A roadmap for police abolitionism

George Ruska

We are coming to an end of a summer of violence. Every other week some communal flare up has seen the hapless police pitted against various ethnic mobs, forced into retreat at the behest of miscellaneous projectiles and flaming wheely bins. Each series of incidents has shown that the British police, demoralised by years of DEI, are now incapable of physically confronting serious civil disorder. The crisis of British state capacity is no longer primarily evident from its systematic failure in the arenas of infrastructure, energy and housing, but in its abrogation of its monopoly of violence. There is no thin blue line ready to preserve the peace in Ukrainia, and if there is, its coming to arrest boomers in Hartlepool for ‘incendiary’ posts on Facebook.

How the right has responded to these episodic bouts of violence has of course varied upon who the perpetrators are. When Romani gypsies, a reputedly criminal but essentially craven people, burnt down their own slum in protest at the internment of five children by the CPS, the usual commentators came to the fore. Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson on X railing at fat headscarfed women, who were bemoaning the loss of their extensive progeny to the social care system, was the order of the day. Images of placid looking Gypsies setting fire to buses with cigarette lighters and overturning solitary police cars were circulated widely much to the indignation of the e-right commentariat. A residual pro-statist, ‘black the blue’ id, was activated even amongst more sensible commentators when confronted with the offensive image of foreign mobs occupying English town centres. The tedious Allison Pearson even defended the working operations of the CPS against its Romani detractors, an organisation which has threatened to rescind the fostering rights of UKIP supporting couples.