THE ugly scenes outside Westminster this week, when far-right Brexit protesters harassed and tried to intimidate female journalists and politicians, were disturbing but not surprising.
Here in the north we are quite rightly concerned with the implications Brexit has for the economy and the stability of our island.
But one of the major outworkings of the process has been the division caused between communities, not just in our own narrow sense but in a much wider and more worrying front.
Brexit and the claimed advantages – the now infamous £350 million on a bus – have been shown to be fabricated. But let’s put the economics aside and look at the way immigration was used to terrify people into voting Leave. Claims of invasions from Turkey and Bulgaria, the talk of taking back control of borders was all aimed at making people think that their country was in peril.
It is easy to debunk those myths by using facts about the benefit of foreign workers to the agri-food sector, skilled labour for the NHS and the already struggling hospitality sector. It is much harder to undo the damage of a feeling, a fear, a preying on the most vulnerable. Making working-class British people think the economic problems they face are down to those who come to work from elsewhere rather than years of incompetent and greedy misrule, under both the Conservatives and the last Labour administration, is much harder.
The abuse dished out to Sky News journalist Kay Burley, who revealed this week she has a dedicated security detail just to get her in and out of work, to Guardian columnist Dawn Foster and to Tory MP Anna Soubry made for difficult viewing. The mainly – and when I say mainly, I mean almost entirely – male protesters who shouted threatening, insulting and sexual harassment at the women, all under the noses of the Metropolitan Police, were not, I believe, reflective of the majority of Leave voters.
However, the growing confidence of the far right is deeply concerning when you think of the murder of MP Jo Cox just before the Brexit referendum. What Brexit has done is give those with racist and radical views wind. It has allowed the growth of the far right, a group of thugs who thrive in political chaos and peddle their false message of hate.
Among some of the footage posted online was a clip of protesters mistaking pro-EU activist Femi Oluwole for Labour MP David Lammy. The only similarity between the two? They are both black men. This depressingly sums up the mentality of those responsible.
There are those who seek to defend this thuggish behaviour, claiming those who stand for election or who work in the public eye such as journalists are fair game, that it is just free speech. These are the kind of justifications I have heard before.
While Brexit has opened up a new war in Britain, closer to home and the racism on display is very similar to the ugly sectarianism that we have endured for years. Covering the Orange Order parade at Woodvale in 2015, I was followed around by a small gang of men and women who shouted filthy sexual and sectarian abuse. I like to think I am pretty strong and, as a security journalist, not easily rattled, but to have such nasty intimidation in such a close proximity was upsetting. I felt for those under attack this week and sympathised with their predicament. I reported feeling intimidated to a police officer at the time, who told me there was nothing he could do about it. Despite me making a police complaint and two eyewitnesses making statements on my behalf the ringleader was never charged.
Just as the thugs at Westminster are not representative of all Leave voters, the small mob at Woodvale are not representative of loyalism.
What must not happen is that such behaviour becomes the norm, that it goes unchallenged and unpunished.
I hope the yellow vest-wearing moron shouting “You’re not even British” and “I’ll give you a war” at a black police officer at Westminster this week is prosecuted and that example acts as a warning to those who use Brexit as an excuse for mob rule.
Because the angry white men abusing female journalists in London this week were not created by Brexit; their thuggish misogynistic traits did not suddenly appear out of nowhere in June 2016.
This is not a free-speech issue but a law-and-order one. Trying to intimidate journalists from doing their job? Now that is an attack on free speech.
And it is a problem that is being permitted to flourish due to dithering, incompetence and uncertainty.
It is an issue that cannot be allowed to continue and police and politicians must take collective responsibility to stop this rise of the violent right, before it is too late and there are more Jo Coxes.