They seemed to manage pretty well in Southport and in London. The mosque was protected, the larger mob next day was kettled.
I'd hardly call an operational response involving injury to 53 officers and the loss of a police vehicle "managing pretty well". Ditto the initial response to Hartlepool where there were further injuries and destruction of a police vehicle, and a fascist was allowed to punch a man of colour whilst a girning mob stood around shouting racist ephithets and laughing, filming it on their phones, whilst officers stood at a distance and watched behind riot shields.
Like the judiciary the police are part of the response, not the whole response. There needs to be a significant community-led element part of which is represented by counter-demonstration. You draw an equivalence between "agitators" on each side of the police line, quite wrongly. The counter-demonstations as I understand them are explicitly no violent, have no members intent on violent disorder or destruction of property as the purpose of their mobilisation. I don;t think we can say the same of the various ex- EDL / Patriotic Alternative agitators mentioned throughout this thread and their cretinous, drunk, chinged-up followers.
Policing is by consent. The consent of the communities those who sign up to enforce the law require in order to do their job. Community policing initatives cost too much and as mentioned police numbers are far too low for them to be the whole response. There are ten officers allocated to Hartlepool and the town's custody suite was closed a few years back- a lack of resource exposed pitilessly the other night. The politicians seem not to care.
In such circumstances a peaceful community counter-demonsration and response is essential in order not to cede public space to these fascist bastards and hooligans unopposed. Such a force shows that ordinary folk won't put up with their neighbourhoods being turned upside down by fascist neanderthals without a response. Nor will they tolerate incorrect racist scapegoating of minority communities who had nothing whatever to do with the original atrocity in Southport. And in the event of these demonstrations being met by violence from the far right side I am sure in time they will meet with a robust response.
In my view fascists wear police arrest, community sentences, tags, as badges of honour. The few basic links I linked to onb the last page all show in different ways that they are less likely to forget a good kicking, or come back for more. The tactics are crude but have been developed and delivered to great effect in the past, stunting the appeal of far right politics both in terms of the hollowness of its claims and the humiliation of coming out on the wrong end of a physical confrontation. The one thing fascism cannot overcome is laughter, humiliation and being made to look ridiculous by an opposing force.
The longer term view- re-building communities through multiple socio-economic levers and through targeted and robust policing of offenders by both community and police takes money, time, patience to achieve. Politicians have shown little if no interest in the state of policing beyond platitudes thanking police for their services. Communities asking questions of the targeting and priorities of local police forces and engagement with their work is as vital as community scrutiny of the work of politicians. Through that process consent can be built and negotiatied / re-negotiated.
That's my point of view, by all means disagree, but personally I would prefer to keep this thread focused on the far right's rather than our response.
