Disorder UPDATE II: ‘No-one loots us and we don’t care’

We live in strange times indeed when Milwall fans can pose as the forces of sanity and law and order and not be laughed out of the room but here we are...

Eltham, earlier this afternoon

Large numbers of vigilantes have apparently been gathering all day in Eltham and there is ample evidence on the social networks that this particular coalescence has the fingerprints of the hard right all over it.

Certainly, the disorder has been manna from heaven for every racist and right-wing crank from here to Berchtesgaden. The usual coalition of footfall fans, the BNP and erstwhile Daily Star darlings; the EDL, banded together today to protect Eltham and now they are apparently taking their gospel on the road...

At the time of writing, reports on the social networks suggested hundreds of people were marching from Eltham to Lewisham in order to reclaim the streets. I had this confirmed by a source in contact with one of the marchers who put the march at ‘maybe three hundred people, a lot of Milwall and Charlton supporters’. More unsettlingly, there have also been various tweets suggesting that black people were being attacked indiscriminately by this vigilante group but these are as yet unconfirmed.

Eltham has a troubled history in race relations; exemplified by the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1994 and the ramifications thereof which continue to be felt to this day in our attitudes to community policing and institutional racism at the London Metropolitan Police.

Comments

Down a Rabbit-Hole

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Seán Flynn. I'm 56 years old and I have been a front-line paramedic with the London Ambulance Service in the East End for the past seven years. It's a job I love and, by and large, it's the happiest I've been in a long and varied working life. I am also an accredited GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) coach with enhanced DBS clearance; both as a coach and as a registered clinician. I recently travelled to the West Bank in order to coach three teams in the territory under the aegis of GAA Palestine, introducing the children to Gaelic football. I was lucky enough to travel first to South Bethlehem, then to the Al Am'ari Refugee Camp in Ramallah and then on to Qabatya in Jenin. It's important to note at this point however that the individual with whom I was initially due to travel, pulled out on the morning of the trip as the result of a cancelled connecting flight; leaving me to fly out on my own. As a consequ...

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