'Seeds of riot sown hundreds of miles away - and Braverman was silent for hours'

13 February 2023 , 19:01

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Suella Braverman took an age to respond to the riot (Image: Getty Images)

Saturday morning felt as though I’d stepped out of a time machine.

Especially after I watched the appalling scenes in Knowsley, Merseyside: A baying mob surrounding a hotel that is housing people seeking refuge in Britain.

There were signs held aloft reading: ‘This is our city’. Clashes between police and protesters chanting racial slurs. A police van set ablaze.

And, through it all, terrified women and children among the many who were holed up inside the building.

As for Home Secretary Cruella Suella Braverman, there was silence for hours. Likewise her office.

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A burnt police van after a demonstration outside the Suites Hotel in Knowsley where people were protesting against asylum seekers staying at the hotel (PA)

It could easily have been the UK of my parents' era, the Sixties – or mine, the Seventies – when landlords would openly defy the Race Relations Act of 1968 to refuse Black and Brown people housing or work. When Braverman did eventually manage to issue some words, late on Saturday afternoon, it was more of her usual inflammatory rhetoric.

“I condemn the appalling disorder in Knowsley last night,” she tweeted.

“The alleged behaviour of some asylum seekers is never an excuse for violence and intimidation.” Trouble is, it was she who had spurred it on.

The incident which sparked the protests is still being investigated yet it has already been clouded by lies and misinformation which have been spread via social media.

But the seeds had been planted way before what happened last week in Knowsley. They’d been sown hundreds of miles away.

Theresa May cranked up the modern-day hostile environment campaign 10 years ago. Boris Johnson and Braverman maintained it in Westminster and in TV studios around the country.

Even current PM Rishi Sunak has tried to play on people’s fears by demonising human beings who just want to live in safety. Some Labour MPs are not blameless. Especially when they too see migrants as a problem when this country takes in fewer than Germany, France, Spain and Italy, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

While we’re clearing up the numbers, most refugees displaced abroad, 73% in fact, live in countries neighbouring their own. But don’t let those facts get in the way of a good riot.

Bigots will always look to find stories to scare you with. They’ll try to replace our humanity with fear.

They did that with people who looked like me in the Sixties and Seventies.

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And they are doing it again half a century later.

Darren Lewis