A boy throws a missile at police during Wednesday’s Epsom ‘protest’
Last weekend a woman reported that she had been raped by a gang of men outside a church in Epsom, Surrey (this is a few miles from where I live), between 2am and 4am after leaving the Labyrinth night-club. Over the past few days, the police have not issued any descriptions of the alleged attackers, leading people online to “put two and two together” and assume that this means the attackers must have been asylum seekers living in nearby hotels or houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) or at the very least were not white. Comments like “no description is a description” and “it’s those doctors and engineers again” can be found under any link to a newspaper article about the alleged incident on Facebook. Yesterday, a ‘demonstration’ took place in Epsom town centre, in the middle of rush hour, allegedly by “angry locals” but no doubt supported by organised groups of racists from outside town; their supporters on social media have been taunting the police whose job it was to contain them, calling them ‘traitors’ and the demonstrators “English patriots who have had enough”, cheering as ‘projectiles’ are thrown at them and they took a step back as the ‘demonstrators’ moved forward up Epsom high street. Epsom is fairly posh, with the exception of a council estate (or former council estate) to the north of the town centre; the seat was solidly Tory from its inception in 1974, regularly returning its MPs with more than 50% or even 60%, until 2024 when a Liberal Democrat was elected. It is unlikely that most of the ‘demonstrators’ depicted are anything like local.
Complaints about “two-tier policing”, first heard after the riots following the 2024 Southport triple murder, have been heard in relation to this ‘protest’, both on social media and on the new-right TV channels like Talk TV. The complaint is that the police are nowhere near as heavy-handed with pro-Palestinian protesters in London as they are with “decent honest English” when they protest against “third world vermin raping our women”. The obvious reason is that these mobs, including many with convictions for domestic violence and other criminal behaviour, went on the rampage after the Southport murders in an attempted pogrom against Britain’s ethnic minorities and immigrant communities; they did not distinguish between the two then and still do not. Demonstrations against the Gaza genocide have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and many of the arrests have been for politically manufactured speech crimes such as holding up placards supporting Palestine Action, the banned group that sabotaged military hardware intended for use by the Israeli military. The protests have been subject to restrictions: a demonstration outside BBC Broadcasting House was banned because it was near a synagogue on a Sunday, while an order was issued that pots and pans not be used (to ensure that the noise could be heard in the Israeli embassy) in one demonstration in Kensington. The policing of the ‘demonstration’ in Epsom yesterday was not especially heavy-handed; riot police were deployed with shields because previous protests in similar circumstances based on similar accusations have turned violent.
The conspiracy theory as to why no description of the attackers has been published by the police is that that they are asylum seekers and that the police and politicians are more concerned for asylum seekers’ welfare than for the rights of the ordinary citizen. A variant on it is that the attackers will claim to be under 18 and that the police will not identify them after arrest or charge because of this claim. (A man touting this theory has been putting out videos on Twitter, alleging that the police know who the men are and are lying to the public.) Ex-cops both on Twitter and in the new-right media have been repeating variations on these theories when they should know better. One reason they have not been able to release descriptions of the men is that they are still patiently trying to get information out of a traumatised victim; another is that they do indeed know who they are but need to gather actionable evidence to arrest them, so that they will not have to release them under investigation a few days later. Another reason is that they are trying to find corroborating evidence for the claim and maybe even that they are having trouble doing that. (A few years ago in Oxford, a teenage girl reported being raped by two men who arrived in a van; police could not find any evidence that said van was in the area at all, and closed the case.) The fact that the area of the alleged rape is covered by CCTV has been amply mentioned by the racists on social media, but this possibility never occurs to them.
Yes, no word from the police for several days might look suspicious, but sometimes the police have to watch what information they put in the public domain to avoid endangering the inquiry. Racists, the sort who assume that such an attack must be the doing of a Black or Asian person, an immigrant or an asylum seeker, do not have the right to have their assumptions confirmed or addressed by the police when they are trying to solve a report of a serious crime.
