04 March 2024 , 20:06
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It is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: stoking anxieties and whipping up the untrue fears of mob rule to attack democracy.
Conflating the UK’s heightened threat level with legitimate protest over the death and destruction in the Middle East. Using opposition to the killing out there to forward tougher policing on protests over here. Claiming the UK is the most successful, multi-ethnic democracy, as PM Rishi Sunak did last week, while his senior colleagues were trashing and demonising the 12,335 people in Rochdale who used the ballot box to install George Galloway.
When Sunak suddenly popped up outside No 10 on Friday, insisting: “I need to speak to you all this evening because this situation has gone on long enough”, I actually believed he’d finally grown a pair. I fleetingly allowed myself to believe he was about to agree that most people – of all races – want to live in harmony. Or that he’d call out the extremists in his own party.
I convinced myself he would concede the Tories have a problem with Islamophobia, allowing himself to condemn more broadly anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism. I briefly expected Sunak to face down the vile rhetoric of his former deputy PM Lee Anderson, his erstwhile Home Secretary Suella Braverman and poisonous Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick.
Instead, Sunak’s word salad, pledging to “crack down” on extremism with new measures, was yet another attempt at misdirection. It inferred the innocent White, Black, Asian and other men, women and children are more troublemakers than troubled enough by the bloodbath in the Middle East to march every week.
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Nobody wants anyone to have to work in a climate of fear and this column will not be making any kind of justification for behaviour that breaks the law. Nor will these pages be anything but supportive of the parliamentarians whose families are not, and should not be, in the crossfire.
We are simply in dangerous territory when ordinary voters who use the democratic process are maligned because the results do not go the way the Government wants. Could it be that last week’s by-election shot across the bows has sent shivers down the collective spines of Tory high command? It certainly looked that way.
In any case, where to even start with the brass neck of MPs who turn Westminster into a circus – remember that SNP vote chaos – but condemn the conduct of the people begging them to call for the killing to stop?
Where to start with the MPs and ministers routinely using incendiary language, inflaming tensions, but who somehow believe THEY are the good guys? How do you even begin to address the politicians and their cheerleaders who throw around racist insults and stereotypes then try to have you believe they are anything but?
Among the many memes quickly created using Sunak outside No 10 last week was one using footage behind him of a strategically placed rhino defecating. As a metaphor for what we were hearing, it spoke volumes.