After racist riots caught the government off-guard, the pre-emptive arrest of climate activists shows a grotesque imbalance of priorities

— So what did we have this past week? First, the Metropolitan Police diverts the Trans Pride march to give Tommy Robinson Trafalgar Square. Then a riot in Southport incited by fascists and simultaneous attacks on minority communities around the country — which the State made no apparent attempt to foil ahead of time. This was followed by hundreds of arrests, as much the cause of Wednesday’s nationalist no-show as were the rapidly-organised counter-mobilisations.

Then, on Thursday morning, while the liberal press is busy petting the police and praising Keir Starmer for his heavy hand — a dawn raid on the climate camp infrastructure and organisers, effectively shutting down the entire protest event rather than deal with its policing consequences.

It is tempting to think someone is reaching for a “public order win”, after the racist riots caught the government and domestic intelligence community off guard. But we are not on a page out of the German police playbook. The raid was, of course, scheduled according to the campers’ own very public plans, and triggered without too much attention to the news cycle. Never assume they’re playing 4-d chess when it’s blunder upon blunder.

Besides, the false equivalence between Reclaim the Power and the fascists is so grotesque, such an insult to the intelligence, that only someone like Suella Braverman could try to feed it to her voters. Which (a) makes sense, since Reclaim the Power have been openly organising the climate camp since well before the elections, and (b) raises the next question: Why was no-one on the ministerial level able to abort such a blatant show of two-tier policing?

Reclaim the Power put it quite well: “police prioritised locating and arresting people suspected of organising peaceful protest with tents, toilets and track for wheelchairs over locating and arresting people who are actually organising, far right riots with bricks, knives and other weapons”. Just in case someone puts themselves at risk near a power station, the Met and local police force will launch a costly surveillance operation. But white supremacists are left to incite and organise violence, and take the streets, before any intervention is made.

Luckily for the government, this morning’s raid is yet to gain any mainstream attention in the aftermath of the riots, and remains buried in the local press and small-print news. The right-wing papers will likely ignore it completely, because it shows up their own fantastical version of two-tier policing, in which the boneheads are polite concerned citizens while Palestine campus protesters carry grenade launchers. The liberal press, for its part, is still on honeymoon with the new government, and can hardly resist a bit of macho posturing.

Which leaves us with the State’s laxity in containing the violent racist right, and its zeal to contain the nonviolent intersectional left — irrespective of which party is in power. The trouble is, misallocation of intelligence-gathering efforts costs lives. Twenty years ago, police spies and security analysts were mucking about with G8 protesters while the London bombers organised under their noses. It doesn’t seem like anyone in power has learnt the lesson.

~ Uri Gordon