Many correspondents appear to have been mystified by my reference to the Riot Act of 1714 in this column last week Riot Act (desmondswaynemp.com) . I’ll elaborate: the historical context was a series of riots from 1710 onwards including the 1714 Coronation Riots, sparked by the arrival of our first Hanoverian George. All of which was made much more complex by a change of government from Tories to Whigs, High Church agitation, and the possibility of an alternative monarchy under the Old Pretender, James Stuart (son of James II, who was deposed in 1688).
The Act enabled the proper authorities to require the dispersal of any gathering of more than 12 persons within an hour of the proclamation, on pain of death!
The efficiency of legislating for a modernised version of that measure is that it relieves the police and prosecuting authorities of the difficulties in securing evidence of any criminal act, beyond merely being present at the scene, after the warning that everyone must disperse.
There are all sorts of tensions within our nation that politicians, Clergy, and communities need to address. But I believe that it is a mistake to discuss how they might be addressed, or who and what are the causes of them, in the context of the riots to which they may have been a contributing factor. To do so, in my estimate, is to come too close to explaining them as if they may be an understandable, even a predictable expression of social discontent. The mere inference of such causality has already got our own Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner into very hot water.
The proper and immediate concern is the one that the authorities have quite properly already taken: to respond with force and swift sentencing.
My contention is that this would be assisted in future, were we to legislate for a new riot act.
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The alleged author of the original misinformation on social media, that the Southport murders were the work of an asylum seeker who had arrived on a cross-channel dingy, has been arrested and detained. The key issue for any conviction will hinge, not on whether the information was false, but upon her intent -the mens rea.
Incitement to violence and disorder is a crime. irrespective of veracity of the information provided.
The Government’s suggestion that they might now reopen the distinction within Online safety Act between what is lawful and what may be harmful, strikes me as very unwise. Parliament invested a great deal of time and debate on this distinction, and the provisions of the Act are only now being sequentially implemented. Enabling governments to censor information that they deem ‘harmful’ though if falls short of ‘criminal’ is to provide a standing challenge to freedom of expression.
So, what if the fake news on social media had actually been correct, what if the Southport murders had indeed, been the work of an asylum seeker?
The suggestion by a couple of my correspondents that, had this been the case, the violent public expression of anger would have been understandable, is utterly grotesque. The response of rioting to the tragedy of Southport is no more justifiable than would have been the case had there been any such public reaction to the monstrous murder in 1996 of 16 children by Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane. The radical depravity of mankind is equally distributed between all classes and ethnicities.
Divine intervention is our only possible redemptor in that respect.
The connection, now under investigation, between rioters and football hooligans may be instructive.
Some people just enjoy violent disorder as a form of recreation. They need little excuse.
The purpose of the state must be to provide a sufficient deterrent: bring back the Riot Act.