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Notes -
Further context on this is that criticism of Two-Tier policing began with the difference in how anti-Lockdown protesters were treated by the police compared to BLM protesters in 2020. To summarise, the handful of arrests at BLM protests were for sporadic violence. Other left-wing omnicause protests went unchallenged. Meanwhile, the smaller and less violent anti-Lockdown protests faced blanket arrests for violating lockdowns, which de jure criminalized all protest but de facto criminalized only anti-Lockdown protests.
There have been a number of smaller incidents over the next few years which further enflamed this criticism. The light-touch treatment of JSO, XR, and other environmentalist protesters who sought to commit vandalism, often getting justified in the mainstream on the basis that "climate emergency" justifies unrestrained criminality, was compared to how government media and politicians treated anti-ULEZ protesters. Another was buffer zones around abortion centres outlawing forms of protest as mild as silently praying.
Then then escalated in 2023, where the Israel-Gaza conflict meant that there were constant protests that, in theory, violated the UK's extremely broad anti-terrorism laws, but were met with milquetoast police response. When a counter-protest to these was organised in November 2023, and met by a violent police response, the charge of two-tier policing escalated to the point where a minister was sacked for criticising the police over it. Further incidents, like police going after a Jewish man for being "Visibly Jewish" near protesters, only made it worse.
Edit: And this all takes place in a context that the police have increasingly failed to police crime in general..
The "moderate" explanation for why these events keep happening is that the police are trying to placate a violent mob over permitting peaceful protesters because their goal is to keep the peace, and keeping the peace takes precedent over fairness even when it means arresting innocent bystanders instead of violent mobs. The lesson some people will take from this is that the most violent group wins. Therefore, they should become more violent so that they become the mob that the police have to placate instead. Unfortunately, this lesson is wrong, because the actual explanation for these events is that being left-wing puts you above the law and being right-wing puts you beneath it.
Today, the counter-protesters and the police will argue that they are standing against racism. They are wrong. For the last 9 months, they have either participated in, or been complicit in, their own forms of racism. Forms that the current British government finds more acceptable to it's tastes
I mean, the riots between Tory-voting Hindus and labour-voting Muslims went mostly unpoliced, didn’t they?
The goal is pulling immigrants into Britain to prop up the economy without doing things that feel bad. You can’t do that when the natives are driving them out. It doesn’t have a lot to do with skin colour or political beliefs- no doubt if these were anti-shithole-parts-of-EU-migration riots, there would be the same response.
The meta for avoiding accountability is 'disparate impact', and the Conservatives has a surplus of Nigerians and Hindus who have decided that playing into the game is a viable strategy. I love the fact that the Tory leadership election is a coterie of brown women leading the pack, and how Labour tried to emphasize the diversity of their leadership lineup with Reeves as the first woman to hold the Chancellor of the Exchequer, when the Tories literally put a hindu man with all great offices held by 'minorities'.
Ultimately though the great gutting of the UK police (and globally most police forces dealing with disparately impactful criminal minorities) and the consequent 2-tier policing evidently visible is due to the Macpherson report and some updated review that hamstrung police forces. That the police likely were not actually hamstrung but were marginally optimized to underpolice instead of overpolice does not change the fact that the macpherson report acts as a useful fallback to let lazy cops off the hook for failing to investigate. No charity is extended to white wrongthinkers, but 'I didn't want to seem racist' is a good enough excuse to let a bomber blow up a concert full of girls or let a teen boy into a childrens school to slaughter kids.
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