Follow-up letter to local council re: fake riots

Dear Councillors,

I sent you the below letter on Tuesday 7th August in relation to your inflammatory promotion of fake news, and your attempts to foster hostility and sow division in the Kirklees community by fomenting fear.

More than one calendar week and six working days later, none of you have done me the courtesy of issuing a reply, including Imran Safdar, who is the councillor for Crosland Moor where I live, and therefore my directly accountable local representative. I also included additional Crosland Moor councillors, Jo Lawson and Alex Vickers, in the BCC list, as I have done once again with this correspondence. 

I have BCC'd rather than CC'd various individuals, as I am afraid I do not trust the integrity of the main recipients not to attempt to contact and influence other recipients were I to make their names visible. Please note there are additional undisclosed recipients on the BCC list. 

The lack of response I have received from all of the main recipients, including all of my ward councillors, clearly implies that my elected representatives hold me in contempt, and consider me "unworthy" of even the basic courtesy of an acknowledgement of my extremely serious and legitimate concerns.

This being the case, I would like to remind you of exactly what your job, and place in the community, is:

You are public servants. You serve the public, you are accountable to the public, and you work for the public. 

Your salaried positions within Kirklees Council are funded via the provision of council tax, and, as such, you are wholly accountable to those who pay it. Since I moved to Huddersfield, my household has paid close to £10,000 to Kirklees Council directly in council tax (and subsidised you further via exorbitant parking fees charged to park around the town). 

I do not give you this money willingly: rather, this money is extorted from me under duress, and you might reflect upon the fact that legitimate organisations providing quality services do not need to fund themselves by taking money from people by force. 

However, as I am forced through threats of punitive action to give you money against my will, then I certainly expect to receive what I pay for - which is your prompt and appropriate response to my concerns. 

Please let me remind you that, when you chose to stand as 'elected representatives' for the people of Kirklees, this does not just imply the representation of people who agree with you politically. When you stand for a council position, you are consenting to represent ALL the constituents in your ward, regardless of their political views. 

If you feel you are too sectarian to be able to respond professionally and appropriately to all those you represent, including those you hold political differences with, then politics certainly is not the career for you. 

I would like to underscore to you that the gravity of the issues I raised in my letter of 6th August are now more severe than ever, given that, last Wednesday 7th August, we essentially had a replica on the national stage of what we experienced in Huddersfield on Monday 5th August: that is, establishment players grossly exaggerating threats of riots and violence in order to terrorise people, when no rioting or violence is actually forthcoming.

The Guardian newspaper described the atmosphere in the country's city centres on Wednesday evening - when supposedly "100 far-right riots" were to take place - as being "like a carnival", full of happy people singing and dancing, and with little or no presence of the so-called "far-right".

That is because the actual far-right (as opposed to the people frequently mischaracterised as "far-right" simply because they have political differences with metropolitan middle-class liberals) is barely existent in this country, and of those small number of people who would legitimately qualify for this label (e.g., those who are actually threateningly aggressive and violent to ethnic minorities), they are typically low income, disorganised, and without any kind of significant support or resourcing. 

The idea that they could therefore have mobilised vast swathes of people to 100 central locations in one night is ludicrous - and the anti-racist charity, 'Hope Not Hate', has since confirmed that, much like the "Huddersfield riot", the "list of 100 riots" was a hoax. 

It wasn't indicative of any real planned events, and these demonstrations were never really going to take place.

If "the far-right" was really such a threat, the establishment wouldn't continually have to promote faked, fabricated "evidence" of this threat, would it? 

The government, national and local, is clearly zealously desperate for this threat to exist so you can use it to advance your political ambitions, as I exposed in my previous letter.

In the last month, despite the extensive media fear-mongering, there have in actuality been zero (0) violent incidents in Huddersfield carried out by the far-right. 

The local establishment has therefore become so utterly desperate to validate the existence of this "bogeyman" that the local newspaper, The Examiner, put as headline news in its online newspaper:

'Huddersfield bus smashed up after far-right demonstration 'fake news'

The clear implication of this headline is that the far-right demonstrations were not fake news after all, since the far-right smashed up a bus.

Yet when one reads the actual article, it declares the bus smashing was an "isolated incidence of vandalism" that was not linked in any way to the "far right".

It is precisely this kind of devious and duplicitous propaganda that Kirklees Council has used to promote the fabricated idea that there is a severe threat to the community from the "far right", and used this fictitious threat to extensively fear-monger and divide the community.

In reality, there is no significant threat to the security of this country from "the far right", and that is now irrefutably obvious. You are many times more likely to be injured in a car crash than by a "far-right extremist". 

The real threat comes only from the government (central and local) and its lackeys in the media, who are deeply invested in continually manufacturing threats, fomenting fear, and pitting people against each other, in order to maximise their own power and control.

As I intimated to you in my previous correspondence, I find your coordinated attempts to instil fear into the people of Huddersfield, and to use this fear to modify their behaviour (up to and including intimidating them into closing their businesses and barricading themselves in their homes), to be akin to terrorism, which, may I remind you yet again, is a highly illegal activity.

I expect a comprehensive reply to this letter on this occasion, and if one is not forthcoming, I will continue to pursue one through all the relevant channels (and continue to make all my correspondence to you public). 

A final observation: I watched the live YouTube video of your most recent council meeting, and in this meeting, it was stated that you are interested in celebrating "diversity". One councillor then declared that "all communities need to be reading from the same hymn sheet".

Please allow me to advise you that this is the exact opposite of diversity, the defining qualities of which are a plurality of people and groups with a range of opinions and views. Your definition of "diversity" is in fact the essence of rigid conformity: everyone agreeing with your views and aligning with your perspectives. 

If they do not, they are dehumanised as "far-right extremists", or some other slur.

So please see this correspondence as an important lesson in actual diversity: being robustly and legitimately challenged by someone who holds different views to your own - and who is nevertheless worthy of the same respect and recognition as those who agree with you.

Yours sincerely,

Miri Finch

Independent Writer and Researcher

(Full postal address supplied)

miri.substack.com

miriaf.co.uk

@MattersInformed

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