The old Trade Union song by Pete Seeger, ‘Which side are you on?’ popped into my head whilst watching video of Hampshire Police officers dragging a man off a wall in Southampton and beating the shit out of him with the edges of their riot shields. The incident happened during protests in response to the murder of Henry Nowak. I do not know the identity of the man but Dr Helen Ingram on X describes him as: “A 50yo dad-of-three military veteran with 13 pins in his ankle, but that didn’t stop a dozen police officers beating the hell out of him.” Dr Ingram added: “The public support for the police is in its death throes.” I’m afraid this is a statement that I find difficult to disagree with. There have been so many police–related scandals over the last decade or so, that the police’s reputation is not just down the toilet but a long way around the U-bend.
Now I’ve been a public disorder photographer and I’ve attended many demonstrations where there’s been police violence. Sometimes this violence has been justified because someone has gone out of their way to attack a police officer or attempt to destroy property but on other occasions the police violence was not so justified. From what I can gather in the Southampton case, the man in question was not actively engaging in violence against the police, he was just quietly sitting on a wall when he was grabbed by several officers, pushed to the ground, smashed with the edges of shields and had kicks aimed at him and allegedly at his head by police officers. Some unconfirmed reports I’ve seen have said that the man the police beat up has been remanded in custody charged with ‘assaulting a police officer’. I must admit that from the video that I’ve seen – though I admit I’ve not seen all of it – those doing the assaulting appear to be police officers not the member of the public in question.
Here’s some of the video in question which has come from the X platform.
https://x.com/MaximusChud/status/2062297146796204529
https://x.com/Donna_Rachel_/status/2062661279324442974
These videos forced me to ask this question of the police. What side are you on? I ask this because it certainly doesn’t seem to be that of the British people, at least not at present and in some situations.
The videos and those like it are going viral and deservedly so. People need to see what Britain’s police forces have become. They are obsequious to the elite or to protesters whose causes have had elite backing, such as the ‘Palestine’ crowd or the likes of Extinction Rebellion or to the more volatile sections of Britain’s Islamic community. However when ordinary working class Britons take to the streets to protest yet another murder of a British person by a member of a minority group, the police get out the riot shields and reach for the tool of ultra violence.
Yes indeed. As the song goes ‘which side are you on boys, which side are you on?’
I suppose that this post will elicit responses from police apologists about how they are only tackling the ‘far right’ or ‘protecting public order’ or those in the top tier of lame excuses ‘I was only following orders’ or ‘I had no choice, I had to do it.’
I would like to remind any police officers reading this piece and I’m pretty sure that they are, that should things really go down badly at sometime in the future and Britain descend into a bloody, chaotic mess following revolt and the collapse of business as usual governance, then there is going be nobody watching the police’s back, not government and certainly not the people. We could even see a situation where unnecessarily violent officers are called by some future tribunal set up by a future government to account for their actions. If that occurs, then feigning a lack of choice or citing ‘superior orders’ has a very poor historical record of success as an excuse. It didn’t work for the Nazis at Nuremberg and it didn’t work for those who worked in key positions in the security and repression apparatus of former Iron Curtain countries once Communism fell. Senior Nazis could not escape accountability after the Second World War and the functionaries of oppression from the Iron Curtain nations were either imprisoned or lost a lot of their social rights and status by the decisions of new democratic governments.
Today the dispensers of porcine thuggery towards Britons expressing displeasure at the state of the nation are protected by a government that has no answers to the nation’s many problems apart from State violence, the exclusion and oppression of those who disagree and outright lies. However tomorrow there might be a different government, a government that might take a very different view of police conduct in demonstrations where they have attacked ordinary Britons with little reason or justification. That government might not be as willing as this one to listen to the excuses or pleadings of those who ‘just followed orders’.
So what’s it going to be? Which side are you, the police, on? Is it the people who ultimately pay your wages or is it the side of a government that would drop you in the brown stuff at the drop of a hat if there was some advantage for them in doing so? Remember what the Establishment did to Sgt Martyn Blake, the officer who shot dead alleged gangster Chris Kaba. Blake was hung out to dry and although acquitted of shooting Kaba unlawfully, his life and his career was ruined. Choose wisely.
I think we are going to to see a lot more of this sort of violence being dished out by police to indigenous Britons, especially over the next year. We are governed by a Government that has lost a very great deal of the confidence of the public. The government might pull the propaganda levers but the propaganda is not hitting home; those in government are ignored or mocked or increasingly despised whatever they do, because they will not do the very things that are necessary to solve some of Britain’s problems. That sort of government, the sort of arrogant out of touch one which knows they are not persuading the people or cajoling them into acquiescence to the government, will inevitably more frequently and more brutally use the state’s monopoly of violence against its own people to get their way.
The murder of Henry Nowak was not the first murder of a Briton by a member of a minority or by a migrant, the list of those who have lost their lives that way is lengthening by the week and it will certainly not be the last. I doubt also that the scenes we saw at the protest in Southampton, the one where the police appear to be more sinning than being sinned against, will be one offs.
At the next occasion of a migrant murder or rape or the next horrific crime committed by a member of a minority who has been gifted with more rights and gets more leniency from the police and justice system than the rest of us, we might be seeing similar scenes. We might be seeing a phenomenon of migrant crime followed by a mass protest and these becoming regular affairs. We might not have seen that 20 years or so ago, but people were more trusting of the Establishment, the politicians, the BBC and the police back then. It is also the case that the migrant and minority related crime problems were less than they are now and the implications of having fully open borders and the attacks on social and legal equality by multiculturalism had not yet been fully understood.
I can see the situation getting out of hand quite quickly. Protests such as we saw in Southampton are controllable when they are in one place but what happens if there are ten or more towns and cities erupting in anger at crimes that might never have occurred had they not been committed by people who many would prefer were not here in the first place? We could be looking at a very nasty time with indigenous groups protesting plus the presence of potentially violent religious sectarians and the far Left also kicking off. If that happens and the perception is given to the public that the police are policing the religious sectarians or the far Left or similar groups with kid gloves whilst battering the shit out of protesting indigenous Britons then the current public support rate for the police of 54% might drop a whole lot lower.
For the record, I know that there are decent cops who do try to do their jobs without fear or favour, despite being encouraged not to do so by their senior management. They are not the enemy and sometimes they’ve been threatened by their management with sanctions for challenging the monstrous mess, the bias and the politicised policing that their management has encouraged.
Fighting with the police is not the answer, beating the wrong’uns who have brought the country to its knees via the ballot box is the long term solution. I do not encourage or call for or incite violence of any form. I discourage the use of all types of political violence both for moral reasons and because it is all too often counterproductive. I merely predict based on my readings of politics, society and my experiences of various bits of public disorder and of observing public disorder policing as a member of the Press. If we want to change things for the better, the ballot box not the projectile bin or the brick is the way to go. We should cast votes instead of stones.
Links
Killing of Chris Kaba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Chris_Kaba
‘Which side are you on boys’ by Pete Seeger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsNVzwuJeVk&list=RDbsNVzwuJeVk&start_radio=1
Helen Ingram’s X post about the man who was battered by police officers in Southampton
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