At the age of 72, I begin to wonder, for the first time in my life, if there might be a future for a fascist party in Britain. The thought has been provoked by the riots, or rather the response of many to them.
The riots themselves were horrible, an outburst of callous criminality, doubtless enjoyable for those who took part in it. Yet they were comparatively unimportant. To say this is not to pretend that they weren’t frightening, that people weren’t killed, or that other victims did not suffer injury or damage to their property. Nevertheless, disturbances of this kind have happened before, and will happen again. Sometimes a fuse is lit, in this case by the shooting of Mark Duggan by the police, and then the tinder-box explodes. Happily the rioting subsided quite quickly, as was predictable. Such things normally fizzle out, though they may well flare up again.
Some of the reaction was at least as worrying . A Conservative MEP, Roger Helmer, sent out a tweet: ‘Time to get tough. Bring in the army. Shoot rioters and looters.’ Given that we are engaged in military action in Libya to prevent Colonel Gaddafi from using violence on his own people, as the Foreign Secretary and others have put it, this call to shoot our people in the streets of London was both intemperate and hypocritical. It was also remarkably stupid. A riot set off by the police shooting of one man was more likely to be enflamed than quelled by shooting a few more, especially if the victims were teenagers.
Daniel Knowles, assistant comment editor on the Daily Telegraph, pointed this out in a well-reasoned blogpost, and wrote that someone who thought like Helmer had, in his opinion, no place in a modern Conservative party.
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