A report by UK MPs into the policing of last summer’s riots claims to have found no evidence of ‘two-tier policing’. What’s more, according to the Home Affairs Select Committee, such claims are ‘baseless’, ‘unsubstantiated’ and ‘disgraceful’.
Accusations of two-tier policing have clearly touched a nerve with the British establishment. In the wake of the Southport riots, when a Sky News reporter asked Mark Rowley, Britain’s most-senior police officer, if he would ‘end two-tier policing’, Rowley grabbed the mic from the journalist’s hand and dropped it on the ground. He later dismissed claims of two-tier policing as ‘complete nonsense’. In January, a leaked report from the Home Office went as far as to suggest that fears about a two-tier justice system were an example of a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’.
These furious denials tell their own story. In truth, it is impossible to argue in good faith that identity politics has not infected policing, or that the justice system treats all offenders equally regardless of their background or beliefs. Police have become so obsessed with the maintenance of ‘race relations’, with trying to keep what they see as the multicultural peace, that this often comes at the expense of enforcing the law equally.
The Home Affairs Committee report relies on a strawman argument to wave away the accusations of two-tier policing. It says that ‘those participating in disorder’ in the wake of the Southport murders ‘were not policed more strongly because of their supposed political views but because they were throwing missiles, assaulting police officers and committing arson’. They were rioters, not protesters, in other words.
Of course, no one sensible believes that last summer’s riots were merely peaceful, legitimate protests. As the report reminds us, the rioters menaced mosques, tried to burn down asylum hotels and vandalised minority-owned shops. It was entirely appropriate for this violence to have been met with a firm policing response.
What MPs neglect to mention is how the police’s handling of the post-Southport disorder compares with their handling of other riots. In fact, we only have to look at a different riot, just two weeks before the Southport disorder, to see an entirely different policing response.
In July 2024, a riot erupted in Harehills, a diverse suburb of Leeds. This was sparked when social services attempted to take a Roma child into care. Yet, while the police were rightly out in force after Southport to quell the violence and disorder, in Harehills, the police simply ran away. Rioters overturned a police car, set fire to a bus and wreaked havoc for the rest of the evening, and the police did nothing to stop them. The police essentially allowed the rioters to tire themselves out.
Strikingly, the day after the Harehills unrest, Leeds City Council issued a joint statement with ‘representatives of the Roma community’, praising their contribution to the ‘diversity and richness’ of the area. Could this have been a hint that the identity of the rioters played a role in the authorities’ hands-off response? That a misguided concern about ‘race relations’, or fear of further unrest, got in the way of keeping all of the residents of Harehills safe?
It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination. Differential treatment is an unpleasant but inevitable outgrowth of Britain’s system of multiculturalism. From the late 1980s onwards, the modern British state has treated different ethnic and religious groups as distinct blocs. Self-appointed ‘community leaders’ are called upon to ‘represent’ these groups. And they can often have a great deal of sway over policy in the police and in local councils. Two-tier policing is the obvious result.
We saw this grim system in action in Birmingham, just after the Southport riots. Masked, armed Muslim men, supposedly protecting their communities from right-wing rioters, were essentially allowed to run amok around Bordesley Green. An LBC journalist was chased away with a metal poll. A Sky News broadcast van had its tires slashed. An innocent man was badly beaten outside a pub, leaving him with a lacerated liver. Incredibly, the police knew that large crowds were planning to gather there, but they decided not to show up or intervene.
The next day, Emlyn Richards of West Midlands Police explained why. Speaking to Sky News, he said: ‘We had the opportunity to meet with community leaders… to understand the style of policing that we needed to deliver.’ He then added that the ‘community’ (ie, Birmingham’s self-appointed Muslim community leaders) ‘were trying to make sure that [this gathering] was policed within themselves’. So community representatives can just decide how the state should respond to gangs of tooled-up, masked men?
Similarly, around the same time in Stoke-on-Trent, a police-liaison officer, in uniform, was filmed telling a group of Muslim men that if they were carrying weapons, then they should stash them at the mosque. ‘We are not going to arrest anybody’, he assured the crowd. Considering that some of those involved in the Southport disorder were criminalised merely for posting extreme views on social media, this reluctance to arrest armed men is surely two-tier policing in action. Yet you probably won’t be surprised to learn that neither the Bordersley Green unrest nor the Harehills riot get a mention in the Home Affairs Committee report.
Deflections about two-tier policing are particularly outrageous at a time when the grooming gangs scandal has reared into view again. Indeed, it must be the most grotesque example yet of how policing has been warped by supposed concerns about maintaining multicultural harmony.
For decades, the authorities turned a blind eye to gangs of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men as they raped, trafficked, tortured and murdered mostly white, working-class and poor girls. The authorities were often well aware that these unspeakable crimes were going on. A report on the rape gangs in Telford, Shropshire says it was ‘commonly known among police officers, police civilian employees, and the public’ that groups of Asian men were systematically abusing children. But time and again, those in charge of protecting those children refused to intervene – or worse, actively colluded to cover up the crimes – for fears of sparking a race riot.
Tellingly, the police often treated the victims of the rape gangs far more harshly than the rapists themselves. Young women in Rotherham complaining of sexual abuse were ‘threatened with arrest for wasting police time’. A Rotherham girl, known only as Child H, was 11 years old when she first reported her abuse to the police. When a man was later found with explicit pictures of her on his phone, still no action was taken. Then, when she was discovered in a derelict house with a number of men, her tormentors walked free, but she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly.
As just about every inquiry, report and investigation into the rape gangs has shown, the identity of the perpetrators warped the state’s response. Partly, the police, councillors and social workers feared being accused of racism. But their far bigger fear was that being more open about what was happening would stoke a racist backlash among the white working classes. In Rotherham, a senior police officer warned the father of an abused teenager that the town ‘would erupt’ if the rape gangs’ crimes became public knowledge. Alexis Jay’s report into Rotherham talks of broad ‘concern’ among the local authorities ‘that the ethnic element could damage community cohesion’.
‘Damage community cohesion.’ That’s really just a polite way of saying that these girls had to be sacrificed for the good of multiculturalism, and out of fear of what might happen if these evil crimes were talked about openly and investigated fully. This betrays a deep contempt of both white Brits and Pakistani Brits alike. The former are apparently a pogrom in waiting, wont to go on a rampage against Asians in response to the crimes of a depraved few. Meanwhile, Pakistanis are presented as totally uninterested – offended even – by the police pursuing paedophiles operating within their midst.
Two-tier policing is not a myth. It’s the grim reality of life under multiculturalism. Multiculturalism might pose as simply being the same thing as tolerance, diversity, a true melting pot. But, in truth, it means treating groups differently on the basis of race and faith. It means approaching society not as a body of citizens with values and standards in common, but as an assemblage of antagonistic tribes who must be managed. Even if that means turning a blind eye to depraved crimes or corroding the principle of equality before the law.
We really are living in two-tier Britain. It is disgraceful that our rulers still refuse to admit it.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
