I like to believe that even the most tolerant among us can be absolutely horrified by an attempt to decapitate a fellow citizen on our streets.
I also like to believe that even the most myopic of us can accept that when the assailant is of a different skin colour or ethnic group to the victim, raising the question – is this terrorism? – is not an inherently racist thing to ask.
I even like to consider that questioning the value of jailing someone for years over an ill-advised social media post after a high-profile incident which shocked the local community doesn’t make someone a fascist. Nor indeed does concern about the speed with which justice and hefty prison sentences are handed out when community anger boils over into rioting – while those accused of murder and rape can wait years for trial. Little wonder cries of two-tier justice resonate with so many. Yet the deeper problem isn’t two-tier justice so much as two-tier memory.
Some names and events are destined to be etched onto our memories for life. Things that shock us, people that repulse us – for what they have done and what they stand for – will leave a notoriety that neither the place nor the perpetrators deserve. Mention Hungerford or Dunblane and you instinctively know the names of the evil associated with them. We remember the perpetrators forever, while the names of most victims fade with time, recalled only by those who loved them.
Read more by Calum Steele
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We can be horrified by the alleged attempted murder (as sub judice laws demand it be described) in Belfast last Tuesday. But spare me the self-righteous indignation about immigration and the apparent motivations of Sudanese-born Hadi Alodid if you remained silent about what drove 18-year-old Alina Burns to attempt to decapitate a Kurdish barber with an axe in Bristol last August.
If you don’t know who Alina Burns is – ask yourself why. A white British teenage girl radicalised by neo-Nazi ideology tried to behead an innocent man in broad daylight, yet most people couldn’t pick her name out of a line-up. Does her story, and her 19.5-year term for a terrorism-motivated crime, not rock you to your core with the same revulsion now you know about it?
If you raged against the 31-month sentence given to Lucy Connolly for her tweet to “set fire to all the f***ing hotels …” following the Southport murders, but said nothing about the four-year sentences handed to Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan for setting up Facebook pages encouraging rioting after the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police in 2011, you might also want to ask yourself why. Could it be that their names mean nothing to you, or that incitement following the death of a black man doesn’t stir your sensitivities in the same way as when a black man is the perpetrator? Either admit your prejudices or concede that you’re being played.
The rioting that followed Duggan’s death led to arrests and convictions every bit as quickly as those that followed the Southport murders. Twelve months after those riots, almost 1,500 people were or had been imprisoned for riot-related offences. That wasn’t two-tier justice – it was fast and uncompromising justice, just as it was after Southport. Mercifully, our police and courts have always seen rioting as something that has to be hammered.
Stamping down on public disorder is one thing. Pretending that concern about how we reached this point of frequent disorder is something else entirely. Concern about mass immigration isn’t a precursor to racism any more than concern about crime is evidence of vigilantism. Of course, racists exploit immigration concerns; they always have. The mistake is pretending that because some racists exploit an issue, everyone raising it must therefore be a racist.
Politicians and commentators who reach for the lazy racism tag in response do far more to cement those concerns than to address them. Labelling people may win an argument in a television studio or make for a good social media clip, but it rarely changes minds in the real world. It symbolises a deeper, more pervasive problem – one used to deflect from the original issue and which perversely drives sceptics into the arms of the (increasingly far) right, where their concerns are exploited by those willing to give them a voice.
Yet almost every brutality and outrage in my lifetime – including domestic terrorism – has been home-grown. Hungerford, Dunblane, Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Raoul Moat, Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, Fred and Rosemary West, Robert Black, Peter Tobin and many dozens more. All Blighty-born and bred. British men and women doing unspeakable things. Not once did we consider wrecking the place as the right response to their crimes. We condemned the perpetrators without holding millions responsible for sharing their birthplace. Perhaps they were just the wrong colour.
The Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana was just shy of his 18th birthday when he carried out his atrocities. Alina Burns was just a few months older when she carried out hers. Both were born and raised right here, and what drove their radicalisation is what should concern us – not the colour of the skin or the "foreign"-sounding surname of one of them. Both had their minds poisoned by extremist ideology and both were dealt with expeditiously and justifiably harshly by our courts. What these cases and all those before them show us is that while we don’t have two-tier justice, we most definitely do have two-tier memory and two-tier tolerances.
Rudakubana and Burns were products of a society that has, for too long, outsourced its thinking on integration and extremism to algorithms, activists and focus groups; a society where social media rewards outrage, politics punishes candour, and extremists exploit both. The poison that warped their young minds didn’t arrive on small boats – it festers in online echo chambers and in fractured, forgotten communities that have learned that to speak out is to be labelled, and whose trust in the very institutions they should be able to turn to for help is all but gone.
A more toxic combination of failures you would struggle to find. Until we confront that reality, we will keep arguing over the names, faces and origins of monsters while ignoring what created them.
Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and former general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations. He remains an advisor to both.
