The toll of violence was horrifying. Over two days, 50 police officers were injured, eight people were stabbed and one victim was burned with acid or another corrosive liquid.
Three people suffered life-threatening injuries, one a woman of 32, now in a coma, who was with a child.
In total, 334 people were arrested at an event that was frequently – and quite clearly – out of control.
But there is no political condemnation. Why? Because this was not a riot but a ‘festival’ – the Notting Hill Carnival last weekend.
If such chaos and carnage ever flared up during an England football match at Wembley, the reaction in Parliament, on social media and from the police would be explosive. The prosecutions would be swift, the punishments fittingly sharp.
The police made 334 arrests at Notting Hill Carnival over on the bank holiday weekend
Yes, large numbers of arrests have taken place: but you can be sure that Keir Starmer will not deliver a grim-faced speech condemning the ‘thuggery’ on display at this year’s Carnival, as he did when appalling riots flared across Britain in recent weeks following the murder of three young girls in Southport.
There is no question of the event being cancelled and, I fear, little prospect that it may be moved to a fenced-off area such as Hyde Park.
Critics claim that the Notting Hill Carnival is a case of a ‘two-tier’ police and judicial system – one that treats certain groups more or less harshly than others.
It is a phenomenon that many increasingly fear is afflicting Britain – and one that Labour seems all too willing to tolerate.
In some respects, of course, such fears of unequal legal treatment are nothing new: for decades, police in Northern towns shied away from pursuing grooming gangs of Asian men for fear of being called ‘racist’.
But these concerns have undoubtedly accelerated, not least given the police’s strangely differing treatment of various groups of protesters over the summer.
To my mind, however, the most concerning recent case of apparent two-tier justice relates to the now-notorious events at Manchester Airport on July 23.
The full CCTV footage of this disorder, when it emerged, showed armed officers, including two women, jumped on and nearly overpowered, beaten around the head and dragged to the ground following a dispute between passengers and their families.
One female officer was hospitalised with a broken nose. Two brothers of Pakistani heritage were later arrested on charges of affray and assault, and a police officer was suspended.
Yet despite the compelling video evidence, and despite the impressive speed at which Southport rioters have been banged up and handed exemplary sentences in recent days, the men responsible for attacking that female police officer have still not been charged. Why not?
Footage from Manchester Airport last month shows an altercation involving passengers and their families, and police officers
Well, perhaps because, in the hours after this shocking incident took place, a few seconds of footage – edited to remove some of the vital context – was leaked online. This showed a policeman kicking one of the floored suspects in the head in the closing moments of the melee.
On seeing this, the local community erupted in outrage. Protests swelled in Manchester, while an angry crowd of hundreds of Muslim men gathered outside Rochdale police station after 10pm, shouting abuse. Many of the local community claimed, in the absence of any clear evidence, that Greater Manchester Police was ‘racist’.
Well, I have strong doubts this is the case. The Force’s failure to properly pursue grooming-gang cases in the area – frequently involving male perpetrators of Pakistani heritage – amid fears of being called ‘racist’, suggests otherwise.
Cases such as that in Manchester are part of the reason that Elon Musk, among others, has taken to taunting the Prime Minister as ‘two-tier Keir’.
Starmer first attracted this damning nickname four years ago, when he and his deputy Angela Rayner were photographed ‘taking the knee’ in support of the controversial Black Lives Matter [BLM] movement – after demonstrations in its favour had led to 27 police officers being injured.
In one case, a protester flung a bicycle at a police horse, spooking another animal that threw a female officer to the ground. She suffered a collapsed lung, a broken collarbone and fractured ribs.
Dozens of protesters were arrested for offences including violent disorder, public order crimes and assaults on emergency service workers. (Needless to say, the supine broadcast media referred to the BLM protests as ‘largely peaceful’.)
Despite all that, Starmer still felt it was appropriate to be photographed three days later on bended knee in a bizarre gesture of ‘solidarity’.
And he wasn’t alone. Several wrongheaded Met police officers also made the openly political gesture at a BLM demo, which only encouraged protesters to howl their rage at the more principled officers who, in deference to their public role, rightly remained standing.
That was bad enough. But two-tier policing has only worsened in the intervening years. In the recent disorder following the Southport killings, thuggish white protesters faced riot police as well as horses and dogs: one man who live-streamed the disturbances outside a hotel housing asylum seekers was savaged by a police dog ‘in an area of particular tenderness’.
But in the West Midlands, police adopted a softly- softly approach, apparently surrendering their responsibility to maintain law and order to local non-white ‘community leaders’.
On August 5, angry crowds of men, some waving Palestinian flags, gathered outside The Clumsy Swan pub in Yardley, which had been targeted after false rumours had spread online that a far-Right EDL march was planned in the area. A drinker in his 50s was brutally assaulted and left with a lacerated liver.
Later, at a press conference, Superintendent Emlyn Richards admitted his officers had ‘met with business and community leaders prior to that event’ to ‘understand the style of policing that we needed to deliver’.
In other words, unelected and unaccountable Muslim ‘community leaders’ were consulted on how the threat of mob violence should be handled – not, it seems, with much success.
A similar example of police taking their lead from ‘local communities’, rather than applying the law equally to everyone, took place last month in Harehills, Leeds.
Violence had flared after four children from a Roma family were taken into care by social services. After officers were pelted with missiles, a police car was flipped over and a double-decker bus was torched, West Yorkshire Police were filmed running away from the area.
As fires began to spread, a group of more than a dozen local Muslim men stepped in – to their credit – to plead with the rioters. One of them, Nadsy Qurban, suffered burns. Zane Rashid said: ‘We got failed by the police… They left the community to basically rot.’
When police run away from rioters, instead of coming down on them hard whatever their backgrounds, they hand over the streets to the mob.
Well, this can’t go on much longer. Lady Justice, that mythical figure with her scales and sword, wears a blindfold as a sign that everyone is equal under the law.
When her blindfold is removed, and people are treated differently according to arbitrary details such as their race or religion, the very concept of the rule of law is jeopardised – the rule of law on which our civilisation depends.
More than anyone, the former Director of Prosecutions sitting in Downing Street should know this. But two-tier Keir is doing nothing to stop this dangerous trend.
Dr Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance.
Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner were photographed ‘taking the knee’ in support of the Black Lives Matter [BLM] movement in 2020