(Read on, or view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UugWh2-emqw&authuser=0 )
With the opening of the football season, fears were inevitable of an unholy alliance of fascist and football thugs creating more mayhem. A predicted heatwave didn’t help. And, as our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, events so far have already added two hefty items to the government’s to-do list.
On the one hand the massive and heartwarming display of public repugnance about mindless violence of the alleged right-wing so-called ‘protesters’ has done much to scare the pants off them.
Likewise the fast-tracked and heavily publicised justice meted out in the courts. Especially when combined with warnings that CCTV imagery will get more of them banged to rights.
Against that, the ubiquitous use of social media, ever a two-edged sword, is showing its potential for evil as never before.
No longer do peddlers of hatred have to go to the trouble of actually talking to people, let alone organise gatherings on an individual basis.
As the right-wing extremist Tommy Robinson has shown, you can marshal your forces from a nice comfy hotel in Cyprus.
He’s now grumbling furiously that his hols have been spoiled by nasty journalists who’ve caught up with him and started holding him to account.
Poor old him, don’t you feel his pain? Not.
But in the scheme of things he’s no more than a minnow. It’s the tech giants, notably billionaire Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, who’re the real problem.
Besides promoting the presidency of Donald Trump, by fair means or foul, he’s squaring up to our Prime Minister and his core beliefs.
The ‘two-tier Keir’ jibe, suggesting Starmer’s softer on proper protests than violent disorder, is just an opening shot.
Musk’s real beef is with the very idea of doing anything about his currently virtually unregulated platform.
The media overseer Ofcom, which has some say in what TV and radio are allowed to get away with, is pretty much powerless to prevent the likes of X from being used to propagate falsehoods.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan is the latest senior figure to call on the government to beef up the Online Safety Act, which he says, bluntly, is: ‘Not fit for purpose.’
The Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has admitted it is, to use his euphemistic words, ‘a bit leaky’. But spotting there’s a problem is not the same as solving it.
So far the government’s gone no further than sending an open letter to the tech bosses warning them not to let their platforms be used to egg people on to break the law.
Hmmm. As one waggish commentator pointed out, that was as much use as: ‘Firing a water pistol at a mountain.’
Certainly it’s done nothing to stop Musk from likening Britain to the Soviet Union for arresting people for putting inflammatory posts online.
Indeed, he happily shared a fake article claiming Starmer might send rioters to emergency detainment camps in the Falklands.
The difficulty here being that not only did he fail to check the story’s provenance, the very fact that he posted it meant it reached a huge audience.
So here’s an early and deadly googly bowled at Starmer, whose tricksiness can hardly be overstated.
He has promised to set up a new ‘Regulatory Innovation Office’ – whatever that’s supposed to mean – but a press release is no substitute for putting in place something with real teeth.
And the scale of the problem is ruefully acknowledged by Mr Kyle, who says dealing with the likes of Musk is more on the lines of diplomacy than simply putting businesses in their place.
Such people, he concedes, are as powerful as top ministers in foreign governments, ‘simply because of the scale and scope that they have’.
While that’s not to say best just throw in the towel then, it is an admission of just how hard the job’s going to be.
But Starmer’s early unforeseen difficulties don’t stop there.
There’s also the undercurrent in the underbelly of British society of barely focussed but unquestionably visceral resentment.
When Margaret Thatcher smashed the nation’s old and increasingly inefficient industrial base she didn’t think to provide a safety net for the communities that fell victim.
Successive governments, both Conservative and Labour, have tried to repair some of the damage, but manifestly haven’t tried hard enough.
Hence those depressed cities in the north, and pockets of poverty in the south, where all too many deprived people want someone to blame.
It’s not in the DNA of ministers of any party to hold up their hands and admit they haven’t made much of a fist of things. So scapegoats, like immigrants or asylum seekers, come in jolly handy.
And, as public services and living standards continued to flounder under the last Tory government, the ‘stop the boats’ and ‘cut immigration’ mantras have sounded out like a military drumbeat.
They’ve been echoed and amplified of late by violent rioters, some of whom have probably been spurred on by two little words easily spotted on X, alongside the cross of Saint George and the Union flag.
Those words are: ‘England lives.’
What they almost certainly don’t know is that the phrase was originally coined by our best-known and most notorious fascist Oswald Mosley, who backed Hitler with his own little army of blackshirts.
It could even give some of these guys who’ve been out on the streets creating mayhem lately food for thought, if they’re prepared to make the effort.
But astonishingly, in an earlier incarnation as a Labour minister, this same Oswald Mosley put together a manifesto calling for the government he was serving to splash more cash, and boost infrastructure.
Leftist economists loved the idea, and a succession of both Labour and Tory Prime Ministers toyed with it.
Who knows? It could even get our very own Keir Starmer to put his thinking cap on. After all, the so-called fiscal rules that look set to lead to cuts in public services aren’t necessarily set in stone.
And a bit of serious, and successful, levelling up could do a fair bit to heal rifts within our currently divided society.
After all, a study published last week in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science suggests that even enmities that no one’s ever questioned may not be all they’re cracked up to be.
Moggies and pooches? Always hate one another?
It ain’t necessarily so, judging by data garnered from questionnaires handed out to hundreds of people who owned one of each.
In each case, if the dog died the cat showed every sign of actually grieving. According to the study’s authors the dear little pussies miaowed more, hid more and ate and slept less.
What’s more, the longer the two animals had lived together the worse it was. Which, the boffins agreed, sets the lie on Rudyard Kipling’s notion of the cat that always walks by himself.
So all those superb gatherings last week with the banners proclaiming solidarity between races and communities certainly prove one thing.
If we humans really put our minds to it, we can be almost as clever as other animals.
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