessness, which was encompassing it on the extremes. And I would agree with that, but I think if you're not careful, you end up sort of saying oh well, but these communities kind of have a point and a reason to be angry, but don't accept that for other causes. I think consistency is incredibly important when we're talking about violent behaviour, street violence, what I would consider to be far-right politics across the board. So I don't only include people like Tommy Robinson in that and some of the far-right idiots we've seen on the streets of our country over the past few days, I also would include radical islamists in that, who I would consider to be pretty extreme and sometimes borderline fascistic movements who are incredibly misogynistic, very homophobic, very anti-symmetric, and they have carried out extreme acts of violence in this country and other countries over the past 20 years. So I would include them in that as well. And I think it's important to have a principled, consistent opposition to those kinds of movements across the board that seek to divide our communities and which seek to inflict violence on our communities. I think that's a very important point that you make there. But what I'm saying about working-class communities across the country, I'm not saying that they are supportive of the violence that has inflicted their communities. They are actually against it, they think the riots have been a disaster. But I'm saying that they do have some underlying concerns that I think we're often too swift to write off, we're often too swift to demonize them. We're often too swift to say, well, if you're so concerned about immigration, maybe you've got some xenophobic tendencies, or if you're really concerned about radical Islam, maybe you're crossing the line into Islamophobia, those temptations I think we need to resist, because otherwise we could end up driving some of those people into the arms of those who claim to listen to them like Tommy Robinson, but I don't think they actually do listen to them. Yeah. I mean, I think on that last point, that's right. And I've been concerned by some of the activists campaigning on the left, which has... Effectively or directly said that, for example, the last government's policy on immigration was xenobic self for a right, and you can have the disagreements with that, and I didn't agree with it at all. But I think if a lot of people, big parts of the population agreed with that kind of approach, and if you label them as you say as supportive of a far-right policy, then that lessens the barriers for them to be enticed by the likes of, well, Tommy Robinson, the actors who have been part of the English Defence League movement over the years, and people who peddle that kind of snake oil. We're talking about the far-right as a sort of fringe group, but we have had certain right-wing individuals now in Parliament, Nigel Farage, who released a statement where he was seen to be sort of fanning the flames to some extent. He said that these protests were not down to a few right-wing thugs. Obviously, we shouldn't make these sorts of equivalences between Farage and people like Tommy Robinson, but was that a helpful interjection from Nigel Farage? No, what Nigel Farage said was not helpful, it was, I think, deliberately engaging in the kind of conspiracy theories that can fuel unrest at times on this rather than dampening down tensions. But Farage, and others in Parliament, is a challenge to all of us who want to stand against the kind of politics that he can represent, because I think there is a level of scrutiny and challenge which is needed. But again, if we are too quick, just simply to label him as an equivalence to, say, Tommy Robinson, which I can understand why people want to draw parallels, but if you do that as an automatic thing, then you potentially drive people further into the margins rather than trying to bring them back into engagement with mainstream politics. And Brendan, a lot of this disinformation was spread online. You've wrote a lot about the need to protect freedom of expression in online spaces, but are we seeing a line being crossed in this instance? In relation to freedom of speech, I would say no. I'm a free speech absolutist, which means I even believe that people should be able to say things that are not true. So long as the rest of us have the freedom to challenge that and to openly confront their lies and their bigotry and to say, actually, here's the truth, here's the reality. I do think more freedom is always a better response to misinformation and even bigotry rather than censorship, which has a tendency to push things underground. It doesn't actually resolve the problematic ideas. It just pushes them somewhere else where we can't really see it. But in relation to misinformation, for me, one of the worst things that happened over the past week was, aside from the killing on Monday, which, of course, I think is without question the worst thing that's happened, but the protest outside the mosque in southboard, I thought, was obscene. Firstly, because there was no evidence whatsoever that the alleged stabber was related to Islam and it seems that he has no relation to Islam whatsoever, but also even if he was a Muslim, it would be utterly unjustifiable to protest outside a mosque. But this is where I think the importance of consistency comes in because over the past nine months since the Hamas pogrom of 7th of October, synagogues in this country have been under relentless attack, a kid in North London was stoned with stones on his way out of a synagogue. We've seen families have to be spirited out of synagogues by police because they were surrounded by supposedly pro-Palestine protesters. Just a couple of months ago, a man was sentenced to eight years in jail for plotting to blow up a synagogue in Sussex. So this is what I mean when I talk about the necessity of consistency because there will be Jewish people in this country who will quite rightly be asking themselves, where was the concern from the left and from sections of the media when our religious institutions were under relentless and racist assault and yet now there's this outpouring of understandable angst and I think righteous angst about the attack on the mosque