What has become known as “two-tier policing” in the UK – the alleged practice of dealing more harshly with one set of protestors than others, based on their politics – has now been dismissed in a Home Office report as “a right wing extremist narrative.”
The report has been leaked by the Policy Exchange think tank, the UK press is reporting.
Unsurprisingly, those that various politicians, activists, and media have for years been saying are disfavored by the authorities in terms of how their protests are handled, have simply been branded as “extreme right wing.”
“Two-tier policing,” suggesting a deliberate two sets of rules for one group of people publicly expressing their dissatisfaction, debuted during the BLM protests way back in the Covid days when UK’s law enforcement was slammed for “soft policing.”
And it culminated last summer when the handling of post-Southport killings demonstrators was considered excessively harsh, summed up by X owner Elon Musk referring to UK’s Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer as, “two-tier Keir.”
And now, Starmer’s cabinet has been outed for (quite expectedly, though) downplaying and trying to delegitimize criticism of the kind, as coming from the “extreme right wing” – and this is happening in a report dubbed, the Rapid Analytical Sprint, that the UK’s current cabinet commissioned in order to “map extremism threats.”
The report’s recommendation to the government is to pay less attention to threats linked to Islamism – that’s although, over the past 15 years, 94 percent of deaths linked to terrorist activity had Islamists as the perpetrators.
But the leaked document suggests the UK government should pay more attention to other “behaviors of concern,” with misogyny cited as one of those.
Another point made in these recommendations is to go back on the previous government’s decision to record fewer “non-crime hate incidents” – even if that, too, was something wrangled from the Tory cabinet with difficulty.
Now, this new recommended set of policies has opponents worried that it would result in anything from the ability to catch those who pose actual danger to the public, to suppressing free speech.
“This new approach risks swamping already stretched counter-extremism interveners and counter-terror police with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of new cases, making it more likely dangerous people will be missed,” Policy Exchange’s Paul Stott and Andrew Gilligan are quoted as saying.
They added that, “Some of the definitions of extremism also threaten free speech and legitimate political debate.”
