THE BIG READ: Why couldn't the law-abiding Jewish Londoner cross the road?

Blame our politicians, not our police officers, for the creation of a dystopian society in which basic liberties are sacrificed to the interests of the mob.

ALMOST the entire political class has failed to oppose mass uncontrolled immigration, the diversity doctrine, Islamic resistance to integration and official cowardice in the face of unreasonable minority demands.

Photo by Dovydas Žilinskas on Unsplash

Those of us who have been warning about the impacts of these factors literally for decades have been marginalised by this same political class and depicted as extremists who “just don’t get the modern world”.

Yet from the Prime Minister downwards, our politicians now apparently expect the Metropolitan Police to maintain a standard of civic order in our capital city to match that which pertained in the immediate post-Second World War period.

That period was characterised – even in the capital - by remarkably high social solidarity in the wake of the unifying war effort, very great homogeneity in the population, deference to authority, fear of stigma for bad behaviour such as littering or swearing and an innate respect for shared public spaces.

Famously Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore, was impressed with what a high trust society Britain and London sustained when he visited in the late 1940s. In particular, he recalled seeing unattended newspaper stands with honesty boxes for people to put their coins in and even take correct change from. He said to himself: “This is a well-ordered and disciplined society.”

That Britain and that London must have been a relative doddle to police compared to the Britain and London of today. Nowadays our capital city is populated by millions of incomers from every continent and country in the world. The city’s mayor tells us that such diversity is “our strength”. And yet this is obvious baloney.

For example, these days every weekend the capital plays host to large and angry pro-Palestine demonstrations attended by those for whom the condition of the Palestinian people is their top concern. Many are Muslim immigrants or their descendants for whom the Ummah – the notion of global Islamic brotherhood – is a very powerful motivating factor. Some even staged public celebrations after the October 7 pogroms perpetrated by Hamas on Israeli soil.

It falls to the Metropolitan Police to attend these weekend marches to ensure good order is kept. At the same time, Met officers must carry out numerous other crucial duties to keep the peace: policing boisterous and factional football crowds, cracking down on street crime and especially knife and machete crime predominantly perpetrated by ethnic minority gangs, helping retailers hold back a rising tide of shop theft, pushing back against the growing harassment of women in public spaces, attending Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park to make sure things don’t turn stabby there either. And the old presumption that law-abiding folk will always and everywhere step in to help the police no longer applies either.

In the midst of all this the Conservative party which has governed this country either alone or in harness for the past 14 years appears to be in the process of hanging another Metropolitan Police Commissioner out to dry. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has called for Sir Mark Rowley to be dismissed, while Rishi Sunak is apparently appalled at the Met’s treatment of a Jewish Londoner who was in the vicinity of one of the pro-Palestine marches. Described as being “openly Jewish” by a police officer, this gentleman was not permitted to cross the road through the passing demonstrators because of concerns about what their reaction to him would be.

Video footage of the incident appears to have hit Rishi Sunak like a bolt of lightning, with Downing Street sources saying he expects Rowley to account for how it happened.

In fact, it should be Sunak and countless other gutless and gullible senior British politicians held to account for how it happened: it happened because they have overseen a nightmarish social experiment that has manifestly failed. The only way the British tradition of policing by consent can be maintained in the new fragmented society that has transpired is via the police pursuing the just-about-still-achievable goal of mere containment. This means deferring at street level to the largest faction present. So a solitary “openly Jewish” Londoner - or indeed a pro-freedom Iranian holding aloft a sign saying “Hamas is Terrorist” - gets ushered away in order that the mixed throng of Islamists and Corbynistas doesn’t “kick off”.

The only practical alternative to this is to get the truncheons out and crack heads when the mob turns on counter-protesters permitted to wander through it at will. And make no mistake, the Islamist tendency would come back in strength to play double or quits the following week. I’d be up for that, but would Sunak? Hardly. At the first whiff of a riot, he’d be hanging police commanders out to dry for brutality.

Having ignored Braverman’s warning that the “hate marches” should be nipped in the bud and banned in the autumn, he is especially culpable for the loss of liberty and order in shared public spaces that has ensued. In effect he is bemoaning the consequences of his own complacent inactivity. And the whole posturing political class is bemoaning the consequences of its decision to implement a mass immigration policy in tandem with a crude multiculturalist approach that tells incomers it is fine to maintain primary affinity with their countries and cultures of origin. And that if anything doesn’t go their way in Britain then they should regard themselves as victims.

What would 1940s Londoners have made of the latest horrific twists in the Middle East conflict? Pretty much the same as they made of the violence that attended the birth of the state of Israel in the 1940s, I expect: concern and regret and bus queue conversations expressing a hope that the two sides could sort out their differences somehow. But not endless weekends of intimidating protests with chanting in support of murderous political ambitions.

This is who and what a big proportion of modern Londoners are. And it is by design. Such a factional population lacking respect for the heritage of the society in which it lives is never going to be easy to police.

Rowley’s predecessor Cressida Dick faced a similar dilemma during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of summer 2020. Her officers often backed off from missile-