Have we misjudged the concern about radicalisation in plain sight? For so long we’ve worried about the impact of extremists on kids, teenagers and young men. And yet when you watch the footage from the Reform conference last week, of two female hecklers being attacked by senior citizens, your jaw will drop.
Because it leads you to ask whether sections of our British pensioners have been fanaticised by the corporate lobby group with just eight MPs. Older voters push back against extremists in France and Germany, despite Sunday’s success for the far right in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
But Reform’s xenophobes appear to have gained traction with sections of the UK’s senior citizens, judging by their conduct last week. The incidents, caught on camera and beamed around the world, leave you convinced that serious chats are needed around a few dinner tables among some extended families around the country.
At times the images looked like scenes from a zombie movie, where victims disappear under a sea of flailing arms. In one incident, for example, older men drag a young woman to the ground while one appeared to jab and strike her with a walking stick.
A man wearing a white, open-necked shirt and jeans then appeared to stamp on or kick the clearly terrified woman while another hand appeared from nowhere, gripping her on the back of her neck.
So much for Reform wanting to protect our young women and girls. Or for their claim to be protectors of free speech. The woman is also pushed to the ground and struck from behind with what appears to be a walking stick.
In another incident, a woman is manhandled by four or five men while an older lady is violently yanking her hair and a bespectacled man appears to be pulling at her face and mouth repeatedly and forcefully from behind.
At least two female protesters have spoken out, detailing their fear, their ripped clothes and their injuries. The response of Reform would-be Chancellor, Robert Jenrick, to critics of the attendees’ conduct, said it all.
“Oh boo hoo,” he said. “You take your chances if you go to a party conference and you try to mess it up. We are now in a country where a far-left protester goes into a party conference, tries to wreck the leader’s speech, and cries foul if a pensioner knocks her over the head with a Zimmer frame. Come on, get a life.”
This was the same Jenrick who took to social media when Farage had a drink thrown at him and, rightly, deplored the act, demanding police action. To be fair to Reform chairman “30p” Lee Anderson, he did go on stage to claim he “does not condone” that behaviour.
But given he also joked that a “whip round” was needed to buy a new walking stick for a man who used his cane to hit a protester, Anderson clearly appeared to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth.
And while the focus will be on the MPs, the bigger picture is frightening. We need to ask whether our older contingent have successfully been radicalised by the scare tactics and the xenophobes determined to divide us as a society.
That they would treat young women who could easily be their children or even grandchildren in the manner that they did at that conference is chilling. It shows a slavish devotion to the purveyors of hate reminiscent of the kind of thing we’ve seen in the movies.
As for those purveyors of hate – well, no man who responds to any woman being violently attacked with the words “boo hoo” should ever be remotely close to government.
