Author name: Shay Bottomley

The riots in the United Kingdom have brought the concept of two-tier policing into the limelight once again as the government seems more concerned in targeting those protesting against the consequences of mass immigration than actual criminals.

As we reported earlier, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised a crackdown on rioters with “standing armies” of police officers and 24-hour turnarounds in the courts. His focus, however, on right-wing rioters has leant itself to the nickname “two-tier Keir.”

When it was Brits rioting over the death of George Floyd, a man who didn’t even live on the same continent as them, Starmer said “Like you, I was shocked and angered at the killing of George Floyd, and the response of President Trump and the US authorities to the peaceful protesters, to people rightly demanding justice, has been an affront to humanity. This week has shined a spotlight on the racism, discrimination and the injustice experienced by those from black and minority ethnic communities in the US, the UK, and across the world. Martin Luther King said ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Yet when it was Brits protesting the violent consequences of mass migration, he sung a completely different tune, stating; “I utterly condemn the far-right thuggery we’ve seen this weekend. Be in no doubt, those that have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law. The police will be making arrests. Individuals will be held on remand, charges will follow, and convictions will follow. I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder, whether directly, or those whipping up this action online and then running away themselves. This is not a protest, it is organized, violent thuggery, and it has no place on our streets or online.

One of the U.K.’s most left-wing newspapers, the Guardian, recently published an article in which claimed this “two-tier policing” against right-wing protesters was a “myth.” Thanks to the power of X, the article was soon “community noted” with articles from their own publication arguing that there’s two-tiered policing in the world.

“The Guardian have [sic] been telling people about two-tier policing based on race and sexuality for decades,” the note said.

One article included in the note, from January 2024, reported claims by a senior figure that policing was “institutionally racist” in the UK.

Another article from a month prior noted a study which “supports the idea that the patterns of ethnic disproportionality evident in the UK Home Office statistics cannot be explained solely or even primarily at the level of individual officer behavior or psychology because they are an outcome of an interaction between structural and institutional racism.”

A third article discusses a 300-page report claiming to find institutional misogyny, racism and homophobia persist within the London Metropolitan police.

In other words, they’re fine with the concept of two-tiered policing, but only when they can try to claim it’s in a way that serves their political ideology.

Others questioned the reliability of using the Guardian as a source.