Sir Keir Starmer in the Downing Street rose garden, 27 August 2024
As Rousseau didn’t put it: ‘Man is born in the wild and everywhere he gathers into tribes’. Tribes are essentially polities, political collectives, which variously merge, split, fight each other, conquer and absorb. And for ‘tribes’ the most successful modern formation is the nation state, the political collective which is the way in which European man in particular has organised himself over the last few centuries. Clearly nobody could suggest that they are flawless institutions. Within them elites establish themselves, and invariably ensure that they are protected from greatest rigours of their laws while snaffling a disproportionate share of any cake. Competition between them has been protracted and not infrequently bloody. Nevertheless, they are how we gather together, and despite sundry efforts being made no better or more successful way to define and govern men and women has yet to emerge. The European Union is such an effort, but for all its contribution to peace and friendship its sclerotic economic growth, failure to defend its borders and widening internal divisions do not augur well for its future. The people of one of its largest component nations recently came to a majority decision to leave, and it now appears at least possible that their example will be followed by those of other nations; Euroscepticism may not be dominant anywhere but it is present – and growing – in many countries.
So what is it that holds a nation state together? A good place to start is with the French Orientalist Ernest Renan’s observation: ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.’ [My italics.] The nation, like the tribe, needs a myth or two. While national foundation myths do exist – the most obvious being the American Revolution – they scarcely have the neatness and precision of tribal myths, of a people arising out of a rock, a waterfall or an egg. Britain’s are probably more than usually untidy, and should be seen as a collection of reinforcing myths, from which her people interpret history in their own way, and make a shape of it that makes sense to them, and makes them, if not necessarily heroes at least the ‘good guys’ that others cannot either emulate or easily join. In recent years our myths have tended to focus on World War II. In 1939-45 our forefathers, many will have it, fought for democracy. I really cannot buy into that. While there was broad awareness that Hitler and the Nazis were an unpleasant mob the conscripted squaddies who groused and grumbled across swathes of Europe, North Africa and Asia were not some sort twentieth century refashioning of the New Model Army. Come to that, there were doubtless many among that army’s troopers who weren’t quite so familiar with the Soldiers’ Catechisms as Cromwell and Rainsborough. Mythology was every bit as important in the seventeenth century as it is today.
It was the belated realisation that many – probably a large majority – of the British tribe actually believed that the Battle of Britain saved the country from a successful German invasion in 1940 that led me to return to the study of history, and ultimately to publishing my book, which ended up focusing on the national tribe’s delusional faith in the omniscience of the bombing aeroplane, which infected its psyche in the 1930s. So my exploration of one tribal myth led me to expound an earlier, now largely forgotten belief which it could be said to have superseded.
I first discovered Renan’s valuable aphorism in the course of my researches, in Linda Colley’s book about the history of British tribalism and its mythologies: Britons, Forging the Nation 1707-1837. And by a delicious irony, after quoting Renan, Colley immediately scores an own goal:
‘When the Germans drove the British expeditionary army back through France in 1940, for instance, and the survivors were rescued in only a haphazard and partial fashion by flotillas of brave, civilian boats, this near-fiasco was speedily converted by the British themselves into an auspicious deliverance.’[1]
Aside from the pedantic point that – despite what some sailors are prone to believe – boats are inanimate and therefore cannot be ‘brave’, the evacuation from Dunkirk, Operation Dynamo, was the work of the largest navy in the world. While civilian vessels were requisitioned and utilised most of the soldiers were carried in warships. It was ‘partial’, but to describe it as ‘haphazard’ could be read as insulting to its commander, Admiral Bertram Ramsay, and to his staff and subordinates. They were professionals who knew what they had to do. Colley herself, it seems, had fallen, hook, line and sinker, for one of the national tribe’s reinforcing myths. Irony heaps on irony as the reader realises that she might as well have been quoting directly from the work of a master storyteller, in the shape of J B Priestley’s Postscript talk of 5 June 1940. It was that broadcast, more even than Churchill’s leadership, which established the Dunkirk myth in the national psyche. It is well worth listening to today. It is a eulogy to the coastal pleasure boats, almost all of them paddle steamers, which plied their trade along Britain’s coasts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Priestley especially singled out ‘the good ship Gracie Fields’, which was used by the navy as a minesweeper before being utilised for Dynamo. In his talk Priestley didn’t mention the nerve-wracking tedium of minesweeping, nor did he make the historian’s blunder of explaining that the Gracie Fields and her sisters were only man-made tools. He brought them to life and endowed them with human emotions. The real heroes of Dunkirk, the sailors who manned the ships and risked their lives, went unnoticed.
