Watching Essex Police escorting Far Left troublemakers to a confrontation with local residents protesting against a hotel in Epping being converted into an asylum hostel for single men should surprise nobody. These days it’s par for the course.
More than 20 years ago I dubbed the police ‘the paramilitary wing of New Labour’.
Under Tony Blair and his Oxford University contemporary Ian Blair (no relation), former Commissioner of the Met, the Old Bill had become increasingly politicised.
The recently deceased Ian Blair, basically a social worker with scrambled egg on his cap, dressed openly to the Left and policed London accordingly.
At one stage, in the middle of a general election campaign, Tony Blair was being driven around in official police vehicles resprayed with the slogans ‘Vote Labour’ and ‘Britain Forward Not Back’.
The nadir of Ian Blair’s reign at Scotland Yard came not with the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles De Menezes in the wake of the 7/7 terror attacks, but when the Met arrested Tory spokesman Damian Green on trumped-up charges after he was accused by then Labour Home Secretary Jacqui ‘Jackboots’ Smith of leaking classified information.
Locking up an Opposition spokesman was straight out of the Stasi songbook. The case eventually collapsed despite the best attempts of 20 anti-terrorism officers to rustle up evidence against Green.
Since then, rather than clean up their act and return to the neutrality we are entitled to expect from them, the police have shifted even further Left.
Riot police follow a march into the Epping town centre from a demonstration outside the Bell Hotel last week
Watching Essex Police escorting Far Left troublemakers to a confrontation with local residents protesting against a hotel in Epping being converted into an asylum hostel for single men should surprise nobody, writes Richard Littlejohn
Protesters hold up red smoke cannisters and signs outside the hotel in Epping
We’ve seen police cars resprayed in rainbow colours and coppers painting their nails and posing in high heels to ‘celebrate Pride month’. MGBGT+ flags have been flown above our dwindling number of police stations.
Who can forget officers dancing and skateboarding with Extinction Rebellion headbangers who brought chaos to London’s streets. And taking the knee to Black Lives Matter marchers.
More recently, the Met have spent their weekends giving a police escort to the pro-Hamas/Palestine mob calling for genocide against Israel, even threatening to arrest the head of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for looking ‘openly Jewish’.
So when Essex Plod marched in lockstep with the Stand Up To Racism gang who descended on Epping they were only behaving true to form.
Stand Up To Racism is a Socialist Workers Party front funded by Far Left trades unions, intent on provoking a violent reaction from those who object legitimately to illegal migrants, almost always single men, being bussed in to their communities in the dead of night and billeted in four-star hotels.
The Epping protests erupted after an Ethiopian migrant, who had only arrived on a small boat eight days earlier, was charged with sexually assaulting a young girl.
The correct police response would have been to turn back the SWP mob before they got to within a mile of the locals. When the inevitable confrontation kicked off and the Far Left agitators found themselves outnumbered they were spirited away from the scene in police vans ‘for their own safety’.
The chief constable of Essex, Ben-Julian Harrington, first denied that his officers had escorted the Stand Up To Racism rabble and, when the truth emerged, then claimed the police had a duty to uphold ‘freedom of assembly’. That’s the lame excuse wheeled out by the Met to justify the softly, softly policing of the anti-Israel marches.
Harrington might have been given the benefit of the doubt had he not sent officers to the home of the columnist Allison Pearson, formerly of this parish, on Remembrance Sunday to investigate her for an alleged ‘hate crime’ over a social media post which she subsequently deleted. She was accused of stirring up racial hatred after posting a photo of police officers alongside demonstrators waving what she wrongly thought was a Palestinian flag, but was in fact the flag of a Pakistani political party.
The police are more interested in investigating online ‘hate’ than tackling real crime. Call for the death of Jews on the streets and the police will turn a blind eye. Post some hurty words on the internet and go directly to jail.
For the record, I don’t blame the frontline coppers involved in the Epping fiasco. The poor bloody infantry are only obeying the orders of chief officers such as Harrington, who know the best way to get on in the modern police ‘service’ is to embrace every woke/Far Left cause espoused by their political masters.
And, I reiterate, no one is making excuses for any anti-migrant protester who resorts to violence, whether chucking petrol bombs at a Holiday Inn or jumping up and down on a police vehicle.
But while violent demonstrators should always face the full force of the law, the Far Left will continue to get a free pass and a police escort into the bargain.
Naturally, Harrington has rejected calls from Nigel Farage and others to resign and he can expect the full backing of the Prime Minister, too.
Surkeir’s response to anyone who opposes his catastrophic immigration policies is to smear them as ‘Far Right’ and send in the heavy mob.
These days the Old Bill aren’t only the paramilitary wing of Labour, they are the enablers of the SWP, Extinction Rebellion, the pro-Hamas mob and every other Far Left cause out there.
Mind how you go.
