Rejecting British values, marching unwanted down the streets and covering their faces in public. What does a terrorist look like, again?

They are ‘thugs’ because they are British.

They are ‘morons’ because they are white. They are rioters, hooligans, skinheads, Far Right, troublemakers, hate-filled protesters, because they look and sound like they come from here.

We don’t want to think our country is capable of a word easy to use about others, and much harder to say to ourselves. Never mind that thug is Indian, moron is American, hooligan is Irish and skinheads, as far as I can recall, didn’t like the Queen.

But it’s really simple. The right word is defined, in both the dictionary and the law. And it’s the word we’d use if anyone else was organising riots across the country and sapping the country’s resources and goodwill.

If a mob of brown-skinned people had tried to burn a hotel down because they didn’t much fancy the residents, then as a country we wouldn’t just wait for it to rain and everyone to quietly go home.

If crowds of people who called themselves good Muslims but hadn’t set foot in a mosque for years were messaging each other about meeting up in a car park for a pitched battle with police officers, we’d expect them to be sent to Belmarsh for a few years.

The fact that ‘we’ as a country aren’t using the word – that our politicians, media, police aren’t saying it – does not mean the authorities aren’t thinking it. The Crown Prosecution Service says Far Right terrorism has increased in the UK in recent years, and the fact several of their groups have been proscribed under anti-terror laws is why these riots are being organised by social media figures.

With riots across the north and Midlands, and more than 400 arrests, there’s a good chance that a man nicked for swinging a plank at a copper will, once his phone and internet history is examined, either be charged with a terror offence, or lead detectives to someone else who will be. That takes time, and resources the police have little of.

But it would probably help if ‘we’ as a country said the word now, for the simple reason that it might help. Those who genuinely want to protest would think twice about joining a march and getting sucked into a mob. Those vying for leadership of the Conservative Party wouldn’t suggest the way to win an election is to keep these criminals happy. And ‘we’, as a country, might stop and wonder how it is that we have bred terrorists of our own.

Those behind this focused on the poor and left behind, the hopeless, the angry. They radicalised them, groomed them, isolated them, and told them it was someone else’s fault. Precisely the same happened with the blackshirts in the 1930s, with the IRA, and yes, when ISIS recruited idiots, morons, and lifelong troublemakers to the cause.

If we called them all the same thing, we might decide they need similar solutions. Of those in jail for terror offences about a third are considered Far Right by the Home Office, but it rises to almost half of those referred to Prevent. Is that intervention working so brilliantly for white terrorists that they don’t end up in jail, or – which may be more likely, considering – when they step up to something worse, do we just call it something different?

Perhaps we call it affray, or tax evasion, or assault, or racially-aggravated. Maybe we find more excuses for people whose skin, faith, or language puts them in the majority. Maybe we’ve overlooked the causes, triggers, solutions, punishments, because we called it crime and not terrorism.

And if it were unprocessed refugees hurling rocks at nurses on their way to provide emergency cover in a hospital where they were treating the victims, we wouldn’t call this ‘unrest’.

We’d call it terrorism.

The fact that ‘we’ as a country aren’t using the word – that our politicians, media, police aren’t saying it – does not mean the authorities aren’t thinking it. The Crown Prosecution Service says Far Right terrorism has increased in the UK in recent years, and the fact several of their groups have been proscribed under anti-terror laws is why these riots are being organised by social media figures.

With riots across the north and Midlands, and more than 400 arrests, there’s a good chance that a man nicked for swinging a plank at a copper will, once his phone and internet history is examined, either be charged with a terror offence, or lead detectives to someone else who will be. That takes time, and resources the police have little of.

But it would probably help if ‘we’ as a country said the word now, for the simple reason that it might help. Those who genuinely want to protest would think twice about joining a march and getting sucked into a mob. Those vying for leadership of the Conservative Party wouldn’t suggest the way to win an election is to keep these criminals happy. And ‘we’, as a country, might stop and wonder how it is that we have bred terrorists of our own.

 

Because if you look at it objectively, it’s hard to call it anything else. These people aren’t patriots. They don’t respect our institutions, don’t seem to understand our way of life, are neither use nor adornment to the country as a whole, and, to boot, COVER THEIR FACES IN PUBLIC.

There are plenty of racists who don’t try to burn asylum seekers alive. There are lots of people who want to thump police officers, but who don’t organise online flyers, buy a bus ticket, and bring their own cocaine to the party. Those who have that extra level of commitment have an extra level of culpability.

They certainly terrorised the people in the hotels, the shopkeepers, the local residents, the nurses. There are British citizens watching the news terrified to walk down the street, to display their beliefs, to attend their church. If that was white Christians feeling so scared and attacked, you’d call it terrorism. If it’s British Christians, British Muslims, Black Britons, why won’t you do the same?

Lawyers can pick over and through the legalities. But the nation needs to get its head around the fact that, if as suggested earlier this year “extreme protests” like Just Stop Oil could be considered terrorist groups, that it should be doubly so for people who do far worse than occupy a motorway gantry or chuck orange powder around.

Even if they lack an organisational structure, they have their leaders – sinfluencers like Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, and Laurence Fox, who stoke up the hatred for reasons of their own careers. They never throw a punch, never condemn, never get their shoes dirty, but they are hate preachers just the same.

Would Clacton have voted for a man who incites terror? Would there be podcasts, or media gigs, or excuses made for it? Some might say because none have been murdered yet, it’s not quite the same as Anjem Choudary or Abu Hamza riling up their followers. But the word ‘yet’ is doing a lot of work there, and it’s unlikely any court would think an absence of bodies a good enough defence, for an Islamist.

To me, it boils down to the fact they don’t share British values, and they want people to be afraid. That’s terror, in my book: a wish to make the world worse, with violence. White or brown, Christian or not, they’re terrorists, recruited from losers and destined to fail.