Labour councillor ‘called for far-right protesters' throats to be slit'
In the wake of rioting following the Southport murders, Ricky Jones, 58, described demonstrators as 'disgusting Nazi fascists', his trial was told.
The now-suspended councillor had been told by the Labour Party to stay away from the protest, but turned up anyway, jurors heard.
A video showing Jones addressing the crowd in Walthamstow, east London, on August 7 last year went viral on social media after the protest.
Wearing a black polo top and surrounded by cheering supporters, the councillor said: 'They are disgusting Nazi fascists. We need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all.'
He also drew his finger across his throat as he spoke to the 'tinderbox' crowd.
The demonstration had been organised in response to plans for a far-right march outside Waltham Forest Immigration Bureau, jurors at Snaresbrook Crown Court were told.
It followed the nationwide violent disorder that occurred last summer after the Southport murders.
Prosecutor Ben Holt said Jones used 'inflammatory, rabble-rousing language in the throng of a crowd that we will hear described as a tinderbox'.
Opening the case on Monday, Mr Holt said: 'Last summer, three young girls were killed at a dance-themed party in Southport.
'There was some hysteria… Some of that grief manifested itself in anger, and regrettably, violence.'
The incidents brought out counter-protests, one of which Jones decided to go to, the prosecutor said.
'He attended in the face of considered advice not to do so,' Mr Holt added.
'At Walthamstow that day, rumours had spread that there was going to be a protest outside an immigration centre.
'During that event, he made a speech, amplified through a public address system, to the crowd.
'He called the other side disgusting Nazi fascists. He said that their throats needed to be slit.
'He drew his finger along his throat as he said that.
'This, in a setting where, we suggest, violence could readily have been anticipated.
'We ask rhetorically, what did Mr Jones think was going to happen?'
In the days before the protest, the councillor had been warned to stay away by his party.
A letter sent to him said: 'With heightened tensions in many areas of the country due to the threat of further violent disorder, we wanted to remind all Labour party councillors to follow the clear advice issued by the police which is not to take part in, attend or encourage others to attend, any sort of demonstration or counter demonstration.'
Jones, of Dartford, who denies one count of encouraging violent disorder, told police he was 'sorry' he made the comments 'in the heat of the moment', and had not intended for them to be 'taken literally', Mr Holt said.
The councillor also told police he was upset having been sent pictures of National Front stickers that had been left on a train, which had razor blades hidden behind them.
Jones, who has been a borough councillor in Dartford, Kent, since 2019, was suspended by the Labour Party the day after the alleged incident.
The trial continues.
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Speediest was the transition in the vast archipelago of the Dutch East Indies (encompassing much of modern Indonesia), which the Japanese occupied from March 1942 until the end of the war. The Dutch tried to re-establish domination after 1945 but were confronted by an organised national movement under President Sukarno, who won independence for Indonesia in 1949. Similar events in French Indochina were longer, more tortuous and appallingly bloody – stretching out over 30 years. After Japan's wartime occupation of the colony, the French returned in 1945 and were confronted with the communist leader Ho Chi Minh's declaration of independence. After a decade, the French abandoned the struggle and in 1955 Vietnam was partitioned, leaving the communist party in control of the north. That was unacceptable to Cold War America, which increasingly propped up South Vietnam with economic and military aid, and then later, by vast bombing campaigns and US combat troops. But the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal destroyed Richard Nixon's presidency, and during 1975 US forces were driven ignominiously from all of Indochina. The lurid backdrop of Indonesia and Indochina allows us to see the British withdrawal from south Asia more clearly. Although Britain fought a protracted counterinsurgency before conceding independence to Malaya in 1957 and then similarly to the enlarged Malaysia, it generally managed to avoid the travails of the Dutch and the French. Crucially, the Indian Raj was never invaded and occupied by Japan. Equally significant, Labour's victory in the July 1945 general election replaced the diehard Churchill with Clement Attlee. Whereas Churchill's experience of India ended in 1899, Attlee paid extended visits there in 1928 and 1929 with a parliamentary delegation. He had no doubt that India – a chequerboard of princely states and areas under direct British rule – should eventually follow Australia and New Zealand down the path to self-government and then full independence. He saw this as part of a shift in global power that had been accelerated by the Asian war, telling the cabinet in 1942 that 'the East is now asserting itself against the long dominance of the West'. But trying to surf the tides of history was a perilous business in a polity as vast and volatile as India. Attlee and Labour placed too much faith in the Hindu-led Congress Party, which dominated the interim government formed by Britain in September 1946. Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League demanded a greater role, and the escalating communal violence cost thousands of lives. Attlee was also grimly aware of the financial costs of victory, including debts priced at £4.7bn, the sale of £1.1bn worth of overseas assets, and exports down to a third of their 1938 level – no basis for an assertive foreign policy. Over cabinet opposition, he announced a firm date of 30 June 1948 for the end of British rule in India and was then obliged to abandon hopes of a unified country – fabricating instead the states of West and East Pakistan, a thousand miles (1,600km) apart. (The latter broke away in 1971 to form Bangladesh.) The human cost of partition was terrible – scholars estimate one million died and 15 million were displaced. But the Conservatives privately agreed that there was no alternative and even Churchill, despite fulminating about 'socialist scuttle', did not turn India into a political crusade, as he had done in the 1930s. The endgame was briefer and less bloody than Indochina, and the new rulers of India decided to keep their country in the Commonwealth – preserving the fiction of a 'transfer of power'. [See also: How China is reclaiming history] The long denouement of the Great Asian War is only part of the story of Japan's defeat. The central drama of capitulation is beyond the scope of this essay, except to note the continuing debate about the relative importance of the two American atomic bombs, dropped on 6 and 9 August 1945, compared with the shock of the Soviet declaration of war on Japan on the 9th. The answer might seem obvious now, but in Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan (2025), the historian Richard Overy notes that Japan had never previously been conquered by a foreign power and that the threat of invasion by a communist state seemed particularly horrendous to the Japanese ruling class – opening up fears of a domestic revolution as in Russia or Germany in 1917-18. Regardless of which superpower claimed credit for Japan's defeat, the actual occupation of the country (1945-52) was dominated by the US – unlike the endgame in Germany. Stalin's attempt to grab Hokkaido, one of the four main islands, was blocked by President Harry Truman. American administrators in league with Japanese civil servants pushed through demilitarisation, democratisation, land reform, labour laws and also women's rights beyond anything sanctioned in the US. Galvanised by these radical but peaceful reforms, and sheltering under America's defence umbrella, Japan's economy grew exponentially until the country boasted the highest per capita GDP in the world by the 1980s – not bad as the price of defeat. But the Japanese bubble burst in 1990, and it was followed by two decades of stagnation. Talk of 'Japan as number one' evaporated, and the focus of international attention shifted to China after its Communist Party's brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement in 1989. This brings us back to the roots of Japan's militarist expansion in the 1930s and 1940s. Its conquest of Chinese Manchuria in 1931-32 escalated into full-scale war with China from 1937 to 1945, costing perhaps 15-20 million lives. The War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, as it is known in China, was entangled with the longer on-off civil war between nationalists and communists for control of China itself, which resumed in 1946 and led to the eventual triumph of Mao Zedong in 1949 and the nationalists' retreat to the island of Taiwan. For Xi Jinping, appointed leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 2012 and now president for life, these historical issues are of central importance in his sustained challenge to the hegemonial position of the US. He has insisted since 2015 on the need to 'reconsider the great path of the Chinese people's War of Resistance' by taking account of the nationalists' war effort and thereby underlining 'the great contribution that the war [of resistance] made to the victory in the world anti-fascist war', which he also referred to as 'the Second World War'. (This was an attempt to move the Sino-Japanese conflict from the margins to the centre of historiographical discourse.) Speaking in this voice, Xi implied common ground with the nationalists. But that could not override the intolerable fact that their successors still controlled the island of Taiwan – centre of the world's semiconductor production, flanking one of the major global trading arteries, the Taiwan Straits, and a standing affront to the PRC's claim to rule a unified and sovereign state. The possibility that Xi might resolve this dispute by force makes Taiwan one of the world's most sensitive hot spots. Another of Japan's former wartime conquests falls into the same category. Korea has been divided since the war in 1950-53. North Korea is a totalitarian state with nuclear weapons; South Korea is dependent on US military support. Both claim to be the rightful ruler of the whole Korean peninsula, and they are separated only by the armistice line from 1953. Taiwan and Korea are sobering reminders that the legacies of the devastating wars unleashed by imperial Japan are still shaping the 21st-century world. VJ Day should not be treated as a mere postscript to VE Day. As for the Trumpian issue of which country won the Second World War, it should be clear by now that a world war is a lot more complex than winning the World Series. David Reynolds' most recent book is 'Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him'. He co-hosts the 'Creating History' podcasts. [See also: North Korea's guide to going nuclear] Related
