Poisonous diatribes by Tommy Robinson play into the arms of the Left

Hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets, more than 300 dead, including 14 police officers, the Prime Minister fleeing the country. Now that’s what I call a riot.

Not here, obviously, but in Bangladesh where widespread civil disobedience has led to the military forming an interim government. I mention this not in any way to diminish the disgraceful disorder on our own streets over the past week, but to at least provide a degree of perspective.

Next to the bloody uprisings in Bangladesh and elsewhere, the mostly performative confrontations with police across the North of England and elsewhere have been little more than handbags at chucking-out time.

I’ve seen worse outside boozers on the way home from Upton Park after the West Ham/Spurs derby. Most of the so-called ‘Far Right’ activists looked like extras from the football hooligan movie Green Street.

They were there for the beer and the bundle rather than to make any specific political protest. That’s not to discount the very real fears of those menaced by the knuckle-scraping morons who attacked mosques and asylum hotels everywhere from Merseyside to Tamworth, in Staffordshire.

Police were right to condemn the opportunist troublemakers as responsible for a disgusting orgy of racist thuggery.

Four hundred people have been arrested and, as far as I’m concerned, they should have been clubbed like baby seals then dragged before the courts and given exemplary, Just Stop Oil-style, prison sentences. Five years, as a basis for negotiation.

Satisfying to say, that seems to be happening. The prosecutions, that is, not the clubbing, however well deserved.

What sickens me to the pit of my stomach is the way in which the appalling murder of three innocent little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport one week ago has been cynically politicised and exploited, primarily by the sewer of social media and increasingly-irresponsible rolling news channels.

Let’s deal first with the absurd ‘Tommy Robinson’, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the Toytown Oswald Mosley wannabe currently stoking tensions from his sunbed at a five-star hotel in Cyprus.

He has been fuelling unrest with a series of incendiary, inaccurate posts online. Why anyone would take any notice of this incel fantasist is a mystery to me. Nor do I understand why anyone from Elon Musk downwards would give him houseroom. His social media account should have been closed down years ago.

Same goes, I’m afraid, for the former actor Laurence Fox, who should know better but clearly doesn’t. I once had sympathy for Fox, who was effectively and unfairly cancelled by his Left-wing union and his industry over some innocuous remarks about Meghan Markle on the BBC’s Question Time.

Since then, though, he’s become embittered to the point of derangement and gone completely bonkers, not to put too fine a point on it. He has become the kind of crazed conspiracy theorist who makes the original Urban Spaceman, failed goalkeeper and self-styled Son of God David Icke appear sane.

The fabled ‘Far Right’ in Britain consists of a few skinheads above a chip shop in Luton and a Buster Bloodvessel lookalike from Blackpool with a swastika tattoo above his left buttock. But there are just about enough of them to take ‘Tommy Robinson’ and the former Det Sergeant Hathaway from ITV’s Lewis seriously.

What they seem incapable of grasping is that their race-baiting, rabble-rousing, poison-peddling diatribes only serve to play into the hands of their opponents on the ‘anti-racist’ Left, who are emboldened and amplified by their gormless cheerleaders among the Boys In The Bubble and the 24-news brigade.

If you turned on Sky, which these days is ten times worse than the BBC, you will have been treated to a few seconds footage of a fat bloke in a Union flag shouting at a copper on a constant loop, while a few imbeciles mill about in the background swigging from cans of Special Brew. Most of them are spectators, especially the women with the council-house facelifts and a couple of snotty kids in a clapped out Mothercare stroller.

This was, some young reporter straight out of a media studies course informed us, conclusive evidence of the ‘Far Right’ threat to democracy. The BBC’s ridiculous ‘Verify’ service has ‘Far Right’ on every autocue, complete with Two Ronnies of Doom-style graphs to back it up.

They’ve even tried to drag Nigel Farage in to it, accusing him of stirring up the violence.

What Farage actually did – I saw it live – was ask some perfectly legitimate questions about the perpetrator of the Southport murders, which the police were unwilling to address.

Farage speaks for four million voters, who ended up with just five MPs. He is absolutely entitled to demand accurate information on behalf of the paying public, especially as the authorities are reluctant to divulge anything about alleged terrorist incidents, such as the stabbing of an Army officer in Kent two weeks ago.

We are considered too stupid and volatile to be trusted with the true facts. Nothing to see here, move along. That vacuum is filled by the pernicious drivel peddled by ‘Tommy Robinson’ and Sgt Hathaway, with inevitable consequences.

The Government, too, shamefully played up the ‘Far Right’ narrative, shifting the attention from the real tragedy – the senseless slaughter of three young girls.

The Prime Minister went into full Mr Cholmondley-Warner mode, speaking to us like someone from a Harry Enfield spoof of a 1930s public information film. The real issue here was the ‘Far Right’.

Pixie Balls-Cooper, the new Home Secretary, had no doubt who was to blame. It was the ‘Far Right’. Never mind that three young girls had been stabbed to death, the problem was the ‘Far Right’. Labour is now gearing up to introduce a new catch-all crime of ‘Islamophobia’ to clamp down on the ‘Far Right’.

The police, too, continue to insist, despite all the evidence and a catalogue of Islamist atrocities, that the fastest growing threat to Britain’s security is the ‘Far Right’.

Perhaps that explains why Met Commissioner ‘Two-tier’ Rowley was in such a foul mood when he stomped out of Cobra yesterday, throwing a reporter’s microphone onto the floor. He’d obviously had an earful from Pixie.

Let’s get one thing straight. The attacks on mosques and asylum hotels were appalling. Those responsible should be subjected to the full force of the law.

But who was it who thought it was a good idea to billet hundreds of young foreign men who entered the country illegally in Holiday Inns the length and breadth of Britain?

Step forward Pixie Balls-Cooper, who favours open borders and once promised to put up Syrian asylum seekers in her own home, then didn’t. Her first act as Home Sec was to rip up the Rwanda deal and she will almost certainly grant an amnesty to 90,000 illegals already here. Rather than take responsibility, she chose to blame the ‘Far Right’ backlash.

No one is excusing those who took part in the series of disturbances over the past week. But nor is any politician, Farage aside, addressing the underlying issues behind the sense of unrest and disillusion.

The metropolitan-led Labour Party – the so-called ‘workers’ party – gives the impression that it holds the working classes in contempt. Starmer and Pixie, in particular, seem to actively dislike the country they have been elected (by just a fifth of those eligible to vote) to lead.

They even are apparently prepared to exploit the reaction to the killing of three young girls to push through the changes they want. The way things are heading, I predict these riots won’t be the last.

After previous riots, governments set up inquiries into policing and pumped a small fortune into Liverpool. They scrapped the poll tax. They went along with renaming streets, toppling statues and bowdlerising museum exhibits as they took the knee to Black Lives Matter.

But after the past week, does anyone seriously think Starmer is going to do anything about mass immigration to appease the ‘Far Right’? Dream on, baby.

Meanwhile, a former SNP leader called at the weekend for the Army to be sent in to quell the riots.

Maybe Britain’s getting more like Bangladesh than we feared.