Why can’t Jess Phillips condemn the Birmingham mob?

What does a thug have to do to be called out by this Labour government? While Keir Starmer and Co have – quite rightly – found the minerals to denounce the racist carnage that has blighted our streets this past week, they seem to be striking a very different tone when it isn’t hard-right headcases doing the menacing.

Last night, in Bordesley Green in Birmingham, hundreds of British Muslim men and youths – most of them masked up, some carrying weapons – gathered near a McDonald’s. They claimed to be defending the local mosque from a rumoured far-right protest. But the protest turned out to be fake news, and I’m not entirely sure what frightening their neighbours and doing hand-brake turns around a roundabout – as some were filmed doing – had to do with protecting their elders anyway.

Worse than that, some of these plucky defenders of their community seemed to be oddly indiscriminate in who they went after. A group of men, armed with a metal pole, chased LBC’s Fraser Knight out of the area. As soon as he arrived, says Knight, this bespectacled journalist and his crew were accused of being the EDL and told they would ‘regret’ coming to Bordesley Green.

Sky News’s Becky Johnson was live on air when she was confronted by the thugs. One rode up on a bike and chanted ‘Free Palestine’. Another approached the camera and made gun gestures to the people at home. Later on, Sky released footage of a masked man trying to stab the tyres of their broadcast van as they left.

Worst of all, a man was badly beaten by a group of masked youths outside of a pub, the Clumsy Swan. Punters, who had hitherto been enjoying a karaoke night, were barricaded inside. The pub was attacked, too. A car also had its windows smashed in, and there are other reports of criminal damage in the area.

West Midlands Police have confirmed all of this in a statement, saying they intend to investigate what they euphemistically call ‘sporadic incidents of criminality’. But no arrests have yet been made and Knight is quite rightly apoplectic about the marked absence of police last night. ‘In the 40 minutes we were there, we saw perhaps two or three police cars driving past’, he says. A video shows a cop car casually sliding by the scene.

‘Crime is crime.’ PM Starmer said that at both of his emergency press conferences last week – a limp attempt to deflect accusations of ‘two-tier policing’, whereby hard-right riots across the country have rightly been met with force while similar disorder, committed elsewhere by ethnic minorities, led police to retreat.

If Starmer were sincere, you’d expect a robust response to the goings-on in Birmingham. Surely, it would go some way to dispelling accusations of the police being crippled by political correctness. Instead, we’ve had stony silence. Meanwhile, Labour frontbencher Jess Phillips, in whose constituency Bordesley Green sits, took to X last night to downplay the disorder:

‘To be clear, all day rumours have been spread that a far-right group [was] coming and it was done entirely to get Muslim people out on the street to drive this content. It is misinformation being spread to create trouble.’

She even quote-tweeted the clip of Becky Johnson being approached by the ballied-up men, saying something similar. She also chided Reform UK’s Richard Tice for sharing the clip. And so Phillips – a supposedly proud, lifelong feminist; the Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, no less! – struggled to summon the words to condemn masked agitators intimidating a woman as she tried to do her job.

Phillips may well be right, that a hoax march was called to force this kind of reaction. But that doesn’t excuse it, does it? Understandably, British Muslims are organising to defend their mosques, having seen so many of them attacked in recent days. But that’s clearly not what this was. Unless those men thought Knight was going to finish his work for LBC before heading off to brick the masjid.

Phillips has form on this front. Her principles often evaporate when the optics are less than ideal. Following the horrendous Cologne sex attacks in 2015, when hundreds of women were sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve by Arab and North African men, Phillips compared it to women being ‘heckled’ on your average Friday night out on Birmingham’s Broad Street.

Her penchant for straight-talking also escaped her recently, after she was subjected to a concerted campaign of Islamist intimidation during the election. Her majority was slashed to just 700 votes by a ‘pro-Gaza’ candidate, and she and her aides were subject to constant abuse and threats. Phillips has spoken out against the ‘bullies’, but has refused to name the Islamic sectarianism that had been driving the bullying. (A cynic might suggest that wafer-thin majority is why she was hesitant to denounce the mob last night.)

Of course, law-abiding British Muslims will be as appalled by the menacing of MPs, journalists and pub-goers in their name as white Brits are appalled by the hate-fuelled criminality that is currently being committed in their name. The reluctance of Starmer and Phillips to call out Islamic-sectarian thuggery says more about them than anything else. Do they hold British Muslims to a lower moral standard – as if they are childlike, semi-citizens who know not what they do?

We do not need to draw any phoney equivalence – between the vast racist rioting across the country and the grim scenes in Brum last night – to conclude that this was another galling instance of two-tier policing. The longer this goes on, the longer Starmer will fuel online conspiracy theories that he is engaged in some war on the white majority, while letting Islamists off the hook.

But of course, it will go on. Because two-tier policing is only an expression of an inbuilt ethno-religious paternalism within our governing class. They are so petrified of provoking ‘community tensions’, or being accused by some woke idiot of racism, that they routinely struggle to condemn even criminality when it happens to be committed by an ethnic-minority. It’s as if they consider, say, British Muslims to be a group apart.

On top of two-tier policing, we have two-tier feminism – in which a Tory MP’s fleeting hand on a journalist’s knee is treated far more seriously than the industrial-scale rape committed by grooming gangs. We also now have two-tier concern for journalists – in which some hard-right protesters heckling Owen Jones and Anna Soubry, as happened in the wake of Brexit, is taken far more seriously than balaclava-clad, tooled-up goons chasing around Sky and LBC journalists.

This is moral cowardice – not to mention a profoundly patronising view of minorities – masquerading as ‘sensitivity’. Crime is crime? It’s high time that Keir ‘two-tier’ Starmer practised what he preached.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_