Tag Archives: riots

I won’t forget the 2024 election in a hurry.

Not only were there the expected wins of PPCs I had been excitedly anticipating sitting in the House of Commons for years, but there were a steady stream of wins in places where most people, or at least me, thought our chances of victory were somewhere between pretty low and non-existent.

It was the day we finally didn’t have a Tory government anymore.

Also, at a deeper level, it was the day when what Lib Dems say or do started to matter again. How much it matters is up for debate, but when the exit poll showed us back as the third party with record gains, it was clear that what we say or do is of far greater consequence than it had been a few short weeks before.  In terms West Wing watchers will be familiar with,  it felt like we were closer to the ideal of never doubting that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens could change the world.

Since then, the biggest crisis in Britain has been the riots. I struggle to imagine anything that could be more diametrically opposed to the values of community and care that ran through the whole of our election campaign.

So how did we respond then? In summary, and I did some quick google searching to check I hadn’t missed anything obvious, our response was to appoint a government advisor and adopt the relevant APPG’s definition of Islamophobia. Now, of course the government should have an independent advisor on Islamophobia and a legal definition of Islamophobia would help public bodies in taking against it, but I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that the lack of either of these things was a significant cause of the riots.

Surely the end goal of our policy must be that riots of this sort (and any other sort) are never seen again in Britain.