[themaclad]

Very moving interview on Radio 4 this morning with John Hayes, the hero who tried to tackle the Southport attacker. Here’s what he said towards the end of the discussion:

“I actually don’t think that the trouble and the riot has got anything at all to do with the Southport stabbings. There appears to have been a strong undercurrent of discontent for some time about the levels of immigration, and this [the Southport attack] is just a catalyst or a trigger, but I don’t think it’s the root cause.

“I’m not particularly politically-motivated, but I do get dismayed when I hear Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper talking about the police are going to come down with the full force of the law on these people. But they’re not actually talking about the root cause, and they need to start listening and understanding that they need to address the cause rather than the symptoms.

“Putting these guys in prison isn’t going to deal with the core issues. I don’t condone the violence, but there’s an awful lot of unhappy people in this country at the moment that want something to be done, and I don’t think until they start to address that, that this problem is going to go away.”