Far-right rioters should face full force of the law - but so should anti-semitism marches
While we rightly seek to condemn those involved in the despicable riots, we shouldn't shy away from seeking justice for anti-semitism either, says Fergus Kelly.
It was the day after Labour’s general election win, and Andrew Marr couldn’t have sounded more satisfied. “For the first time in many of our lives,” he claimed, “Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability.”
As he’s been reminded more than once since, it’s not an observation that’s aged well – less than a month, in fact. But it was a comment he’d made moments earlier that more explicitly illustrated Marr’s thinking, when he gushed about: “Ordinary, down-to-earth, serious people, talking like the rest of us, in charge of the government.”
It seems unfair to single Marr out. I have friends who’ve worked with him in the past and recall a very amiable chap. But he is emblematic, not just of a progressive left groupthink that with Labour’s move into government has now completed its march through every aspect of public life.
More particularly, he represents a particular middle class snobbery that bears much responsibility for today’s strife-torn Britain. The same phenomenon was exposed last week when Huw Edwards pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children.
Yet when The Sun newspaper first ran the story of the newsreader offering money to a teenager for sexually explicit photographs, one of his former BBC colleagues Jon Sopel sniffed: “There are a number of people in the tabloid press who need to give themselves a good hard look in the mirror.”
And Andrew Marr popped up again, with a finger-wagging “we all have our frailties”. That snobbery defined the Remain campaign as surely as that for Net Zero: both scarcely able to conceal their distaste for white, working class people, either for not being sufficiently grateful to Brussels, or their ghastly cheap package holidays polluting the greens’ more rarified sensitivities.
And it is evident in the response to the riots that have so defiled the memory of the three little girls murdered in Southport. The bullying cowardice of the thugs attacking mosques and refugee centres, and the jackal-like looters trailing in their wake, should face condign justice, without fear or favour.
But people who equally condemn the far-right agitators see the fear of the authorities when confronted by the vilest antisemitism of the pro-Palestinian marches. They see the favour extended to the violent Black Lives Matter riots when Keir Starmer took the knee. And they feel ever more keenly the haughty injustice of it.
