Yes, Britain is on the brink of chaos – but don’t forget that we’ve been here before

The outbreak of unruly and threatening behaviour in Westminster – and I do not minimise the nastiness or the menace of the activities of “protesters” screaming obscenities – proves, were proof needed, that “demons” were indeed released during the 2016 EU referendum. The assassination of Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right terrorist during that very campaign should have served as an omen of what might follow.

So it has come to pass – incited by the incessant violent, incendiary language used in some newspapers. From the insults lobbed around outside parliament at the likes of Anna Soubry, to outright terror plots aimed at murdering Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May, all are clearly dangerous developments.

Yet we do need to regain some sense of perspective. Not so long ago in our history, terror attacks were routine in London and elsewhere in the UK. In Northern Ireland, the Troubles were a way of life. The rule of law ceased to operate in parts of the province (and the police were not always reliable anyhow).

On the mainland, too, there was blood on the streets. I can well remember the provisional IRA conducting bombing raids, almost randomly – on Harrods; the Old Bailey; Regents Park; pubs in Guildford, Covent Garden, Caterham and Birmingham; Green Park tube station; at Deal; a shopping mall in Bristol; Victoria station; Canary Wharf; Warrington; and a Wimpy bar on Oxford Street. No target was too big or too small, too defenceless or too packed with civilians. Most notoriously, it tried to kill the cabinet in the Brighton Grand Hotel bombing in 1984. It blew up the London home of former prime minister Edward Heath, 10 minutes before he returned from a carol concert. The republicans murdered Tory and unionist MPs without compunction.

At the same time there were small bands of far-right and far-left terrorists who sent letter bombs and sought to bring down parliamentary democracy. Renegade elements in the security services had the crackpot notion that the Labour prime minster, Harold Wilson, was a Russian agent, and protected by another Russian spy, Roger Hollis, the director general of MI5, no less. They too were prepared to stage a coup. The National Front – proper fascists who used to dress up like Hitler – marched through immigrant areas of our cities looking for a scrap. People died in political riots.

Plus we had the usual quota of Middle East terrorists hijacking planes and taking hostages passing through London. For the radical left, in Britain we had the Angry Brigade, in Germany Baader-Meinhof, in Italy the Red Brigades, and they were all, to borrow one of those emotive phrases, real enemies of the people. We remember the tragedy of the 1972 Munich Olympics.

And, on top of all that, we had a near-revolutionary form of violent industrial action – so-called mass picketing that more resembled a battlefield – and pitched battles between police and striking miners and, later, inner-city rioters. Some union leaders were communists and, communist or not, they saw it as legitimate to bring down an elected government.

Without taking any sides, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed a level of political and industrial violence that people need to be reminded of today – if only as a warning of how bad things can get in a sick society with dismal economic prospects. In a way, Britain was a nation of rats fighting in a sack.

Well within living memory, people openly asked whether Britain was becoming “ungovernable”. Books, newspaper columns and TV shows were devoted to the decline and despair overtaking a once imperial power. Rampant inflation – 27 per cent a year in 1975 – and unemployment peaking at well over three million in 1984 made many wonder aloud if Britain had simply had it. It is undeniable that some of that spirit seems to be alive again today – and there are evil minds at work, too. But are we becoming – literally – ungovernable as we were in those days?

No. Not yet, at any rate.

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor