A bleak day for Merseyside

What I saw in Knowsley last night

There’s a film currently in the cinemas called Till, about Mamie Till-Bradley whose 14 year old son, Emmett, was murdered in 1950s Mississippi because of a short, harmless interaction he had with a white woman (his cousin said it was a wolf whistle, the woman said he grabbed her waist and flirted - in 2008 she admitted she lied). He was abducted, tortured and murdered, his killers - who later confessed their actions and sold their story - were acquitted.

“I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n****rs are gonna stay in their place.” Till’s killer, 1956.

Last night, a mob of around 250 people arrived at a hotel in Knowsley. A flyer had been shared on social media with the text “we protest against the people staying in the hotel and the effect it’s causing on the city. No violence”. The people? Refugees. The effect? Rumours are flying around about attempted abductions and sexual harrassment of young (white) girls and women. The most commonly shared ‘evidence’ was filmed by a girl standing a few feet away from a man. She asks him how old he is, he says 25, she tells him she’s 15. “You don’t do this in this country, you go to jail,” she calmly tells him. He stays in one place, she slowly walks away, it’s over in 30 seconds. It’s impossible to tell if anything bad happened, but that doesn’t matter, facts are irrelevant in a moral panic.

The incident, which happened on Monday, was reported to the police and the Liverpool Echo ran two stories about it on Wednesday, speaking to the girl’s anonymous mother, and saying that the video had been widely shared on social media. But shared by whom, and why? Why was this particular incident going viral when, as the Echo itself reported only a couple of weeks earlier, sexual harrassment of schoolgirls and women is sadly a daily occurrence, not confined to one demographic of offender, and rarely reported to police or escalated in any way?

Journalism isn’t - or shouldn’t be - about merely reporting a version events as presented to you by an interested party. Why is this newsworthy? Does it sound true? Is the source trustworthy? What’s the context? Without these questions, we might as well just let artificial intelligence do the job for us.

Today, the reason this incident was given so much prominence became abundantly clear. Any attempt to label last night’s riot as racially motivated has been met with cries of “legitimate concerns”. Not just one or two, but every report of the events is flooded with replies:

“they were protesting the child groomer being housed in a hotel”

“Wow! So many people organised and united to protect nonces”

“It wasn’t politically motivated they are tired of their children being stalked, accosted, propositioned and threatened by migrant men”

All of which apparently justifies a police van being broken into, smashed up using its own riot gear, then set alight. We heard chants of “get them out”. Massive fireworks were aimed at the hotel. They smashed the windows of another police van, trying to release the dogs inside.

This was not my first anti-fascist protest by a long way, but it was very different. In the past, we’d get on a coach to wherever the BNP, EDL or whatever they were currently calling themselves had decided to go and cause trouble, we’d shout at them, they’d shout at us, the police would round up the most harmless looking individuals they could find and arrest them, we’d all go home. You might ask yourself what it really acheived, but you still have to oppose hatred and show solidarity with the people they’re trying to victimise. But this wasn’t a typical protest/counter protest. I never saw a single “protestor”, the police had such a heavy cordon around them. This time, we weren’t the targets of their rage, but the residents of the hotel, a group of refugees who had no choice but to be there and nowhere else to go.

Despite being kept a fair distance from the rioters, we could clear hear their chants of “get them out”. Them? How did an ambiguous video of one man standing near a girl for less than a minute result in the need to siege an entire hotel? The answer is depressingly obvious. For some time, far right organisations have been aware that refugees are housed there, they’ve been doing the groundwork and planting seeds long before the ‘shocking’ video started doing the rounds. I’m sure many people genuinely believe they were there to ‘make the streets safer’ by requiring a dozen or so riot vans and for scouse grandparents, pregnant women and church groups to have to barricade themselves into a car park. Their eagerness to take the bait, to pretend to be heroes, and to act in such a barbaric way comes from years of being told their circumstances aren’t their fault, aren’t because of the government, but because of the hordes of nameless foreigners deviously arriving on our shores with less than pure intentions.

Last night felt different, and the reaction feels different. Years ago when fascists tried to come to Liverpool they never made it out of Lime Street Station, such was the size of the crowds that went to meet them, and that day is still brought up regularly as a proud day in our history. To be scouse was to be anti-racist, on the surface at least. A switch has flipped and now people with YNWA and 1878 in their Twitter handles will argue that being part of a bloodthirsty mob terrorising a group of immigrants doesn’t make them racist, and if you think that, you must think paedophilia is ok.

One thing that hasn’t changed is I felt safe and protected amongst my group of activists. This is something I want to emphasise, because I want everyone reading this, if you haven’t already, to join us next time something occurs. In person if you can, or by getting the word out, counteracting misinformation and hate when you see it and sending a strong message that this isn’t the kind of city, or society, that we want to live in.