Unrest is spreading across Europe from France to Spain and Albania, yet the UK has no dedicated riot squad
Daily Telegraph 21/10/26
France is ablaze and we could be next, say the gloomsters; and they may be right. Unrest seems to be spreading across Europe with riots in Milan, Albania, Spain and Portugal in recent weeks.
This may all be coincidental or a sign of a deeper political malaise that is expressing itself in violent behaviour. If the politicians won’t listen, the French protesters say, what choice do we have? It is also the reason given by masked men who have turned up at south-coast ports when asylum seekers arrive.
So if the mobs take to the streets here can the authorities cope? The short answer is no. One reason why the French have a fundamentally different police set-up to Britain’s is their Gallic penchant for airing their grievances on the boulevards and avenues of their great cities.
Perhaps it is a legacy of the 1789 Revolution; but everyone from farmers, to union members to university students and schoolchildren continue to vent their anger not in the polling booths but on the streets.
Britain has not been immune to such disturbances, however. The mob was once a feature of London in particular, springing into life almost spontaneously in volatile mass movements and collective uprisings throughout the capital’s history.
The word itself was coined from a shortened form of the Latin phrase mobile vulgus in the late 17th century as the city’s population grew. Aggressive crowds, fuelled by alcohol and resentment, took to the streets with alarming regularity.
In 1780, the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots saw some of the capital’s worst disturbances that lasted for days. Although there were law enforcement officers – salaried watchmen – to patrol the streets, they were too few to make a difference, or influence bad behaviour decisively.
To counter the mob, the Metropolitan Police was established in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, and gradually the disorder subsided. While sporadic crowd violence broke out on occasion, as in the 1930s against Mosley’s fascists, it was not until the late 1950s and the Notting Hill race riots that further widespread trouble occurred. Since then, there have been disturbances linked to protests over policing in Brixton (1981), the poll tax (1990) and student fees (2010).
The 2011 riots that began in Tottenham and quickly spread into an orgy of looting and criminality across the country stretched the police to their limits. So, too, did the disturbances 10 years earlier in a number of northern towns. In Bradford, heightened tension between the city’s white and Asian residents was escalated by a confrontation between the British National Party and the National Front and opponents from the Anti-Nazi League.
There were similar clashes in Oldham and Leeds, with the police caught in the middle. It was observed how the communities were polarised along racial and sectarian lines, as in Northern Ireland.
Indeed, the Province is the one part of the UK used to dealing with serious rioting that threatened to get out of hand and even trigger a civil war. It required the deployment of the Army to keep order. At the height of the Troubles some 20,000 troops were deployed under Operation Banner. But the Army was three times the size it is today and the manpower no longer exists to back up the police If there were ever to be similar levels of disturbance in England.
We have no specially trained riot squad like the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité (CRS) who have been in action over the weekend in France, are highly trained and have still found it hard to cope.
Our traditions are completely different largely because large-scale rioting has been so infrequent unlike on the Continent. In France, Spain and Italy, as well as other countries, the gendarmerie, CRS, Guardia civil or carabinieri are part of the armed forces. Even America, a common-law jurisdiction, has the National Guard.
Here, we have no equivalent. The police are civilians in uniform, as Robert Peel emphasised in his nine principles: “The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police.”
Since the fiasco of the 1981 Brixton riots, where officers lacked even rudimentary kit against stones and Molotov cocktails, they are now better trained and equipped.
But the police still lack the wherewithal to deal with widespread rioting. Even attempts to introduce anti-riot gear common on the continent run into difficulties here. Theresa May, when home secretary in 2014, vetoed the purchase by the Metropolitan Police of three water cannons of the sort routinely used in Northern Ireland.
They were bought from the German police at a cost of £320,000 but were sold for scrap four years later. Mrs May said “without safeguards” they had “the capacity to cause harm”, which many people might imagine was their purpose.
The modern police “service” as it now must be called is simply not up to dealing with the sort of riots seen at the weekend in France and neither should they be. Bludgeoned by criticism for the way they handled the Brixton riots and the Stephen Lawrence murder they have become more like social workers than upholders of law and order.
It is true that London is one of the world’s safest big cities, but no one living in the capital is unaware of the existence of an element ready to descend into lawlessness at the drop of a hat. The anti-Israeli Left is allowed to parade its bigotry through the streets precisely because the police cannot risk triggering a backlash they could not deal with.
They were criticised when the Tottenham riots broke out for allowing the looters a free rein for hours, itself a reflection of the non-confrontational nostrums that have guided the policing of ethnically diverse areas, with disastrous consequences. Once they let the impression develop that there was a chance to plunder with impunity, it became far more difficult – if not impossible – for the police to regain control.
The Government’s duty is to keep order and protect property. That is the contract the people have with the state, which prevents us from taking the law into our own hands. That is what policing by consent means. But when that breaks down, what then? It may be time to buy some new water cannons, or invest in a dedicated riot squad.
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