Can Whitehall stop the riots?

After a night of unrest in Belfast and elsewhere, the family of Stephen Ogilvie , the man hospitalised by an attack on Monday night, issued a statement via the Police Service of Northern Ireland. In line with similar incidents threatening “community cohesion”, the Ogilvies pleaded for calm, commenting: “We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work.”

The statement was laced with officialese: and Ogilvie is reportedly from Rathcoole, a predominantly Loyalist housing estate north of Belfast. Was the suspiciously polished family statement, many wondered , issued by the Government on the family’s behalf? And if so, why? Social media, unsurprisingly, decided “the State” dictated the Ogilvies’ response. Victims of controversial killings involving ethnic minorities, it was alleged, are manipulated by government spinners. And so the scene was set, digital barricades erected, culture warriors firing barbs across no-man’s-land. It’s hardly the favoured territory of  officialdom, with police comms teams too often flailing in the septic tank of 24/7 social media.

What, though, is the truth? Are families pressurised to give statements sympathetic to official narratives? How seriously does the Government take threats concerning racial tension? And, as Britain enters another potential summer of unrest, are police forces prepared?

First, the specifics of the family statement. Given the severity of Ogilvie’s injuries, a police family liaison officer — or FLO — would be assigned to support them throughout the investigation. Police FLOs are widely considered to be a success story, offering support to victims during distressing circumstances. Nonetheless, they are also detectives with a hotline to the Senior Investigating Officer. Furthermore, victims’ families do receive advice on issuing statements. Statements might be discussed over cups of tea, FLOs explaining how they might impact future criminal proceedings. All parties are likely to have been briefed by force comms officers, keen to dampen down contentious issues. Note how, for example, Henry Nowak’s father gave a full statement — one criticising police actions around his son’s death — only after Vickrum Digwa’s trial.

It seems likely, then, that the Ogilvies’ statement would have been “managed” via the FLO and the wider PSNI . This is standard practice. Suggestions the security services might involve themselves in such matters, in my experience, are wide of the mark. Given the uniquely fraught circumstances Northern Irish officers operate under, not to mention the forthcoming marching season , any public statement would attract the interest of a three-ring circus of community and political groups. Added to this is the Sinn Féin majority administration’s pro-immigration policies, making the party vulnerable to allegations of being “soft” on issues of race. This is why John Boutcher, the (English) PSNI chief constable, tiptoes daily across a minefield of political sensitivities. This isn’t to say there wasn’t some authenticity to the Ogilvies’ statement, nor that the family’s contribution wasn’t heartfelt, but their words seem almost certain to have been polished.

Is the Ogilvie case, then, an example of comms management particular to post-Troubles Belfast? Or does the British government routinely control public sentiment in cases involving potential disorder? My experience working in counterterrorism suggests it does, albeit subtly, even if things have invariably evolved. Techniques pioneered to prevent post-terror attack riots are deployed against vaccine-sceptics and those on the “ radical Right .” The Government clearly is spooked: only this week, Liz Kendall , Secretary of State for Science, declared the Government would urgently seek to update the Online Safety Act so that it requires services “to take quicker action to remove illegal content circulating during times of crisis.”

Even during my police service, I witnessed how genuinely petrified senior police officers and civil servants are of wide-scale public disorder. The 2001 Oldham riots, involving three nights of racially motivated violence, focused their minds. The context, by 9/11 that September, was that of Muslim communities targeted by the far-Right after any terrorist incident. During the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in 2005, working in counterterrorism intelligence, I saw police commanders repeatedly ask the same question: how do we stop Muslim communities from going up in flames? How do we stop another Oldham? Liberal-minded officers, such as Brian Paddick , were accused of cravenness. Others sounded like colonial governors, fretting over restless natives. That was then. Now, we have pro-Gaza independent MPs exercising de facto control over police operations.

“Senior police officers and civil servants are genuinely petrified of wide-scale public disorder.”…