This is the first time I’ve seen all my books stacked together – with a couple of duplicates, but minus a few later editions. I brought them back with me to Stockholm last month.
It occurs to me that having written all these books (and a few articles) on refugees, colonialism, the police and British ‘national identity’, I wonder why I’ve not been approached by the media for my views on the present traumatic situation in British cities, when those views might surely be of interest and even relevance?
But then the fairly distant past – which is where I’ve lived all my professional life – is rarely of interest to politicians, journalists and rioters, except to be simplified, distorted and cherry-picked for propagandistic reasons; leaving us more discriminating ‘experts’, as Michael Gove once sneeringly dismissed us, sobbing impotently on the margins of public life.
I’m following the news coming from my English home town from afar, and with increasing sorrow and anger; but also encouraged by the fact, as reported, that the pro-refugee counter-demonstrations far outnumber the neo-Fascist ones. The Ukrainians I’m sheltering in my Hull house tell me they are safe, but not daring to venture into the city centre.
More on this (I hope) later.
Porter’s Pensées 
Well, this is awkward, isn’t it? Here I am, writing an anonymous post.
I share your concern at recent events in the UK. Clearly Britain is not immune to the virus of the far right, supposedly confined to the continental mainland. The only silver lining I can see is that maybe the stench will steer any wavering Tories away from the Braverman-Farage approach to reshaping the British right.
For what it’s worth, an article in Saturday’s “Times” traces the source of the rumour that a Muslim asylum-seeker was responsible for the attack back to a British woman who had been anti-lockdown and anti-net zero, amplified by a male Polish tour guide concerned about migration and Sharia Law, plus a male British pro-tobacco activist and former Conservative council candidate, as well as a Russian-linked website. The three individuals did not post anonymously.
In addition, Al Jazeera has noted that Nigel Farage and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon exploited the lack of information being issued by the authorities in order to sow suspicion. The very precautions that the police take to avoid Islamophobia are now being portrayed as evidence that the truth is being withheld. In such cases governments need to help the truth to put its boots on faster, and to put out as much information as they legally can as quickly as they can.
Farage seems to have been inspired by the examples of Trump and Henry II to insinuate what he wants rather than risk falling the wrong side of the law. To me the root cause of the problem is not anonymity (which has pluses and minuses which I won’t digress into here) but the denial by the platforms that they are in fact publishers and bear the ultimate liability for their content. I think Stanley Baldwin might have accused them of wielding power without responsibility. Fix that problem and I think you will suddenly have “moderation in everything” – in both senses of the word.
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