Police van burning in Bristol riot

We are now beginning to see the results of the supine establishment response to Black Lives Matter and the related campaign of demonisation against white society and the police.

Last Sunday — in no small irony — a “Kill the bill” demonstration in Bristol, against a proposed new law giving the police greater powers to curb demonstrations, turned into a riot against the police. There were further arrests for breaches of Covid regulations at another related demonstration in Bristol on Tuesday night.

In Sunday’s disorder, said to be the worst rioting in Bristol for a decade, some 21 police officers were injured by a mob armed with glass bottles, bricks and scaffolding. A police station had its windows smashed, and a police vehicle was set on fire while officers were inside.

As the Telegraph reports, Andy Roebuck, chairman of the Avon and Somerset Police Federation, said:

They tried to set fire to a police van with officers inside. To my mind that is attempted murder. I spoke to two officers who said they genuinely feared they would be killed. 

It was said that an orderly protest had been hijacked by thugs. Police are reportedly hunting for up to 500 violent extremists who were involved. 500! With 3,000 having attended the initial peaceful demonstration, that’s some hijack!

But why is anyone surprised? 

For months and indeed years, there’s been a steady and wildly unfair demonisation of the police.

They’ve been attacked for trying to enforce Covid regulations, as they are required to do but for which they have been accused of turning Britain into a “police state”. 

They were attacked for heavy-handed policing of Covid regulations at the demonstration over violence against women following the murder of Sarah Everard, whose body was found after she disappeared while walking home in south London.

Conversely, they were attacked for failing to react robustly at a Black Lives Matter  demonstration which vandalised statues and threw projectiles at retreating police officers. 

Since the 1993 Macpherson report, which on the basis of no evidence whatsoever damned the entire police service as “institutionally racist,” they have routinely been attacked for this alleged collective guilt. Now, on the basis of the death of a black suspect pinned to the ground in Minneapolis by a police officer’s knee, Black Lives Matter has turned up the temperature against the police to boiling point.

Many cultural and political figures in Britain have supported BLM despite the fact that its programme is anti-white, anti-west and demands that the police be defunded and abolished.  Among these supporters was the Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who proudly tweeted a picture of himself and his deputy “taking the knee” in his Westminster office. 

It was irrelevant that Starmer subsequently distanced himself from the BLM demand to defund the police. For reprehensible as the BLM platform is, the real damage is done by these respectable supporters who are literally genuflecting to the claim that their society is intrinsically evil. 

By failing to denounce BLM  for what it actually is — a subversive, racist, anti-white group aiming to overthrow western society —  and, even worse, supporting it as a moral cause, they help give these and other political subversives the feeling that the revolutionary wind is with them. 

The progressive classes have been lazily and irresponsibly giving this kind of succour to unconscionable agendas for years.  Nihilist or hard-left activists bent on overturning western society have been regularly morphing from one anti-west cause to another — Stop the War, Occupy, Extinction Rebellion and now Black Lives Matter. 

At every stage, these revolutionary wannabes have found swathes of respectable society nodding along to one vicious slander after another against the west — that America commits human rights abuses worse than Middle Eastern tyrants, that capitalism is unjust and punishes the poor, that industrialisation is bringing about the imminent extinction of life on earth, and that white western society is intrinsically evil.

Instead of saying robustly that these are all wicked lies against the west and denouncing their perpetrators as potential totalitarian despots, many in positions of cultural authority have endorsed the message if not the tactics. So the universities are falling over each other to “decolonise” the curriculum — that is, censor it and replace objective and balanced analysis by distorted propaganda that teaches students to hate their own society.

And instead of denouncing the instigators of the violence against the police, some people in responsible positions actually blame the police. The Telegraph reports that Dr Jo Grady, president of the University and College Union which represents more than 120,000 academics and support staff in further and higher education and who opposes the policing bill, said on Twitter: 

You don’t have to be comfortable with the idea of violence or damage to understand that when the police turn up to events they also bring with them potential for violence. They literally bring violent tools, which are often deployed quickly to police with fear, not consent.

All this has led political thugs to become intoxicated with their own power. They have observed that taking to the streets in violent disorder may enrage some — but much more significant, it also elicits only indifference or actually gains support from many others. With allegedly conservative or high establishment figures describing Covid restrictions as “Stasi-like” oppression and calling for civil disobedience, with companies and other bodies requiring employees to denounce themselves for “unconscious bias” and white privilege, and with the police being damned if they do and damned if they don’t and finding themselves trying to police a society which is increasingly tearing up its own rules, is it any wonder that those bent on nihilist or revolutionary disorder believe their time has come?

The activists of “No Fixed Abode Anti Fascists”, which was involved in the Bristol demonstration, describe themselves as a “group of squatters, travellers and homeless people combating fascist and bailiff thuggery”. They have taken over a disused police station near the spot in south London from where Sarah Everard went missing. The Times reports: 

Her killing brought an outcry about violence against women and the Metropolitan Police was accused of heavy handedness at a vigil for her at Clapham Common. Some officers have said that the vigil was hijacked by far-left groups after ACAB (All Cops are Bastards) was daubed on a police van.  

The anti-fascist group has used the acronym on social media posts about the planned eviction at the former police station. Its social media contains images of disorder in Bristol and Clapham Common.  

Squatters refused to comment yesterday on their involvement in either event, resorting to profanities when asked by The Times. One supporter said: “Kill the Bill has taken off as a campaign and people are willing to take to the streets for it. I am one of them.”

There are intelligence warnings that more violent confrontations by activists are in the pipeline. By endorsing the calumnies against the west being perpetrated by those intent upon bringing it down, a shallow, cowardly or ideologically twisted cultural establishment has sown the wind. Now Britain is beginning to reap the whirlwind.

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