“with influence in the community”

The statement reported by the BBC from Chief Superintendent Gary White about trouble – ie violent attacks – over the weekend at ‘interface areas’ in North Belfast remided me of an old post were I noted the “ubiquitous community label”.. And as Newton Emerson argued then

Because community implies grassroots legitimacy it is an ideal disguise for such top-down exercises in social control. Being so deliberately ill-defined it is also a tricky disguise to unmask. But unmask it we must if we are not to be told who we are, what we are, how to think and where to think it by everyone anxious to group us under their own agendas. A fair society, as St Augustine observed, must comprise one community of law.

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