So much for national mythology. The nation state, as a coherent tribe, needs its myths but within it there are many sub-tribes, and indeed sub-tribes of sub-tribes, and they too need their own individual, reinforcing, myths. Such tribes are how we locate ourselves within society. Class, religion, ethnicity, education and location all play their part in fixing our own ideas of ourselves in our own minds. It would be tedious, not to mention futile, to attempt to go into a great deal of detail. Similarly, while it may be possible to pick out the particular strands of experience and belief that makes oneself who one is, it really isn’t possible to do it for even our closest friends and acquaintances. We are all of us individuals. We are members of collectives, of tribes, but our identification as members of our tribes only goes so far. Nevertheless, despite our manifold differences, the people of a successful national tribe will agree on enough, even if we don’t all of us have to cling to every identifying myth. Right now in Britain we are losing that sense of collective identification. The outward, obvious, cause is excessive immigration but underlying that there is a deeper malaise: it is that the elite, the establishment, that amorphous body that snaffles more than its fair share of the cake, is far too big. It has grown fat and bloated. It embraces very nearly every Westminster politician, the civil service, all sorts of state agencies, the established media, the leadership of universities and the largest charities. It is replete with people who only talk to, and listen to, each other; people who have no awareness of life on the outside.
Given that any national society is comprised of many different, overlapping, tribes it is only natural, albeit regrettable, that they are policed differently by the forces of ‘law and order’. Different approaches are applied to different tribes and sub-tribes. Policing a community, ‘without fear or favour’, sounds appropriately high-minded but the reality has always been different. It has had to be for good civil order to be maintained. To start with Britain’s police have traditionally been recruited from the working and the lower middle classes. Inspector Morse, the opera loving Oxford graduate, is scarcely more true to real life than Bilbo Baggins. Policing cities has always been different to policing rural communities. An effective policeman always needs to know his community and he has to be prepared to turn a blind eye to some minor infringements of the law if he wants to keep the local peace and be that bit more likely to learn about something serious happening. One consequence is that there will be small injustices, but they are to be preferred to lawlessness. It is an approach that requires stability, both in the police force and the community which it serves and protects.
But now, because of mass immigration, stability has been lost in far too many places and, in consequence, we have blatant ‘two tier policing’. The reality isn’t so much ‘two tier’ as multi-tier.
‘. . . rumours of a far right protest in Birmingham . . . Earlier, a community activist showed me a WhatsApp group with over a thousand members wanting to stand up to racist mobs. “Hopefully the police will take care of us. But if they don’t, we will all obviously be willing to take care of ourselves.”’
What subsequently happened, as the report went on to show, was that a large number of vigilantes, some of them armed, took over local streets and even set up road blocks. Some later chased the Sky News team out of the area – who they can hardly have taken for a ‘racist mob’. The rumoured ‘far right protest’ did not materialise. The police were apparently present but only standing by.
Troubling as that report was the explanation was worse. In an interview with Sky News Superintendent Emlyn Richards of West Midlands Police claimed that the police operation had been a success. He told a reporter that it had been ‘intelligence led’:
‘We have really strong business and community relations . . . we had the opportunity to meet with community leaders . . . to kind of understand the style of policing we needed to deliver . . . so our policing response was commensurate to that intelligence . . .’
So it seems that a senior police officer met with the sort of ‘activist’ who Sky News interviewed and between them they agreed to leave ‘policing’ the streets to vigilantes. So much for intelligence led policing in Birmingham where, apart from other considerations, it appears that the force’s intelligence was seriously lacking: there was no ‘far right protest’. Just how far from being single tier West Midlands Police are is illustrated by the case of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, recently awarded £13,000 damages for wrongful arrest. Her offence: ‘silent prayer’ or, in old money, Thoughtcrime.
