The far right riots, Starmer’s response, and the role of Elon Musk

This episode of The News Agents is a helpful take on the recent rioting, the far right, policing, disinformation, and more.

And I thought this comment on the two-tier policing accusation was apt:

“…this accusation of like two-tier policing, one of the things that’s come out in the last 24 hours is to say, oh well, the police were much gentler when looking at what was happening with the Gaza protests over the course of the last year or so.

It’s like, hello, this is sort of crazy critique. Yes, some of the things that were said on those Gaza protests were distasteful. They were racist, they were anti-Semitic, anti-Semitic tropes.

They reported that on that at the time. Sometimes, they were intimidating to Jewish people who were there. But they weren’t going lot around orchestrating that level of violence and disorder, and they weren’t going around burning down shoe zones.

These were largely peaceful by comparison. So yeah, there’s two-tier policing in the sense that different sorts of protests and if different sorts of crimes are committed, have different sorts of responses from the police. That is kind of how justice and the law works.

You do different sorts of things, you get treated differently by the police.”

Emphasis mine.