Bombs away

Well last night was exciting, for me it started when looking out of the windows a bomb disposal lorry and police escort went flying by, in the general direction of the local Mosque.
While this building is not very old Liverpool was the site of one of the first Mosques in the UK. Liverpool has a wide range of religious denominations most of which get on quite well, this wasn't always true, though typically it was the Catholic and Protestant chunks of the population that used to fight down Scotland road.

You still seem remnants of this as the Orange Lodge marches or some group decides to burn a flag, all this used to go one as little sad bits of aggravation. However, whilst this used to be just the an excuse to get drunk recently things have got a lot nastier with the likes of the EDL jumping on the bandwagon this threatened to get a bit out of hand when a group carried out its march to commemorate James Larkin, a Liverpool born Irish trade unionist. Merseyside Police had to scramble to respond.
Those supporting the march where by no mean neutral several were members of the SWP. So we had the old sectarian fight connected with the current left/right wing fight. This is not a good mix.
Last night bomb or non bomb as it turns out, was left by either a "tall white man" or a "black Brazilian", the latter seems to have become a favourite, I'm not sure how you tell someone is Brazilian, I don't know if I could recognise the accent. However what the story reminded me of is the conflict in Nigeria between Boko Haram and the government. There have doubtless been  atrocities in Nigeria and the possibility of people fighting a proxy war here does exist.
Today in the Liverpool Echo we get a bare bones story with some potentially rather racists comments which has attracted the attention of some grade A idiot first time commenters, the most loud mouthed of which do not seem to be from Liverpool.
In Liverpool in addition to the homegrown Christian sectarianism we have the universal left right fault line, we have imported several additional fault lines namely the West Indian and African fault. Whilst this vast collection should allow us to shrug and tell people stirring up to get lost, it still makes us the Balkans of England with the same number of divisions and the same percentage of hot heads on all the sides capable of forming unholy alliances with each other and dragging us all into the pit.
Let us hope that having overcome 1 sectarian division we can serve as an example we owe it to the people who healed that rift in the past and we owe it to the 96 not to let new divisions set in.

Update

Well most of my facts seem to have been complete and utter bollocks. Today, the following Tuesday, a man was issued with a police caution for causing a public nuisance. The man has today been described as a 22 year old Danish man. That was subsequently changed to a 22 year old Somali man. I really have no idea what was going through his mind or that of the "Black Brazilian" or "Tall White Man", that had early been blamed.