STEPHEN GLOVER: In a spirit of calmness, let us admit the police are sometimes guilty of double standards – and race relations can suffer

Tech billionaire Elon Musk says civil war in ­Britain is ‘inevit­able’. He’s ­talking out of the top of his hat.

It’s difficult to know whether this spate of riots will fizzle out in a week or so or persist until autumn. Although there is no prospect of ­imminent civil war, it must be admitted that we are a deeply divided and increasingly polarised society.

People look at the same events and come to diametrically opposite conclusions, having seemingly made up their minds in advance. This is evident in heated discussions about whether there is ‘two-tier policing’ in Britain.

The Government, police bosses and most progressive people vehemently deny that it exists. The alignment of progressives with the boys in blue is striking since such people are often keen to find fault with the police.

On the other side of the argument, Mr Musk, Nigel Farage and sundry Tory MPs all assert that there’s ample proof of two-tier policing. The nub of their allegations is that the police are more indulgent of non-white protesters than of white ones.

Is this true? It shouldn’t be too difficult to examine recent events in a spirit of fairness and calm, and come at least to a tentative conclusion.

Such calmness was ­regrettably absent on ­Monday when Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley knocked to the floor the microphone of a Sky News reporter who had asked him: ‘Are we going to end two-tier policing, sir?’ It was a petulant, unbefitting reaction, for which he has rightly apologised.

I fear many of the concerns about two-tier policing are valid. I don’t say that ­courageous bobbies on the front line are deliberate practitioners. Nor do I believe that among police bosses it is necessarily an instrument of policy. They may simply be softer on non-white ­protesters out of a terror of being accused of racism.

The danger, of course, is that social cohesion and good race relations will suffer if white people reasonably believe that they are subject to a form of discrimination.

Where to start? A good place is a video taken at the weekend in which a police officer addressed a Muslim crowd outside a mosque in Stoke-on-Trent. He said: ‘If there are any weapons, get rid of them. We’re not going to make any arrests.’

It may not be conclusive proof of two-tier policing. Perhaps the officer, ­confronted by a large and potentially violent crowd, was being prudently ­emollient. Yet I ask — ­clinging to my precepts of calmness and fairness — whether we can easily imagine a policeman addressing a crowd of possibly armed white people in such mild tones.

Item two is the events in the Bordesley Green area of Birmingham, where large groups of men, some waving Palestinian flags and ­carrying weapons, gathered on ­Monday evening. They were reportedly expecting a ‘far-Right’ demo, which didn’t materialise.

This didn’t stop the mob attacking passing cars, ­forcing journalists to ­withdraw, and smashing up a pub. A white man was punched and kicked, sustaining quite serious injuries. There were no police visible and no arrests were made.

Were they taken by ­surprise? No. A senior officer in West Midlands Police said they were aware of the planned demonstration, and had met local community leaders, with whom they have ‘really strong relations’, to discuss ‘the style of policing we needed to deliver’. That amounted to none at all.

In other words, community leaders were allowed to shape the police response, which turned out to be woefully inadequate. A man was assaulted and serious ­damage done. The police were remarkably laid back, as, subsequently, was Home Office minister and ­Birmingham MP Jess ­Phillips, who declined to ­condemn the miscreants.

Still rooted in a spirit of fairness, I ask whether a riot by far-Right hooligans would have been handled by police in a similar way. I very much doubt it. Sir Mark Rowley has warned rioters that ‘we will come after you’. Will the police now come after the Muslim thugs who rampaged through Bordesley Green?

I accept that, if a mosque is threatened by a mob, local Muslims have a right to defend it, as they did with commendable restraint last week in Southport. (At a ­Liverpool mosque they went one better, handing out food to antagonistic demonstrators.) But the mayhem in Bordesley Green was ­vigilantism run wild.

Nonetheless, Sir Mark stuck to his guns yesterday, and rejected accusations of two-tier policing as ‘complete nonsense’. He even said those making the claims were putting officers at risk.

Some of the accusations against the police are probably misplaced. For example, Nigel Farage and others have suggested that the authorities soft-peddled last month when there were disturbances in Harehills, Leeds, after children from a Roma family had been taken into care. Vehicles were set on fire and a police car overturned.

The police certainly took a softer approach in Harehills than in more recent ­confrontations with far-Right thugs, but they may have lacked the manpower, or wished to avoid an escalation. They have made 27 arrests and charged four people since the disorder.

The police’s intermittent tolerance of anti-Semitic chants during marches in London can’t be defended. In June, pro-Gaza activists created chaos on Tower Bridge by blocking traffic and setting off flares. Police restored order without ­making arrests. There have, though, been numerous arrests since the marches began last autumn, and some police injuries.

Nor is it possible to banish the memory of several police officers ‘taking the knee’ during a Black Lives Matter protest outside Downing Street in June 2020. That really was a political statement. The officers concerned suffered no disciplinary action.

What makes the police sometimes indulge minority groups? It is a fear of being accused of racism, or of being blamed for exacerbating racial tensions.

This was evident in the police’s reluctance to pursue gangs, largely composed of Asian and especially Muslim men, which groomed young girls in several northern towns. A 2013 report by the Commons Home Affairs Committee judged that the fear of being seen as racist may have hindered the authorities in detecting and preventing abuse.

The secretary to a 2022 report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse told a newspaper: ‘We need to break the culture where people are worried that they might be accused of being racist just because they record factual information.’

It goes without saying that the vast majority of Muslims had nothing to do with these vile practices, just as they are overwhelmingly law-­abiding. The mob in Bordesley Green is no more representative of Muslims than the thugs who smashed their way into a Rotherham hotel housing asylum seekers are representative of whites.

But the police should beware of the self-righteous defence trotted out by the likes of Sir Mark Rowley. So too must the Government, which shouldn’t let its ­political self-interest in not alienating traditional Labour Muslim voters stand in the way of what’s right for the country.

In a spirit of calmness and fairness, let us admit that the police are sometimes guilty of double standards. Unless this ceases, race relations are bound to suffer.