How the Far Right Built the Two Tier System
The far right’s obsession with “two tier policing” says more about their own double standards than it does about law enforcement.
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Image from REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne |
When Jimmy Savile was exposed as one of Britain’s worst child abusers, the reaction was not riots, protests, or public fury. He became a meme. People wore costumes of him for a laugh. They turned unimaginable crimes into pop culture references. But when a Muslim man is accused of sexual abuse, there is no satire, no detachment. Instead, there are street protests, bricks through windows, calls for deportation, and collective blame aimed at entire communities. The crime becomes secondary to the identity of the perpetrator.
This is the real two tier system. Not in policing, but in how crimes are perceived and responded to depending on who commits them. The outrage is weaponised when the accused is not white. And while far-right voices claim to be exposing injustice, they themselves only turn up when the accused fits a particular profile. Tommy Robinson never stood outside courtrooms when white British men were convicted of grooming offences. Nor did his followers march through towns when Christian clergy were exposed for decades of abuse. Their silence is deafening when the offender looks like them.
In Northern Ireland, there have been some of the most horrific and systemic child abuse cases in modern British history. The Brendan Smyth case, involving a Catholic priest who abused over 140 children, and the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, which exposed widespread abuse across children’s homes and religious institutions, sparked no riots, no mass street protests, no media firestorms from right-wing voices. Victims were heard in courtrooms, not outside them. There were no mobs screaming for justice. Because the perpetrators were white and often respected within their communities or institutions.
Yet now, in that same Northern Ireland, we are seeing riots over two 14-year-old boys who were charged with a serious crime. The outrage has not just been about the alleged offence. It was sparked because the court used Romanian interpreters, revealing the boys were not ethnically British. That was all it took to ignite petrol bombs, violence, and street-level fury. The reaction was not just about justice. It was about identity. About immigration. About otherness. When the accused are white and local, there is calm. When they are foreign, there is fire.
Earlier this year, a grooming gang in Bolton made up entirely of white men was sentenced for grooming and sexually abusing girls over several years. Despite the horrifying scale of abuse, not one prominent far-right account shared it. No viral videos, no marches, no claims of it being a cultural issue. The same people who screamed about “Muslim grooming gangs” were silent. Their concern was never really about victims. It was about who they could scapegoat.
Even the phrase “two tier policing” came from populist and right-wing figures such as Nigel Farage. Like many of their slogans, it began as a feeling of imagined injustice. They create it in their heads, then project it onto the world, dragging their narcissism into reality. Racism creates two tier policing. Xenophobia creates two tier policing. Transphobia creates two tier policing. It is everything but the left that brings about this system. Because when people respond to crimes differently depending on race, religion, or gender identity, the police are left to pick up the pieces and keep the peace. That is their job.
So maybe instead of crying victim while fuelling division, stop applying double standards and start treating every perpetrator the same. Then we would not need two tier policing. Because the moment we abandon fairness, the moment we let prejudice dictate who deserves outrage and who deserves forgiveness, we build the very system we claim to be fighting against.
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