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The riots in Britain have made one thing clear: The political classes do not know what poor people look like.

Keir Starmer has been like a broken record describing everyone on the streets as “a member” of “The Far Right,” with “The Far Right” meaning a shadowy, highly organized group with extraordinary powers of networking and coordination.

The Prime Minister and his media helpers persisted in this cry, like Doctor Who Daleks—Far Right! Far Right! Far Right!—and the impression began to take hold that either they were naive, or they had a plan to preserve this narrative no matter what, when what was happening seemed much messier.

If they did not deliberately present a neater picture than was the reality, then they clearly do not have the first clue what millions of Britons look like. And seeing it they were shocked, wrong-footed, knocked off course like a Dalek bumping his flat bottom against a flight of stairs.

I imagine the civil servants trying to break it to Starmer: “Yes, sir. The people in the tracksuits shouting and throwing stuff, these are what we term ‘poor people,’ or sometimes, for ease of reference, ‘common people,’ if you prefer.”

Well, if that is the case then I can only say listen to your civil servants, Mr. Starmer, for a lot of these rioters are indeed your British poor. That’s right. P-o-o-r. Lacking money. Not having a law degree like you. Not going to the races like Mrs. Starmer likes to.

They live in run-down communities with very little access to good services. They live in places I am sure the middle classes would not like to. They have very little to look forward to. Their children have almost universally low chances of success. Blair had a period when he tried to engage with them, and ministers like Margaret Hodge made brave speeches about what might be making them despair.

In 2007, Ms. Hodge, MP for Barking, called for “British-born families” to take priority over “immigrants” in the queue for council homes. She said it. Not me. She said it.

In the run-up to local elections, she claimed that eight out of 10 people she spoke to on the doorstep were considering voting for the far right—I’m not even sure if she capped it up, like we’re told to now to emphasize how it’s all one big organized conspiracy.

Ms. Hodge, a trade and industry minister, claimed the rise of “the far right” was due to Labour’s failure to address the shortage of council housing available to her working-class constituents, while at the same time providing housing to asylum seekers and migrant workers. I remember this very clearly because she told me this stuff when I was a political correspondent at Westminster and I remember thinking, “Wow, she’s really going for it.” She went for it because she was MP for an area where they were growing restive and she was trying to sound the alarm—and this was seventeen years ago.

She described the new ethnic diversity in her area at that time as “gob-smacking change.” A Labour minister said this. A Labour minister. But her warning has been conveniently forgotten.

Perhaps Mr. Starmer has never met these people of whom she speaks, or if he has met them fleetingly, during an election walkabout, he has never really seen them. Not really.

Perhaps that is why he keeps calling them complex political names, which far outdo how they see themselves. When he claims they are part of some advanced, sophisticated network, I’m sure they would really like to be. Chance would be a fine thing, is how I suspect they see that. If they were part of a really effective network of power they wouldn’t be in the shitty position they are in.

Whatever they have done during the riots—and I don’t condone it—I would stop short of assuming they all know each other, and coordinate, just because they all look scruffy and have tattoos.

When the so-called anti-racism crowd came out on the streets and further “far right” protests apparently dissipated yesterday, if that narrative is to be believed (either that or there were no more “far right” protests planned), the cry went up that at last we saw “normal Brits” on the streets. Ordinary. Normal.

Hone in on those pictures and you see much smarter folk. Some silver surfers. Some bearded hipsters. Some people who look like they might work in offices. Ah yes, this is much better. Much less…common, was what we were meant to say, as we breathed a sigh of relief.

The other problem with Mr. Starmer calling everyone who has been on the streets “The Far Right” is that up until yesterday, with the middle-class anti-racism lot, who are obviously mostly middle-class Caucasians, it had been getting quite mixed out there, ethnically speaking, and there were a few arrests that bore this out, including a fellow with a big stick bound with leather straps, which he claimed he carried “for religious reasons.”

So Starmer could have said, for example: “I want to crack down on thugs of all persuasions, of all colors, creeds, and ethnic groupings. I am an equal-opportunity cracker-downer. I want to offer cracking down for all.” But no, he kept saying he’s cracking down if you’re “a member of the Far Right”—which is confusing enough if you didn’t know you were because as you understood it, you were just Pete and Carol from a sink estate, with Pete ending up in court for chucking a bottle: “’Ere, when did we join that Far Right thing the judge was saying about, Pete?” “Whatchoo talkin’ about? I ain’t joined nuffink since that Christmas club done all our money and we didn’t get no turkey…”

After a week of this mono-cracking down, however, I noticed the narrative slightly changed with the polling by YouGov revealing a third of Britain supports, to some extent, the display of discontent being shown.

And I noticed that as news crews got attacked, the mainstream media were becoming more inclined to try to spell out the various nuances.

It was no longer viable for them to simply keep repeating the government narrative when, as in the case of a Sky News crew, an Asian man began swearing at the camera, then his friends came, then a news van got attacked. Oh, er, um, our tires have been slashed by, er, um, er…

The other side? Spit it out, for heaven’s sake. If there are wrongs being done by two sides in a standoff, we are going to have to say so. If there are problems with law and order, since when did we get ordered by the Prime Minister to pretend there aren’t?

Elon Musk questioning whether we have two-tier policing is hardly rocket science. That so boring an observation should become so contentious under Starmer’s new regime that we end up with the owner of X being pilloried, and it somehow goes down as “fanning the flames” in Mail Online headlines, is unbelievable.

Since when could you fan the flames of anything by reposting something about two-tier policing?

If that were a flame-fanning thing, you’d have gangs running around chanting, “What do we want? One-tier policing! When do we want it? Now!”

And yet a former BBC correspondent, Paul Mason, posts on Twitter his calls for the government to “pull the plug” on U.K. Twitter over it.

What planet is Paul Mason on? Who calls for an entire social networking site to be destroyed, and uses that network to make the call, because its owner has reacted to widespread riots by saying maybe there are problems with policing?

What next? Dismantle Microsoft because Bill Gates has posted that he’s just sent his steak back for being overcooked? Disband Amazon because Jeff Bezos has let it be known that he’s quite cross about his dry cleaning being lost? Is this fanning the flames now?

What’s happening, clearly, is that the left are picking on those of the alternative view, those with alternative power bases and funding—as they did with Trump. Anything those people say or do, no matter how reasonable, is held up as a disgrace, and evidence they must be dealt with.

Obviously, they want Musk dealt with because the man is a hero for hosting the free speech of everyone. “Enact the full Online Safety Act now, no more consultations. I’d be happy to lose this service,” tweets Mason, lost in the illogic.

I can only imagine he has invested so heavily in the long-prevailing BBC narrative that he now finds himself in a blind panic as his life’s work potentially unravels.

A grown man must be absolutely desperate to say such a thing. But aren’t we all going a bit mad, if truth be told?

When you have gaslighting by the authorities so strong that you can’t get a sensible debate going about how three young children could be stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop in Southport, then you start to feel like your reality is falling away.

I still want answers about those poor children. I want to know why weeks on we’ve got no steer as to motive, and why we then hear they’ve canceled a Taylor Swift concert in Austria over a planned ISIS terror attack. If this is pure coincidence, someone needs to explain it.

But no matter where I look, there is no mention of any theory as to why those children were killed. And that is the most frightening thing.