I cannot imagine either tier being deployed in my own home area. Were rumours to spread of a protest, whether ‘far right’ or any other ideology I expect that the majority of the locals would either toddle along to see what was going on or ignore it. If trouble and disorder broke out they would expect the police to deal with it appropriately. The police arranging with community leaders for the streets to be patrolled by vigilantes would be a sign of law and order breaking down. People would want to move out.
A very different tier was used in Harehills, Leeds, on 18 July.
On that day four children were taken into care by social workers, backed up by the police. That provoked a riot which continued for several hours. In response the police withdrew altogether, hoping that it would burn itself out in the fullness of time. Over a million pounds worth of damage was done. So, on that occasion they weren’t liaising with community leaders or agreeing to vigilantes patrolling the streets. Rather, they abandoned them to criminal elements. Thankfully, the riot ended and the police re-entered the area on the following day. Concerned for their well-being on an extremely hot day, a local resident, Nicola Wilcox, went out to offer them some refreshment.
She was later interviewed for TalkTV by Isabel Oakeshott.
The officers she spoke to were anything but grateful. Rather than simply accepting her gift, or politely declining, they arrested her. She was then held in police custody overnight, charged with a public order offence, and released. Oakeshott’s interpretation of the lady’s experience is every bit as telling as her own account. It can only be the case that unlike Superintendent Richards the senior officers hadn’t even any intelligence to guide them: if Harehills is controlled it is by unknown community leaders. Nicola Wilcox was charged by the police to bump up their statistics and help make it appear that they’re in control. She should be warned.
My purpose, in drawing attention to these different tiers of policing is not to criticise individual police officers, certainly not junior officers on the front line. Even their seniors are really victims, handed an impossible task by politicians who cannot, or will not, accept that British society cannot survive the present rate of immigration. Civil policing, as long and generally successfully practised in Britain, necessitates that the police have their roots in the community. As and when the roots are weak it is forced to fall back on the kind of ‘intelligence led’ approach that Superintendent Richards boasted about: a very poor substitute for the real thing. But perhaps that is to be preferred to what happened in Harehills on 18 July.
The recent spate of disturbances were a visceral, unthinking, response to an appalling crime committed on 29 July. There was no rationality behind them. Doubtless the hardcore of the rioters are simply louts, the sort of person who is generally characterised as a ‘football hooligan’; which is scarcely fair to football. The sort who has always revelled in violent disorder and always will. They, however, were given their opportunity to cause mayhem by a larger number of demonstrators. The two categories obviously overlap but it is important to attempt a distinction. The one is criminal, the other those who – in our democracy – feel that their voices are not being heard: that they are disenfranchised.
Sympathetic commentators tend to refer to them as ‘white working class’. Neither term is strictly correct. The English working class is predominantly white, but it is far from being as racially homogenous as it was at the time of the Bristol Bus Strike. Furthermore, many are unemployed, or at least under-employed. Many live in deprived areas, where the opportunities for secure, remunerative, employment are limited. The sort of areas into which large swathes of recent immigrants, legal and illegal, flow. The sort of areas where the police take pride in their ‘really strong business and community relations’, and liaise closely with ‘community leaders’.
It was an accident of history that the disturbances happened so soon after a general election and change of government. If Rishi Sunak had still been Prime Minister all the rioting – and the different tiers of policing, dependent as they so clearly are on differing ethnicity and faith demographics – would have played out much the same. Although of different political parties, Sunak and Keir Starmer have much in common. Both had hard-working, middle class, family backgrounds; both men’s parents valued education. Both are now firmly located in the heart of the elite, the establishment. Neither shows the least sign of even trying to comprehend what life is like for the majority who are outside that charmed circle. Like most leading politicians their contacts with ‘ordinary people’ are pre-planned and choreographed for a television audience.
