THE scenes witnessed outside Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday morning were a microcosm of what the United Kingdom has become under this Labour government. Younger readers may be be labouring under the misapprehension that Keir Starmer’s lurch to the right in pursuit of populist favour is the first time that the Labour Party has betrayed its socialist principles. But the truth is that throughout the Troubles Labour Secretaries of State repeatedly outperformed their Tory counterparts when it came to defending the interests of the British establishment at the price of the rights of Irish citizens.
Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was not hauled before a magistrate in the English capital because he waved a Hezbollah flag; the 27-year-old Gaelgeoir and West Belfast native was ordered there to send a message to the increasing number of English and British people rising up against their government’s complicity in the genocide being carried out in Gaza by Israel. The increasingly demented fascism of the Donald Trump Washington regime has seen migrant policing agencies and the National Guard used to harass and brutalise those protesting at the targeting and scapegoating of people that Trump and his grotesque coterie of minions perceive as enemies. In a similar way, the Metropolitan Police have been deployed to silence Kneecap’s powerful voice; a voice that is energising and empowering young people everywhere.
Locally, Wednesday morning’s hearing in London – which saw Mo Chara released on bail to reappear in August – was not a challenge to the PSNI, but a rebuke. It was not a challenge because the PSNI is simply not capable of responding to the Kneecap prosecution by getting real about displays of ‘support for terrorism’ on this side of the water as the loyalist marching season hots up. The most compelling reason for that is that there is nowhere enough Catholics/nationalists in the PSNI at all levels to make combatting displays of support for Fenian-butchering paramilitaries a priority. Senior PSNI figures like to bemoan their lack of resources. The truth is that the policy of doing nothing about the annual outpouring of summer sectarianism is much more demanding of resources and more debilitating to community cohesion than the proactive strategy that the lawlessness demands. The PSNI hoses its diminishing resources at marching season outbreaks of bigotry. Officers and vehicles are deployed reactively to areas where masked loyalists mark their territory and terrify mixed communities – and this happens because those behind the violence and hate know they have a clear run. Sectarian intimidation is a consequence-free activity.
Were that not the case, were the perpetrators made to understand that the rule of law applies, the chaotic summer free-for-all would in time abate, with a concomitant drop-off in policing demand. But when just a quarter of the PSNI is Catholic, logic and foresight get trumped by that old canteen culture that was supposed to have been dumped with the RUC.
