Nigel Farage is wrong. The Reform UK leader, who no doubt many of our readers understandably hold up as the last hope for saving Britain, is trying to politically exploit last week’s riots in Epping. In itself, that’s no issue; party leaders will make political capital out of whatever they can. To pretend otherwise is naive. This was a highly politicised episode and Mr Farage is a politician. He should be free to pass judgment on it. What should be a source of shame for Mr Farage is not his attempt to cash-in on the Epping riots, but rather that he’s got his facts wrong.
Badly. Specifically, his claim that left-wing anti-racism activists and Essex Police were responsible for the disgusting violence seen around the Bell Hotel on July 17. I was there. They were not. Video footage taken from the scene shows Stand Up To Racism campaigners being escorted into police vans, which officers could be heard calling “buses”. That clip has since been shared by Mr Farage, who presented it as evidence that the police had used the vans to transport the anti-racism campaigners to the Bell to demonstrate in the faces of worried locals.
Speaking to his 2.2m X followers down the barrel, as he has done to great effect umpteen times before, he said of the video: “This shows ‘Stand Up To Racism’ as they’re called, with Antifa, a violent, thuggish group, arriving at the train station and literally by Essex Police being bussed to the Bell Hotel.
“These were the people who caused the disturbances. These were the people that caused the riots. Essex Police caused the disturbances.”
I’m sorry, but that’s completely guff. The video does not show Stand Up To Racism activists arriving at Epping train station and they’re not getting in police vans to be bussed to the Bell Hotel. The video was taken after the riot outside Epping Primary School, a mile from the train station. Add to that, there was no evidence that anyone from Antifa – a US anti-fascist organisation – was in the clip.
So, why are the police escorting the pinkos into police vans? Because opportunistic headbangers clad in balaclavas had chased them down Tower Road, a residential street 15 minutes walk from the Bell. I watched them do it.
Walking the left-wingers to Epping station, where they would have highly likely run back into the thugs that had attacked them, was obviously insane and something the police could not sanction. Loading them in police vans and getting them the hell out of there was nothing short of necessary.
So what about the claim that the placard-waving Corbynistas had started the unrest? The opposite of the truth.
I arrived at Epping station on July 17 around 5pm. I wandered up Station Road and started interviewing those assembled outside the Bell Hotel around 20 past – long before Stand Up To Racism had arrived.
There was a healthy number of residents airing perfectly legitimate grievances about the use of their hotel for asylum seekers. They said that they feared for their children, and that Sir Keir’s government didn’t have the skill or stomach to stop the boats.
A perfectly reasonable position to take given that an asylum seeker living in the hotel had been charged with sexual assault of a local teenage girl, and Channel crossings are at a record high.
But the upstanding, concerned Epping residents I spoke to weren’t the only ones assembled outside the Bell. Their ranks of co-demonstrators included masked youths, social media live streamers, and vested men that looked like extras from the mid-noughties football hooligan film Green Street.
There was a bloke in a Britain First t-shirt and a woman wearing a top emblazoned with the words “white excellence” on the back. Some I spoke to had travelled down to Epping from other areas of Essex or East London.
They no doubt had concerns about the hotel. But, crucially, they were also champing at the bit to get stuck into the “lefties” that were rumoured to be meeting at Epping station.
For a far-right nutter this was Christmas Day. The sun was out, the booze was flowing, and a party of blue-haired Islington lovelies were on their way to get a kicking. They couldn’t contain their glee.
I followed them as they started running. Stand Up To Racism’s glossy placards were red rags to these far-Right bulls, and as soon as they had been spotted hundreds of yards down the road the stampede began. The riot police couldn’t contain them.
Hundreds of young men, armed with bottles and frozen milk cartons, began to charge down Epping High Road towards the counter demonstrators.
The headbangers weren’t sparked into violence by anything Stand Up To Racism did to antagonise them, they went after them as soon as they came into view. Predator and prey.
Lots of people have battered the police for walking the left-wing activists up towards the Bell. They’ve argued that angry locals were always going to react to counter-demonstrators, so why introduce them. Well, we live in a democracy, and people have a right to exercise their right to protest.
It’s a right worth defending. Whether you agree with left-wingers’ arguments – and I can assure you I don’t – they have every right to travel to the hotel and hold their signs.
But, just because you think the asylum hotels should shut doesn’t give you carte blanche to trash a town, to fight police and smash their vans.
How about, instead of putting the boot into people we disagree with for exercising their right to protest, we turn our attention to lunatics gagging for a riot? How about they behave like civilised people and make their point with words not violence?
This coming Sunday, Epping is facing the prospect of Tommy Robinson’s mob descending on their streets. Nigel Farage has often said he’s responsible for the demise of the Far Right. He’s probably right.
But by making claims that are utterly false, by saying that police “heads should roll” for failures they did not make, he is inviting the political forces he claims to have extinguished to mobilise. He needs to correct the record – fast.
This story originally appeared on Express.co.uk
