Daughter's friend being present at Rotherham hotel riot poses bleak questions: Jayne Dowle

So what possessed him to travel to a Holiday Inn on the border between our own town, Barnsley, and Rotherham, on a sunny August weekend to hurl abuse and possibly worse at asylum seekers?

The answer to this question is key to politicians accepting and understanding why so many thousands of individuals - predominately male, but not entirely - are risking their livelihoods and reputations by heeding the call from far-right agitators including Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) and Andrew Tate, the misogynist who already holds alarming sway over the minds of impressionable young men.

One Manvers eyewitness, Jackie, 56, told this newspaper. “People came into the area with crates of beer to cause trouble and destruction. I saw adults giving stones to children to throw.”

All day Sunday The Jam’s political anthem Eton Rifles kept going around my head. Songwriter and frontman Paul Weller is an avowed left-winger, but his 1979 hit single seemed to sum up the mood. “Sup up your beer and collect your fags/There's a row going on down near Slough.”

Released at a time of industrial unrest and during the first months of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, Weller told Uncut magazine in 2016 that Eton Rifles was inspired by visceral class divide: “I was watching the news on TV and I saw this footage of a Right To Work march going past Eton, where all the kids from the school came outside and started jeering at the marchers.”

A million miles from the former South Yorkshire coalfield perhaps.

But in some ways not. Young men will always be angry. Young men were angry in Manvers and across the Dearne Valley 40 years ago, during the 1984-5 miners’ strike when they fought bitterly for their jobs and way of life.

Ghosts we thought we’d put to rest, of battles between strikers and police, have been resurrected with the sight of riot shields once more on the streets of South Yorkshire.

The same unbridled anger is there, but it is of course unjust to equate these historic protests with what is happening in our country in 2024. The riots of the last week have been sparked by the killing of three little girls in Southport on August 29.

Axel Rudakubana, 17, a second-generation immigrant – his parents are from Rwanda, he was born in Cardiff - has been charged with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder. False rumours, whipped up on social media, circulated that he was in fact an asylum seeker.

And the rest is turning, before our eyes, into inglorious history. What is not being talked about much is the ready army of disaffected and alienated young men readily falling under malign influence.

My son, who is 21, the same age as Weller when he wrote Eton Rifles, knows many seeking any outlet for their frustration, to vent the feeling that they are not being listened to by liberal and/or entitled elites. Many of those old enough to vote in the 2019 General Election threw their support behind Boris Johnson, because they considered him “one of the lads”.

Disappointed that Johnson didn’t deliver, they voted Reform in July, swerving the mainstream parties because they believed Labour or Conservative offered nothing to address their concerns; jobs, economic security, secure borders, and for the UK to be a proper fighting force in the world. My son, being apolitical, thankfully just keeps his mouth shut and his head down.

By no means does voting Reform mean you’re ready to pick up a rock, but the resentment is there. And this is what the government needs to accept before it can even begin to calm matters down.

It’s an old trope of political theory that extremist groups end up having more in common than what keeps them apart. The centre must hold against the extremes. This is government’s role, but it must not be blind.

When the policing operation at Manvers finally wound down at 5am on Monday, Labour Mayor of South Yorkshire, Oliver Coppard visited alongside MP for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough, Defence Secretary John Healey.

Praising the volunteers cleaning up with mops and brooms, Coppard told reporters that this “positivity and spirit are the real face of South Yorkshire,” and said: “I’m sad, frustrated and angry that this is the way our town has been portrayed to the world. That is not who we are, and that is not what South Yorkshire is about.”

Sadly, Mr Coppard, and it pains me to say it, for too many of your citizens, it’s exactly what South Yorkshire is about right now.