5 February 2025
As I write this piece there are more worrying incidents coming to light in the UK.
On Monday, it was reported that a 15-year-old boy (white) was murdered at a secondary school in Sheffield. Reports suggest that he was stabbed approximately 15 times. All Saints Catholic High School is located on Granville Road, in a reasonably good area of Sheffield. A bit further out from the school is the area of Manor Top which has a mixed reputation, and the school may also have pupils from Burngreave and Pitsmoor, which also have mixed reputations.
A few days prior to this the school was the site of ‘an incident’ and was placed in lockdown.
All Saints head teacher Sean Pender had sent a message to parents on 29 January about a lockdown at the site.
In it, he said the action was due to “threatening behaviour between a small number of students”.
ACC Butterfield was asked during the news conference about the reports but the officer said she could not share any information relating to it.
She concluded the press conference by urging people to avoid speculation and the sharing of content online “which could be distressing to them [the family] and detrimental to our investigation”.
Source: BBC News 3 February 2025
As usual, the police are releasing the minimal details about the alleged perpetrator, other than to say that a 15-year-old boy has been arrested: they have given no further information. Social media has been awash with comments regarding the alleged perpetrator and it has been suggested that he is of Albanian origin.
The investigation is being managed by South Yorkshire Police, who did not cover themselves in glory during the Rotherham grooming saga.
I was raised in Sheffield and Rotherham and I find it difficult to see what has happened to what we used to call “the People’s Democratic Republic of South Yorkshire”. It was a staunch Labour-supporting area comprising steel works, coal mines and heavy industry. There was a strong sense of community that, with the decline of the industrial base, has been lost forever. My relatives all lament what has happened and indeed knew what was going on with the grooming gangs, but the council and police didn’t want to upset the ethnic communities involved. (Although it seemed to be OK to them to ignore the communities whose children and youngsters were being raped.) This seems to be continuing, albeit on a much-reduced scale.
The South Yorkshire police, and its predecessor, Sheffield City police, have a history of poor policing, dating back to the 1960s case of the Hartley brothers. The brothers were low-level criminals and were taken in for questioning and were interrogated by police using rhino tail whips. The subsequent injuries were photographed and finished up in the national press.
Then there is of course the infamous case of the Orgreave ‘riots’.
71 picketers were charged with riot and 24 with violent disorder. At the time, riot was punishable by life imprisonment. The trials collapsed when the evidence given by the police was deemed “unreliable”. … In 2016, Alan Billings, the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, admitted that the SYP had been “dangerously close to being used as an instrument of state”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle of Orgreave
Prior to this the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigated the conduct of South Yorkshire police during and after the Hillsborough Stadium disaster. On 12 July 2013, it was reported that the IPCC had found that in addition to the now 164 police statements known to have been altered, a further 55 police officers had changed their statements. Deborah Glass, deputy chair of the IPCC said, “We know the people who have contacted us are the tip of the iceberg.”
This is the cause of a general feeling of discontent and restlessness in the white working-class community and the lack of trust in the local police. At the time of the riots last year, this white working-class sector, who were the ones rioting, were described as ‘far right’ by Keir Starmer. This has resulted in the Labour Party being despised by many in this community. Indeed, I was brought up in a coal mining village close to Rotherham and Sheffield, my father was a union rep for Aslef and the centres of the village were the working men’s club and miners’ welfare clubs. These votes are now lost to Labour but have been replaced by the ethnic votes.
My family and I resent being referred to as ‘far right’ and now prefer the epithet non-Labour!
Politics has now passed this community and it’s hard to find a Labour MP from a working-class background: many are from middle-class homes. There is an ex coal miner who is an MP: Lee Anderson of the Reform Party was a miner for ten years. This helps to explain why Reform is gaining votes from Labour as well as the Conservative Party. The latest poll shows that Reform are leading in the polls, and, as they came second to 98 Labour MPs at the election, many of the new Labour MPs are getting mutinous. I don’t do predictions but many politicos in the know forecast that Starmer will be rolled before the end of the year. It is rumoured that two cabinet colleagues are already counting numbers.
