I predicted a riot

The violence must be condemned – but anyone who was surprised by it wasn't paying attention

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / StreetMic LiveStream

They can hardly say they weren’t warned. For years, some of us have been trying to alert the political elites to the resentment that had been building in some of our communities over the fraught issues of immigration and integration. We could see that the patience of many people in these places was being tested to the limit.

And even when we tried to express those warnings – as I did – in temperate terms and from a left-wing perspective, we were accused of ‘scaremongering’ and ‘pandering to the racists’.

‘Diversity is our strength,’ we were told. That was the stock response. As though it answered every question and concern. None of these tensions would exist, they tried to convince us, if it weren’t for those pesky right-wing politicians and newspapers ‘stoking the flames of division’.

And now this.