The mob thinks it rules Britain – and can impose its will on the rest of us
Any fair-minded person would look at the video of the incident at Manchester airport this week and agree that it merits further investigation. The footage is disturbing. It shows a man, lying prone on the floor, having his head kicked and then seemingly stamped on by an armed police officer. The man’s mother looks on in distress as his brother is also forcibly restrained by police.
What triggered this incident remains unclear. It has been claimed that the mother was struck in the face; that a female police officer had her nose broken; and that one of three officers needed hospital treatment following the encounter, having been “punched to the ground”.
What is clear is that we need to know the full context. That is why we have processes in place to ensure justice is served – on all sides. The police officer has been removed from operational duties by Greater Manchester Police and the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is now conducting a full independent investigation.
Yet our tried and tested rules-based system is seemingly inadequate for the protesters (some wearing balaclavas) who subsequently gathered outside Rochdale Police Station seeking retribution. Addressing the 200-strong crowd with a megaphone, one man declared: “We can cause havoc, we can cause riots…. tomorrow, if we don’t get justice, these motherf---ers are going to get it.”
Another local figure has called for all the police officers to be arrested – or threatened mass protests until they get their way.
This is obviously problematic, for a number of reasons. As a democratic nation, we follow the rule of law, not mob rule. We don’t threaten civil unrest until our demands are met. Moreover, in this case, any threats of thuggery appear completely contrary to the family’s wishes.
Although their lawyer, Akhmed Yakoob, has been unhelpfully stoking the situation by suggesting it was an “attempted assassination” and accusing police officers of “going around trying to kill people”, local MP Paul Waugh said they are “acutely aware” that there are “extremists of all sides who are keen to hijack this event and use it for their own ends. The family are not interested in that at all.”
Sadly, though, we have seen this kind of “if-we-don’t-get–what-we-want-we’re-going-to-cause-trouble” response time and again in recent months. In February, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, broke with precedent to allow Labour to lodge a Gaza ceasefire amendment, largely because MPs had been on the receiving end of abusive and threatening behaviour.
Earlier that month, Mike Freer, the former Tory MP for Finchley and Golders Green, announced he was stepping down after facing death threats and an arson attack on his constituency office. And a pro-Palestinian mob surrounded the family home of Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory MP for Bournemouth East, and branding him a “war criminal”.
Numerous Labour MPs faced criticism after they voted for their party’s Gaza amendment in November, which stopped short of calling for an immediate ceasefire. Since October 7 we have witnessed a growing trend of people thinking that established rules and procedures can be broken simply under threat of intimidation, harassment and worse.
But it isn’t just anti-Israel protesters, who casually chant “from the river to the sea” on the streets of London, acting as though they are above the law. Climate activists have also been at it for years. Like the anti-police or pro-Palestinian protesters, they believe their cause is a “just” one. Thus, they operate under the false impression that they can cross the rubicon from peaceful protest to criminality and get away with it.
Fortunately, however, the law now appears to have caught up with the eco-extremists. Earlier this month, Roger Hallam, 58, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, was jailed for five years, and four others were sentenced to four years, after disrupting the M25 in November 2022, causing more than 50,000 hours of traffic delays, affecting the journeys of over 700,000 vehicles and costing the police £1 million.
They were prosecuted under a new law of conspiracy intentionally to cause a public nuisance introduced by the last Tory government. Naturally, their supporters have been up in arms at what they perceive to be “disproportionate” terms, but it is only right that the law has been changed to stop righteous people thinking they can impose their will on everyone else through “direct action”.
Lefties may complain; more than 1,000 people signed an open letter describing the jail terms handed to the activists as “one of the greatest injustices in a British court in modern history”. We’ve even had the mother of Cressida Gethin, a 22-year-old jailed for four years, moan that she can’t go to her brother’s wedding (play me the world’s smallest biodegradable violin), but the law has rightly reasserted its authority over the mob. Judge Christopher Hehir, who presided over that case, was perfectly clear: “I acknowledge that at least some of the concerns are shared by many, but the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic.”
The definition of fanatic is “a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, especially for an extreme religious or political cause”. While I wholeheartedly welcome considered campaigning on the streets of the UK – there is no place whatsoever for the kind of behaviour which seeks to wreak the maximum amount of disruption on the public, wantonly causes criminal damage to property, incites violence and advocates mob rule.
Sadly, the tough justice that has been applied to Hallam and Co has not been meted out to others – which is neither fair nor acceptable. Why, for instance, was more not done to stop the scenes we witnessed during the election when, for instance, former Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth was bullied, harassed and intimidated as he campaigned in Leicester? At one point, the politician was chased down the street and forced to seek refuge in a vicarage by members of The Muslim Vote campaign, which last month warned: “This is just the beginning.” Beginning of what, exactly?
Various exposés have revealed that the group supported unsuccessful candidates who spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, was accused of supporting intimidatory tactics online against candidates it opposed and denounced Muslims who canvassed for Labour as “parasites”. Sorry, but that is simply not the way we do democracy in this country.
The marches, the eco-extremism, the election incidents, and now these anti-police protesters are threatening to cause “havoc” if they don’t get their way. We cannot let them. If the mob thinks it can win, it will continue. Then there is no law at all.