Mick Hartley

Given Rod Liddle's chosen vocation as something of a shit-stirrer against liberal pieties – tongue-in-cheek but calculatedly provocative – this piece in today's Sunday Times is a surprisingly (to me) fine piece of reporting. He goes back to his home town of Middlesborough after the riots:

The march was predicated upon a falsehood which everyone taking part knew was a falsehood. But that didn’t seem to matter, so long as they got a dust-up with the Old Bill and the chance to put through the windows of a few “Muslim” houses. Such as the front window belonging to Theophilus Abiagom, who isn’t a Muslim. He’d been dozing on the sofa with his little son when the rock came hurtling through the glass, not long after lunchtime last Sunday in Middlesbrough.

So a march to punish Muslims for the killing of three little girls in Southport, in which the subject is not a Muslim but a youth born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents, chose as one of its first victims a bloke who also wasn’t a Muslim. You get the feeling the demonstrators weren’t hugely picky about who got a bloody nose, or their car torched, or their front door kicked down. Religious affiliation was not copiously vetted: just skin colour.

In the end 400 or so inchoate yobbos, or yobbo fellow travellers, caused mayhem in my home town for reasons which, before the march, were never openly articulated. The total number of arrests for this fun-packed afternoon stands at 43, so far, with more to come. How did this happen in a town which has always been proud of the fact that it was built by immigrant labour (largely Irish, hence our fine Roman Catholic cathedral) and as a port, was long accustomed to living cheek by jowl with people from beyond our continent?

The grammatically remiss call to arms, festooned with emojis, came to a select group of likely adherents via Facebook, as indeed it had done at Hartlepool and Sunderland and Southport. These riots, or protests, were choreographed — one day Hartlepool, the next Sunderland and then Middlesbrough (which drew the short straw of Sunday afternoon). Durham was meant to be next but nobody turned up — a very different demographic.

The post was, of course, all in block capitals: “MORE AND MORE ATROCITIES HAPPENING EVERY WEEK … IT IS ABOUT TIME TO SHOW WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH AND WE WILL NOT ROLL OVER AND LET OUR COUNTRY BECOME A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY … STAND UP AND BE COUNTED … TIME TO PUT THE GREAT BACK IN BRITAIN.”

And yet in this long, self-pitying screed, what exactly the writer was complaining about was never actually explained: you want bad things to stop happening? Is that it? Maybe the writer didn’t actually know what they wanted, or simply feared his post would be spiked by Facebook if he wrote, “Come on, let’s beat up some foreigners”.

The local sender was a man who, according to his previous Facebook posts, had recently received a 150-hour community service order and a ban from all football grounds in England and Wales for three to five years. “Looks like I will be at a few more [Glasgow] Rangers games this season,” he added, with some pride.

You cannot overstate the involvement of football hooligans with these riots — and remember, the English Defence League was originally a convocation of balding, overweight football “supporters” clad in Stone Island jackets and bearing a grudge. So it was in Middlesbrough, as the crew stamped its way up Linthorpe Road singing “Tees, Tees, Teessiders” as if they were still in the Red Faction (Boro Ultras) quadrant of the Riverside stadium cheering on Middlesbrough FC.

It did not take long to get nasty, not least when they turned into frowsy, down-at-heel Parliament Road, which is home to a large Muslim community. Bricks were thrown, cars were trashed, windows broken. There was a battle with the local coppers and about one tenth of the crowd was arrested. They met with resistance from the local Muslims, too, who were also guilty of a certain vicious overreach. Gangs of young Asian lads armed with crowbars and the like went searching for anyone who looked a bit white and when they found them, beat them up….

Meanwhile the white marchers — and, it has to be said, they were all white — were bricking windows, vandalising cars and smashing up local Asian groceries, such as the corner shop owned by 54-year-old Parvez Akhtar, who works a 72-hour week. There are reports too that the peaceful marchers (as that original Facebook post insisted they would surely be) also looted that not notably Islamic institution, Tesco.

The reaction of most Middlesbrough folk was one of revulsion at the mayhem, which was put down to sheer thuggery, but also a certain realisation that this sort of confrontation had been brewing for an awfully long time — perhaps as far back as 2001 when, after the riots in Oldham and Bradford, a government inquiry suggested that Middlesbrough was named as a “future tension point”.

Andy Preston, the leftish, independent former mayor of Middlesbrough told me that he thought “Ninety per cent of the damage is being done by white British youths seeking thrills and adrenaline … they were indiscriminately smashing windows and causing chaos, not driven by ideology or genuine rage, but by a desire for excitement.” Preston added that he thought the far right had been “emboldened” and conceded that “normal people” felt they were not listened to when they raised concerns about immigration….

Meanwhile, Yasmin Khan is working from home right now and maybe for the foreseeable future. The charity she runs for victims of domestic violence is closed. She says she dare not go outside. She is frightened to park her car in case it gets set alight. Her young niece was spat at in the street.

“I don’t feel safe,” she told me. “I am absolutely on edge. We’re all working from home. People have been racially abused, women and girls. And I think this has been festering for a really long time. I never thought in my lifetime we would see this again.” Grasping towards a solution she blames the rise of the far right and the incendiary language used by “mainstream politicians” — I think she means the Tories and Nigel Farage. We need to use a different language, she says, and we ought to be part of the conversation….

There was never much racial discord in Middlesbrough. Not when I was growing up. But there has been an influx which has unbalanced the town, much as it has unbalanced similarly impoverished northern post-industrial redoubts. Its cheap housing — you can still buy a four-bed terrace in Middlesbrough for around £60,000 — has made it a useful dumping ground for successive governments….

But it is not all about racial identity and nationalism, or even perhaps mainly. While parts of Teesside thrive, Middlesbrough has been left behind. Its once bustling centre is close to moribund: nobody goes there any more.

It still suffers from the appalling depredations of the recession occasioned by the Conservative government in the 1980s — and by the architectural vandalism of the Labour councils at the same time. Ugly concrete flyovers to carry the A66 westward brutally bisect Middlesbrough and the giant out-of-town shopping centres have ripped the heart out of the commercial district.

The centre cannot hold because there is no longer a centre, no sense of a Middlesbrough community. Just two groups of people from different cultures. The impoverished whites who believe in a vision of our country which the British establishment now disdains and feels embarrassed about, and the Asians who cling to their own culture because in truth nobody ever tried to persuade them to adopt our own.