Throughout this year’s Notting Hill Carnival, the Met police, the corporate media, and the far right have reared their usual display of rancid racism. Social media has been awash with this vile show of bigotry – proving all the more why the world’s second largest street festival with its roots in fighting racial injustice is needed.
Notting Hill Carnival
Across the course of the two-day Notting Hill Carnival in West London, the corporate media has published a swathe of articles revolving around arrests at the event. As the BBC reported on Monday 26 August:
Eight people were stabbed during the Notting Hill Carnival with a total of 334 people being arrested during the event, the Metropolitan Police has said.
Every year, the Met police releases crime statistics on the Notting Hill Carnival. And every year, right-wing talking heads use these to call for its closure. At this annual event however, it did so throughout the course of the carnival. As the Peace and Justice Project pointed out, police forces haven’t done this for other large events:
The Met Police’s totally unprecedented decision to publish statistics from its operation at Notting Hill Carnival shows the vast difference in how it chooses to respond to events celebrating black British culture compared to other annual gatherings and music festivals. https://t.co/kIExhFc9UY pic.twitter.com/PLgucNpoA3
— Peace & Justice Project (@corbyn_project) August 26, 2024
Even ex- Met copper Alice Vinten underscored the disparity in the way the police and the media weaponise crime rates at the Notting Hill Carnival, compared to other big festivals:
#NottingHillCarnival – over 2 million people attend a year – 275 arrests last year (0.014%)#LeedsFestival – around 100,000 people attend a year – 78 arrests last year – including four women seriously sexually assaulted (0.078%)
Can we stop demonising #NHC now?
— Alice Vinten (@AVintenAuthor) August 25, 2024
During Leeds’s sister festival at Reading between 21 to 25 August, the Thames Valley Police didn’t release regular crime statistics. In fact, it has yet to publish these at all. Comparatively, journalist Nicolas-Tyrell Scott noted the Met’s instantaneous infographics:
Gotta be some real hate to whip up this infographic so quickly. Lmfao. Anti blackness is hilarious
— Nicolas-Tyrell Scott (@iamntyrell) August 25, 2024
Met’s racist agenda: linking violent crimes to Black communities
Understandably, some have highlighted the alarming number of stabbings the Met has reported at the Notting Hill Carnival. However, Vinten also underscored that the reports don’t take into account the broader knife crime that takes place across the city regularly regardless:
Don’t forget to take into account that fact the carnival covers a huge area of London where unfortunately stabbing take place on a daily basis already.
As a woman, I’d feel safer at NHC than I would at Leeds Festival.
— Alice Vinten (@AVintenAuthor) August 26, 2024
For instance, in the year ending March 2024, the Met police recorded nearly 15,000 serious offences involving a knife. Significantly, this was close to a third of the total number of these incidents across England and Wales. In other words, there’s a reason the Met and corporate media have emphasised these particular stabbings, and it has everything to do with racism.
As one person on X highlighted, they weren’t even trying to hide their rampant racist agenda either:
Metropolitan Police being openly racist
The implication is that crimes only occur at the Notting Hill Carnival
Take down this post you disgraceful organisation 😡@MPFed @metpoliceuk https://t.co/BTSDZx5asG
— Stop The Bollocks with Mirabel (@MirabelTweets1) August 26, 2024
Specifically, its narrative linking Notting Hill Carnival to violent crime is a way of manufacturing consent for further over-policing of Black communities in London.
Origins of the Notting Hill Carnival and the recent race riots
Trinidadian Black feminist and socialist Claudia Jones organised the first indoor carnival as a celebration of Caribbean culture and community in 1959. She did so in response to violent, white, racist mobs attacking Black homes and the brutal racially-motivated murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane in West London. Over the August bank holiday weekend in 1958, fascists led five nights of racist pogroms against Caribbean communities living in Notting Hill and Nottingham.
Sound familiar? The white racist lynch mobs targeting Black, brown, Muslim, and migrant communities across the UK has striking parallels.
Given this, plenty pointed out the right-wing’s shameless racist demonisation of the Notting Hill Carnival, after the recent fascist violence:
Of course the racists would be ready to condemn the events at the Notting Hill Carnival, whilst conveniently forgetting that they literally wanted to burn people alive in hotels and physically harm Black and Brown people.
— Joey 🇯🇲🇰🇳 (@Cjoeytami) August 25, 2024
Hard-right journalist Isabel Oakeshott was one such commentator pushing the vile, vested crime narrative about the carnival. One poster reminded Oakeshott how Reform – the party that incited the race riots is also riddled with criminals:
Your reminder that you’re 5000 times more likely to encounter a criminal at a Reform Party meeting than you are at the Notting Hill Carnival. pic.twitter.com/4DF1MvB00L
— Dr Paul Budd Brexaster Resister #FBPE #FBPR (@PaulCanOnlyGet1) August 25, 2024
Of course, this includes Reform deputy leader Richard Tice – her husband no less.
Met’s institutional racism laid bare again
As Black Lives Matter UK also pointed out, Jones hosted the original carnival to raise money for fines the police had imposed on young Black people. Now, 65 year’s on, the Met’s over-policing of Black communities is unchanged.
Naturally, the vast majority the arrests cops made during the 2024 carnival were for non-violent crimes – such as drug possession. Across the course of the weekend, the Met made at least 81 arrests for possession of drugs – approximately 25% of its total arrests.
Crucially, UK police have a long history of disproportionately using section 60 stop and search powers against Black people. This is particularly the case for low level drug searches. Of course, it’s a blatant case of racial profiling, and regularly exposes the institutional racism at the core of UK police forces. Unsurprisingly, the Met police is the worst for this. The latest government statistics for the year ending March 2023 showed that:
- the Metropolitan Police in London made 33% of all stop and searches in England and Wales
- the stop and search rate for every 1,000 people was 19.9 in the Metropolitan Police area, and 7.0 in the rest of England and Wales
At the end of the day, the Met’s institutional racism, and the corporate media’s bigotry against the Notting Hill Carnival shows how the state and right-wing press work hand in hand to uphold the white supremacist status quo. Millions of people coming together for this carnival rooted in anti-racism is a threat to that – and to the divisive narrative that fanned the flames of the recent race riots. However, in the wake of these, this vibrant celebration of Black art and culture is more poignant and important than ever.
Featured image via Youtube – Notting Hill Carnival Ltd/ the Canary