in southboard. So I think there's the importance of freedom of speech online because it doesn't only mean that people can spread misinformation, it also means that the rest of us have an opportunity to challenge that misinformation and also to remind people that there are other forms of bigotry in this country, some of which I think tend to be downplayed and all of which deserves our real focus and our real criticism and then that goes across the board. I'm often not in the same space as many of my colleagues on this and I think there can be a tendency to crack down on so-called misinformation which can restrict the space that any liberal democracy needs to be able to debate controversial ideas but the misinformation that's being spread here and the way that it has been inciting hatred and violence for me crosses a line and I think there is a case for stronger and faster action in those instances and one area where I hope that there can be a greater degree of consensus over one of the recommendations in my review is a greater capabilities and resource for our intelligence and law enforcement services and law enforcement agencies on being able to identify and counter the way in which hostile states create and spread misinformation because we're probably all going to be in a slightly different place on the freedom of speech for a particular, say, misinformed right-ring imbecile who is British to say what he or she wants to say online but I think we could hopefully all agree that there is no place for the likes of Russia and Iran and the troll factories which they employ to pretend to be britt to fan the flames of that. And just final question to both of you, one of the things that Stomas announced is this new policing unit, what will that look like and what sort of powers will they have or should they have? Well, we don't know yet but I think one of the things that was really welcome for me is the prospect that that can plug the gap in intelligence sharing which we're talking about earlier where too often at the moment, this was again this is one of the issues that I addressed and that I picked up in my review and I recommended the need for this greater central capability to be able to pick up and share intelligence because often you've got a force who might be able to pick up what some known troublemakers are saying in one part of the of the country about a planned protest in another part of the country in another forces jurisdiction but certainly has been the case in recent years there have been definite examples where that just has not been passed on because so I think of a lack of sometimes a lack of priority and overstretched force and if it's have not happening in your doorstep then there's not always that great level as greater incentives is needed to be able to pass it on so that is one important coordinating factor that can be that can be used and if we're going to make greater use of the the new orders which can ban people who have got a track record of disruptable violent protests from going to a particular area then that is a kind of thing where there needs to be well there certainly is a great great use for a level of coordination in the middle beyond just leaving it to each individual force to sort out bilaterally Brendan do you want to come in on that yeah I think I agree with a lot of what what was said there and I think obviously there needs to be a firm response from officialdom in response to riots the like of which we've seen over the past week people can't just get away with destroying their own communities or or going to communities in order to inflict destruction that is very wicked behavior that ought to be punished you know the only thing that concerns me about some of starmas proposals for dealing with this is I do worry about a potential overreach and a potential drift towards authoritarianism so for example his promise that they will make greater use of facial recognition technology I'm not sure that that's something that we necessarily want to see introduced into this country certainly not on a wholesale level and even the restrictions on people's freedom of movement around the country if they have taken part in certain forms of protests or rioting that is something that I think would have to be really carefully judged in a judicial fashion in order that we're not restricting people's movement within their own nation in a way that might be unjust or unnecessary this is really interesting that that last point because these these new orders were brought in largely I think with extreme climate change protests in in mind and some of the people who are probably instinctively in favor of of putting them in for the the far right would have may well have bought at the idea of doing it over over climate change and I don't know whether Brendan you would be in the in the in the opposite way around or you'd have you'd be saying to it similarly if it was kind of just stop oil then you'd have freedom of you'd have worries over their liberty and that they should be able to get around of the country and coordinate him no no I would I would hopefully it's good you put me on the spot there I would hopefully have a consistent approach to it which basically is is to say that any restriction on a citizen's ability to move around the country of which he is a citizen all I'm saying is that that is an incredibly serious business and so would have it and I'm not saying I'm necessarily against it but it would have to be I think very clearly demonstrated that this person would pose a threat if he went to a certain part of the country of which he is a citizen so it's it's a it's a big leap forward and and I think we always need to be careful when we make these kinds of leaps forward and make sure that we're not just responding rationally to horrific events but that we're really thinking things through and I know it's a cliche I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said those who would sacrifice liberty in the name of security deserve neither but it's worth bearing those words in mind you know we need a secure country but we also need a free country and working out that balance is difficult but necessary. Well thank you John thank you Brendan and thank you very much for listening.