Partisan policing rubs salt in Epping wound

IS THIS country really fraying, as Downing Street officials apparently believe? I haven’t been out much lately, for obvious reasons, but, from everything I’m reading and watching, there doesn’t seem much doubt we’re having a wobble.

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Scenes of public disorder outside The Bell Hotel in sleepy old Epping, Essex, seem to sum up the state of the nation in recent weeks. Worried, scared and a bit fighty.

Pass the smelling salts, but even Deputy PM Angela Rayner warned ministers that’ they need to acknowledge public concerns over mass migration.

Reforms Nigel Farage put it more strongly — rightly so, in my view — when he warned Britain is close to “civil disobedience on a vast scale”. And Tiff Lynch, the chairwoman of the Police Federation, wrote that the scenes of disorder were “not just a troubling one-off”.

She warned: “It was a signal flare. A reminder of how little it takes for tensions to erupt and how ill-prepared we remain to deal with it.”