Will we learn anything from the Harehills riot?

Can anything be learned from last week’s riot in Harehills, Leeds? It seems that not much has changed since the full-scale rioting of the 1980s in Handsworth, Birmingham, where I lived at the time. As in Harehills, the spark was a hostile interaction between public authorities and a particular ethnic group. The result was an eruption of senseless vandalism and violence, which the police could not control. In Harehills, a police car was flipped, fires started and a bus destroyed. In Handsworth in 1985, the riot resulted in tragedy, as two brothers who ran a local Post Office were murdered by arson.

Predictably, many on social media were keen to apportion blame before learning the facts about Harehills. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage wrongly blamed ‘the politics of the subcontinent’ spilling out on to the streets of Leeds. In reality, the flashpoint was the removal of five children from a Roma family.

Once disorder started, people from many different backgrounds joined in the mayhem – possibly even from other parts of the city. However, many Harehills locals and community leaders deserve credit for trying to calm things down and later putting out the fires.

The authorities were somewhat less helpful in maintaining order. The response of the Roma community seems to have taken them completely by surprise. The root of this is a basic cross-cultural misunderstanding. The key article of faith of multiculturalism is that many cultures can coexist harmoniously, while fully retaining their identities. However, as Rakib Ehsan pointed out in the Spectator this week, this becomes problematic when dealing with tight-knit communities with fiercely held moral and cultural codes. Why? Put simply, because our values sometimes differ.

Public-sector employees are routinely expected to preside over, intervene in and police diverse communities they struggle to comprehend. Think of the violent sectarian clashes among Eritreans in Camberwell, south London earlier this year, between supporters of President Afweki and those in the diaspora who consider him a dictator. Or take last week’s disorder in Whitechapel, east London, sparked by a violent crackdown on student protesters in Bangladesh. These issues are a minefield for the state to manage.

The old adage that ‘law follows custom’ applies to societies with common values, but begs serious questions in places where no such commonality exists. Of course, all citizens must be treated equally, but the state must reconcile this with the differences that evidently exist between them.

I have great sympathy for our police officers, social workers and other public officials in this regard. For a generation, our complacent political elites ignored these challenges. Instead, they resorted to trumpeting trite clichés like ‘diversity is our strength’. The academic consensus that high ethnic diversity reduces social trust is blithely ignored, as are public concerns about mass immigration. This makes a challenging situation even worse.

A strong Singaporean-style integration policy is probably impractical in a society as liberal as Britain’s. But we urgently need some sort of integration policy. We need to find ways of pulling our society together in the long term. Getting us to ‘sing together’, as former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew would say. At present, we have the opposite. We are told to celebrate our differences, while our political elite continues its addiction to mass immigration undaunted.

There is a second, glaring lesson to be learned from Harehills. Much was made of the tactical withdrawal by the police from parts of the area in the late evening of the riot. Chillingly, a Leeds resident informed me that their lives would have been at risk had they not done so. But a wider withdrawal of policing has been decades in the making. The world in which Dixon of Dock Green-type figures manned neighbourhood police stations, lived in local police houses and walked a steady beat on a daily basis are long gone.

The modern trend is for fewer, but larger units. The small police stations that once scattered our city districts have been bulldozed and replaced by large, fortified central command centres. As a result, the eyes and ears of the police have been lost – as has their personal link with the communities they serve.

The situation in Harehills was only made worse by its social and economic deprivation. There is no question that this is entirely the product of public policy. An indifference to the loss of manufacturing years ago stripped Leeds of well-paid industrial jobs. Consequently, welfare dependency is widespread. The disappearance of industries that once formed the area’s social foundation has left Harehills fractured. Now, its many different communities – Romani, Bengali, Pakistani, Czech and white British, to name a few – lead parallel and sometimes separate lives. They have their own shops, community centres and places of worship.

This is a world our elites have created. If challenges now present themselves, it is because they have been casually ignored. Twenty years ago, David Goodhart asked whether Britain was becoming ‘too diverse’ to sustain itself. Today, that question is being answered, but not in the way our elites imagined.

Britain requires a long hard march of social integration. The problem is, our political masters haven’t taken a single step. They must do so, or else there will be many more Harehills to come.

William Clouston is leader of the Social Democratic Party.