Well, there you go then! That seems to be the conclusion of at least some on the far right regarding arrests and charges arising from the Notting Hill Carnival. Which ‘there’ this data is meant to lead us to is far from clear.

There you go then… assemble a huge, predominantly black crowd and there will be crime, perhaps. But then we can’t recall anyone saying any different. Crowds of any colour mix, especially ones with liberal amounts of alcohol in circulation, do have a tendency not so much to generate trouble as to draw together likely sources of misbehaviour.

Whether a crowd has pre-loaded on Tennent’s and Teacher’s, Stella and Stoli or Red Stripe and Red Leg doesn’t seem to make an awful lot of difference.

What may well be intended, in fact, is more of a ‘There you go then… two-tier policing!’ The innuendo certainly seems to be emanating from the same online dry white whiners who have so eagerly latched on to this almost meaningless slogan – the bleating heart of the internet, if you like. But how does a stack of arrests in Notting Hill support an assertion of double standards?

Tippy-tapping away in his latest EU funk-hole, Stephen Lennon (posting as ‘Tommy Robinson’) reckons he can have it both ways – it’s evidence of both criminal ethnic types and selective policing all in one bundle. We should not be too surprised by this. If there were a Yaxley family motto it would surely be ‘Amamus consumere tamen habere crustum’ – roughly ‘we like to eat yet still have our cake’.

If he wants it, he should get in fast. Once R Slicker (the next Conservative Party leader) pollutes an honours list with Lord Johnson of Partygate, Boris will adopt the motto in a flash. Though come to think of it, now that he is officially Irish, perhaps Lennon would prefer the legend in Gaelic (which is, sadly, beyond our linguistic skills).

Anyway, back to the Tommy tippy-tapping, “Notting Hill Carnival 2 day event seen 8 stabbings,” howls The Fugitive semi-literately. “A dozen sexual assaults. 3 guns seized. 50 police officers injured.” So there you have complaint number one – lawlessness with a lot of non-white people involved. And complaint number two? “Keir Starmer ignores all that, takes a swipe at the protesting English again, this time calling everyone ‘nazis’!”

Oh dear. This is a glaring example of that increasingly common 21st Century phenomenon: a phone that’s smarter than its owner.

We make no excuses for the criminality at the carnival – especially the violence – and we’re sure Keir Starmer doesn’t either. Every stabbing is a despicable act. But we do need some kind of context for the figures. No one knows how many people took part in the Notting Hill Carnival, but for the past two decades or so the Mayor of London’s office has attached a baseline figure of one million. Several sources report that this year – a warm and sunny one – saw more like two million attendees.

That is a simply enormous crowd. In other, perhaps more excitable countries than ours, we would not be surprised to hear that a gathering on such a scale had resulted in a stampede, with dozens crushed underfoot. In Britain, it’s mostly a case of Keep Calm and Carry On.

There was, indeed, crime. Some of it nasty. But we don’t recall any reports of mobs screaming racial abuse, charging police lines, throwing bricks, looting shops and setting fire to vehicles and buildings, including (for goodness’ sake!) a library and community job-seeking hub. In short, the people at the Notting Hill Carnival were mostly just having a nice, laid-back time. They were not staging hate-filled riots, like those scumbags who did so while chanting ‘Tommy Robinson’ in various towns and cities.

 In total about 330 people were arrested across the span of the carnival, which rather makes a mockery of the assertion of far right megamouths that police are too timid or ‘woke’ to arrest black people and their lefty pals. (For ‘lefty’ read white people who mix happily with other races).

“Aha!” cries an imaginary voice that sounds, nonetheless, rather like Nigel Farage. “But more people than that were arrested at the rio… er… the protests, and there were only a few thousand people at those, so the proportion of the crowd arrested was much bigger. So it is two-tier policing.”

Really, only one thing needs saying to establish that this train of thought is some Southern Rail old knacker that is going to break down before it has finished pulling away from Platform 1. The vast majority of people who went to the carnival did so to dance in the street, dress up as goodness knows what or munch on a freshly fried samosa. The majority of people who went to the riots did so in order to… er… riot. Of course the proportions arrested will be wildly different.

So, Searchlight is completely writing off the idea of two-tier policing, then? Well, not exactly. We do in fact get the impression that there’s some picking and choosing going on – just not in the way that the panty-wetters of the far right would have you think.