Both bear some responsibility for Britain’s shambolic excuse for an immigration policy, Sunak through inertia, Starmer ideology. Why should they care about the damage it is doing? For the elite it has brought little but good. They are property owners, and property has soared in value. The cost of goods and services that depend on unskilled and semi-skilled labour have been held in check. Above all, championing even illegal immigration has recently been fashionable, and given them opportunity for virtue signalling. The surging numbers of immigrants who have congregated in poorer areas, de-stabilising already deprived communities, scarcely troubles them. No rumoured incursion by outsiders has persuaded their local police ‘to meet with community leaders’ rather than uphold law and order.
While Sunak certainly wouldn’t have acknowledged that the root cause of the riots was excessive immigration it is impossible to imagine him responding as Starmer has done. He wouldn’t have called for 24 hour courts and exemplary sentences but rather dithered behind a fog of platitudinous soundbites. If asked about two tier policing he would have blustered and obfuscated, side-stepping the issue. Openly denying it takes unusual chutzpah.
Starmer has that unusual chutzpah. He seems wholly lacking in self-awareness. As is well known, in 2020 he ‘took the knee’ to the BLM demonstrators, which leaves him without a leg to stand on on the morality of rioting. He wants to criminalise ‘Islamophobia’ – once he manages to define it – but he has no intention of defending Christianity or other faiths. While there may be logic in means testing winter fuel payments to do it at the same time as pushing up heating costs to aid the green energy lobby – hardly the most deprived part of the national community – is bizarre. Furthermore, given that an Act of Parliament was passed in 2013 specifically to protect his generous public sector pension on that issue, at least, he lives in a veritable Crystal Palace rather than a common or garden greenhouse. Obviously there is nothing unusual in hypocrisy. It is close to being an essential tool of the aspirant politician, but Starmer’s hypocrisy is shameless.
Much more telling than his hypocrisy, however, was his moment of honesty. When, in his initial response to the Southport riot Starmer announced his crackdown he blamed the far right: ‘. . . the immediate challenge which is clearly driven by far right hatred . . .’ The correspondents then queued up to ask him supportive questions, frequently referencing the far right. Not one asked what he meant by far right.
Far right is a term of – idle and unthinking – abuse that has become so ubiquitous in British political discourse that it is fast losing its sting. When Starmer used it to describe the demonstrators and, by implication at least, the public mood behind them, he was doubtless referring to what he sees as a small minority who he thinks he can isolate and demonise: people who do not share his world view. But it cannot be done with a large minority, such as the four million who voted Reform at the last election. Still less can it be done with a majority; those who didn’t vote Labour, or those who believe that immigration is too high. So they are just going to shrug their shoulders, and say: ‘okay, if objecting to excessive immigration make me far right, I’m far right’. Starmer’s ‘far right’ is equivalent to Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables or Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’. It demonstrates nothing so clearly as how hopelessly he is out of touch with public opinion. Shutting down its public expression, as he seems to intend, will not bring anybody onside.
In a speech on 27 August Starmer observed ‘deep rot’ in the body politic:
‘. . . these riots didn’t happen in a vacuum. They exposed the state of our country. Revealed a deeply unhealthy society. The cracks in our foundations laid bare – Weakened by a decade of division and decline.’
There is certainly division in British society. The overriding, critical, one isn’t between ‘left’ and ‘right’, tired political clichés that obscure more than they reveal. It is between the elite and the rest, the people who have little in common with each other apart from being outsiders. Just about the only thing that can be said of them is that they are still members of a national tribe, diverse and damaged as it now is. The elite prefer international bodies – the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, the World Economic Forum – which they elevate over national mythology and symbolism. Not for them stirring tales of ‘brave, civilian boats’ or ‘the Few’. Their instinct is to undermine even the most benign residues of national pride, to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. Starmer, who has entered office as if he believes that his huge majority is down to the popularity of his values, rather than exasperation with the Tories and the quirks of the British electoral system, is a personification of elite values and elite snobbery. If he is intent on anything it is further dividing, rather than uniting, the national tribe.
[1] Linda Colley. Britons, Forging the Nation 1707-1837, p 30.
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Neil Datson is the author of The British Air Power Delusion 1906-1941, the first history to explain and detail why and how the establishment of the Royal Air Force in 1918 weakened, rather than strengthened, Britain's defence capabilities.