Did Essex Police ‘bus in’ counter-protesters?

Another in the series of interchangeable riots

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Earlier this week on Newsnight, Neil Hudson MP told the programme that "'We are going to have a summer of riots. You can just feel it. It is a tinderbox."

Far from being a narrative limited to Tory MPs worried about riots in their constituencies – or simply spending too much time online – it’s been repeated by the Prime Minister, who recently told a Cabinet meeting that Labour must repair Britain’s ‘social fabric’ if they are to avoid a summer of riots similar to those in Southport, whose one-year anniversary is fast approaching.

To paraphrase Joyce, the barometer of Britain’s emotional nature is set for a spell of riot. Following on from the riots in Ballymena, there have been protests in Epping, likewise started by reports that a migrant sexually assaulted a local girl.

Since Southport, authorities have struggled to keep control of events on the ground. In Epping, they have deployed a new style of community activist policing, with videos surfacing of Essex Police bussing in counter-protesters.

This will, of course, exacerbate the other problem the police face in tackling these riots; the perception of two-tier policing. In riots in Harehills is Leeds last year, police withdrew from the area entirely, whilst rioters in Southport were policed more like those in Epping; with force. As the riot in Harehills was an isolated incident in a Roma community, the presence of police may have added fuel to the fire of an event that was unlikely to spread. But the riots in Southport, Epping and Ballymena may be replicated anywhere where there is a migrant hotel and people upset about mass migration; each of these is a domino that cannot be allowed to fall.

That’s because these conditions are replicated in an ever-increasingly large swathe of the nation, both geographically and demographically. A large concern from the police is doubtless that these protests are locally organised, often by local residents who are simply concerned for their safety, rather than by a figure with a distinct political agenda. It would make for awkward perceptions were protests of this kind to be policed this heavily, but the domino still cannot be allowed to fall.

Adding counter-protesters is another weapon in the arsenal of police looking to keep a lid on these local tensions, by facilitating a counter-narrative. In Southport – and indeed Epping, before counter protesters arrived – protesters regularly made the claim that the police were protecting attackers. By adding in a counter-element, police can claim they are trying to prevent tensions between two groups from overspilling, whilst also allowing the counter-group to portray the original protesters as far-right or racist, which then gives the police more leeway to treat them with greater force.

It is likely that this is the riot that will come to define Britain in the near future; not any single one, but a series of interchangeable riots in different places with the same cause, that simply seem to roll on. But, if 20 years of trying to manage concerns about immigration away by doing anything other than reduce immigration should teach us anything, it is that only reducing immigration will reduce tensions.