As far away as Pakistan (!) a man has been arrested for publishing the invented Arab-sounding name that was circulated online as being that of the Southport murderer, and which undoubtedly helped to fuel the anti-Muslim riots. There’s surely little doubt that this arrest is at the UK’s behest. But at least one large-circulation Pakistani daily has stated that its contacts within the investigating bureau believe the website involved, C3N, merely cocked up.

This makes sense. C3N is what is known in publishing as an ‘aggregator’. That is to say, it does no investigative journalism itself but scours the worldwide web for stories and repackages them. This gives the site owners a (hopefully) lucrative advertising platform without the need to employ any real journalists.

Not even the British end of the arrest seems to have any faith that a hard-core bad ‘un has been nicked in Pakistan. The BBC reports that its (presumably UK) police sources believe that C3N’s action was “an error, not intentional”. C3N certainly didn’t invent the name circulated. ‘Walk back the cat’ and you can see that the name appeared on UK social media quite some time before C3N published it.

Does this let C3N off the hook? Not entirely, because it published the name recklessly, with no attempt to validate it, in extremely volatile circumstances. We cannot be sure that the man – one of the website’s three owners – will face trial over the mess, but it does look likely.

How do we see any two-tier policing in this? Because right-wing rentagob Katie Hopkins did exactly the same thing – published the fake name without any attempt to check that it was correct, leaving her many witless followers to believe that a Muslim had killed the Southport schoolgirls. And has ‘Hatie Katie’ appeared in court over this? We don’t recall seeing her name listed in that connection.

Or take the case of the Northern Ireland loyalist who has been arrested, charged and remanded until 20 September over an online post calling to “stop the spread of evil Islam”. You may say that the word ‘evil’ is particularly inflammatory, but you might also think that, otherwise, there’s not a great deal of difference between that post and one by Reclaim Party leader Laurence Fox saying that “We need to remove Islam from Great Britain. Completely and entirely.”

Some would argue that that Fox’s demand is the worse of the two, because what he wants would clearly require violence – the idea that all of GB’s Muslims would happily emigrate of their own accord is laughable. Have we seen ‘Looza’ in court over this incitement to hatred? If so, the report has eluded Searchlight.

We don’t really need to find comparisons for Stephen Lennon’s lance corporal, Daniel Thomas (aka ‘Danny Tommo’), because his message to his 68,000 followers that “It has to go off in different cities” and that “Every city has to go up” would undoubtedly have added to the sentences already received by many small-fry rioters. ‘Tommo’ even organised the Whitehall protest that saw other boneheads jailed. But has he been brought to book? Not that we can see.

The wretched reptile that is Nigel Farage is employing some calculated sophistry to disavow his own sins, but we’re really not sure how he’s getting away with it. After pooh-poohing the idea that the Southport murders were, as the police has stated “non-terror related”, the Reform UK Ltd owner added “I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us.”

Despite his protestations that this was a question, not an assertion, and that he had not actually deployed the specific word ‘liars’, no reasonable person could doubt that he was indeed accusing the police of being exactly that – liars. The suggestion that the authorities were not telling the truth about the Southport schoolgirl stabbings was like throwing a bucket of petrol on a smouldering fag-end. Has he even been questioned by the police about this? Not as far as we can tell.

As for ‘Tommy Robinson’, we could write a whole extra feature about his status as a riddle wrapped in an enigma nested in a sun-lounger. Suffice it to say that some days it feels like half of ‘the establishment’ wants him behind bars, the other half wants him on the loose, and the two trip each other up at every opportunity. Why any of the establishment should prefer not to see him picking oakum is an intriguing question.

So, if you want to talk about ‘two-tier policing’, Kameraden, instead of desperately trying to conjure up fantasies about how white people are being persecuted by the government, Crown Prosecution Service and police, why not ask yourself why the small fry (or, as loosely Irish Lennon would probably have it, The Little People) are being sent down in droves over the riots, while the ‘influencers’ with big social media followings seem to enjoy immunity.

Perhaps the man whom the knuckle-draggers have dubbed ‘Two-Tier Keir’ should have a go at explaining not why the riots needed putting down (which they plainly did) but why it’s always the poor bloody infantry who get prosecuted and not the far-right generals. Are their Twitter followings really that intimidating?

Photos, clockwise from top left: Nigel Farage, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), ‘Danny Tommo’, Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins, .