My Take | Unlike Hong Kong, Starmer has acted decisively to quell riots
- The British PM did well in cracking down quickly but then he was not hampered by foreign interference like HK was in 2019 and even now
British Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer has turned out to be a tough law-and-order guy. I commend him for speedily ending, at least for now, the riots that threatened to engulf British society early this month. If only Hong Kong had done the same in the summer of 2019!
UK authorities have taken to quickly arresting and prosecuting riot suspects, including keyboard warriors for incitement. The message: riot today, jail tomorrow. The wheel of justice has spun so fast it’s scarcely believable; courts were ready to operate round-the-clock, 24 hours non-stop, to process offenders.
When chaos threatens, you end that first and ask questions later. Now let’s hope he will have the courage to address the underlying social problems. The murder of children was the trigger, but surely it wasn’t just about unchecked migration and far-right agitation. Worsening poverty, joblessness, deteriorating public services, especially in healthcare, and the disenfranchisement of the young and poor all contributed. The pent-up anger burst the dam this month.
Maybe our two societies are not so different.
Starmer has had plenty of practice. As the then director of public prosecution during riots sparked by the police killing of Mark Duggan, a black man, in 2011, his office put away almost 1,300 people. This time, it took authorities less than two weeks to arrest nearly 1,000 people with half of them charged by now. By comparison, it took Hong Kong police 20 months to arrest more than 10,200 people in connection with the anti-government protests, or roughly 127 per week.
People have been comparing the situations in the UK and Hong Kong. After watching Starmer in action, I wish our former chief executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor had been similarly decisive when dealing with the worst riots since at least the 1967 disturbance – if not ever.
Of course, Starmer has certain advantages over Lam. He could do whatever he deemed necessary without his Five Eyes peers criticising, politicising and distorting every step and mishap the authorities made. Children have been charged in both places, but Hong Kong got all the criticism and sanctions, even today, while there is barely a word from Washington and other Western allies about the UK.