The Notting Hill Carnival, Emblem of the Yookay Diversity ‘Miracle’

With the summer now fully upon us and most people looking forward to a well-deserved holiday, the three words your average Metropolitan Police officer most dreads will start to appear in inboxes across the capital. Not ‘police officer redundancies,’ ‘more administrative forms’ or ‘mandatory diversity training.’ No, these words pale into insignificance compared to those which encapsulate the absolute cultural predicament that modern London and its police force have gotten themselves into—Notting. Hill. Carnival. 

It’s hard to overstate how this event (now known only as ‘Carnival’ by progressives) dominates the Metropolitan Police year. The August Bank Holiday weekend sits there lurking in the calendar, waiting to claim the career of a hapless copper or the life of someone who was just looking forward to a nice day out. More than 7,000 officers will, about now, be having their worst fears confirmed and will be rostered to work it. 

The Notting Hill Carnival has grown into one of the largest street festivals on Earth (with over two million attending across the two days), and has been held annually amongst the narrow streets of W11 for nearly sixty years. It can be traced back to post-war immigration to Britain, particularly the arrival of the now venerated ‘Windrush’ generation from the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s. 

Notting Hill, at that time, was a deprived area and therefore relatively cheap to move into. It soon became, along with Brixton, one of the focal points of London’s burgeoning Caribbean communities. In 1958, after notorious ‘race riots,’ Trinidad-born activist Claudia Jones established a ‘Caribbean Carnival’ in St. Pancras Town Hall. This morphed into the first open air Notting Hill Carnival in 1966. 

By the 1970s, London’s Caribbean-origin population had exploded in scale and, so with it, did the carnival. This was at the time when the so-called ‘sus laws’ in England and Wales were at their most controversial. These referred to Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824, and allowed police to stop, search and potentially arrest individuals based on suspicion of them intending to commit an offence. A rise in street robberies (or ‘muggings’ in 1970s parlance) in areas with significant Caribbean populations meant such offences became thought of as specifically ‘black’ crimes. This led to mutual suspicion between police and black communities, the disproportionate searching of young black men, widespread resentment and violent confrontations. The 1976 carnival, in particular, was marred by serious violence, with hundreds of people injured and scores arrested. 

In subsequent decades, we’ve seen the sus laws replaced by the Police & Criminal Evidence Act and police strategy pivoting much more towards community engagement. However, the Metropolitan Police’s ongoing, almost universal corporate guilt complex remains very much in the 70s and 80s. So an event with such massive crowds, held in such densely packed streets goes virtually unchallenged by the emasculated senior echelons of the Met. This view is, of course, one echoed by the mainstream media and wider establishment.  

The policing of Notting Hill is analogous to painting the Forth Bridge. The planning for the next one will begin as soon as this one ends. Intelligence will be gathered from the current event and the lessons learned (or at least they should be). Senior commanders—Gold, Silver and numerous Bronzes—will be appointed, and all of these will have fully imbibed the progressive policing Kool-Aid, concentrating on the things that matter, like the quotas of ethnic identities on the feedback panels. At no point will they question whether the carnival should go ahead at all. 

This is because Notting Hill is now woven into the fabric of the modern Yookay diversity ‘miracle,’ and seniors aren’t willing to question this orthodoxy for the sake of their careers. Despite 90% of their officers saying they feel unsafe working it, often describing it as a ‘war zone,’ with many suffering significant hearing loss at the very minimum. And those cops also know full well that if they commit an error in good faith under serious pressure, their management will hang them out to dry in order to extricate themselves from any blame. 

On one occasion when I was working the carnival, we were called to an outbreak of serious violence between gang members. Upon arrival, it was clear that one of the protagonists was very seriously injured. While my colleagues were performing CPR on the victim, his friends got busy trying to attack them. We had to form a protective cordon around the medical team in order to let them save the life of the individual. Many, many serving and ex-police officers will have comparable stories. 

The carnival attracts most of the capital’s violent gangs, usually armed with knives, machetes or hand guns. And they often have scores to settle, exemplified by the death of Cher Maximen, who was fatally stabbed in front of her daughter whist caught in the middle of a gang fight in 2024. For your average copper, it’s 48 hours of living on one’s nerves in the most febrile of atmospheres. The advent of social media, with often inaccurate messages instantly going viral, only exacerbates the issues. 

But the only aspect senior police ever question is the funding, at which point various authorities invariably come up with more. This is despite money being in short supply for just about everything else. At the very (very) least, the carnival should be moved to Hyde Park. In such a location, cordons could be placed around the perimeter, with knife arches being the only points through which punters could access the event. The London Assembly does discuss this occasionally, but nothing ever comes of it. At its current location in the Victorian streets of west London, the carnival is also a magnet for those wishing to carry out a mass casualty terrorist attack, and I’m frankly surprised that nobody has yet tried. God forbid that they do. 

If this event were sacrosanct to the indigenous population, it would have long since been scrapped, either on health and safety grounds or just because the elite don’t like the indigenous population. But Notting Hill has become so emblematic and symbolic of the ‘inclusive’ Britain the chattering classes espouse, it is now inviolable. The irony is probably lost on the same people when gangs of steamers rampage through them and steal their belongings, leaving them utterly bewildered as they drop their jerk chicken. 

A Windrush era street festival has mutated into a monster which now devours London’s police force. Everyone knows it yet everyone looks the other way, because nothing can get in the way of ‘Carnival.’