'Starmer must answer the call or darker forces will', says Mick Booker

Paul - I've changed his name but he does exist although sometimes he wishes he didn't - had just got out of prison, another drunken brawl that had got him in trouble and a few months behind bars.

Stood, shivering in a chilly Sunderland city centre on December 23.

Anxious, emotional, alone, three or four drinks into the night, he rang the number of the foster carer family that had been his only oasis in a childhood wrecked by an alcoholic, drug addicted mother and absent dad.

Now in his mid-thirties it's 15 or so years since he left the care of social services. Some foster carers didn't do much caring.

But not long before his 11th birthday Paul and his two younger siblings had found a bit of order and love from a family who lived just a few miles from the former Durham pit village they'd been born into.

Just a few miles apart in distance but worlds apart in environment. Thankfully someone answered - the only father figure he ever had known.

Always honest, fair and loving, trying what he can even all these years on to point Paul away from trouble and towards a bit of common sense.

But the call has to end at some point and once Paul clicks the red button on his phone he's on his own again.

Unlike the polarised political voices fighting for our attention during these febrile times, I can only speak from my own experience.

Growing up in the north east I saw countless boys and girls like Paul grow up into men and women, rudderless and with no sense that they could have a successful, fruitful life.

And this wasn't just those who had been born into families caught in the web of the social services.

I went to school with kids from loving families from the same villages where Paul and his family came - villages that were shattered by the changing face of industry.

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It had started in the 1950s in county Durham when scores of villages which had thriving, happy, hardworking communities were rendered obsolete overnight when the mines shut and they were told investment would cease.

Most didn't leave - why would you if you loved the place you live? But it started a social decline across the area that was finished off with a final death blow during the 1980s and the Conservative government's battle with the remaining pit communities in the north east and elsewhere.

It was no surprise when I saw people like Paul on social media on Friday night. Crowds of them causing chaos in Sunderland.

And there's 'Pauls' joining riots and disorder in towns and cities across Britain too. Stirred into action by their own sense of personal desperation but also, more dangerously, by the false prophets and messiahs that have taken over social media and the political narrative in recent weeks.

There's desperately unhappy people in communities in this country who have been neglected for years - and that was before the debate about immigration exploded. Not all of them have someone to call when they are feeling desperate.

Not all of them have someone to talk them down from the brink and give them the best bit of citizen's advice - that it's best not setting fire to Citizen's Advice Bureaus if you want the government to listen to you.

But years of neglecting to really listen to those who live in our communities has precipitated what we see on the streets of Britain today.

There was a bit of time when politicians patronised 'the Red Wall' but that seems to have been abandoned and whatever the hell 'levelling up' was has been thrown in the bin.

Yes there's plenty of nutters out there on the streets - I grew up terrified of a lot of them - but calling all of them Far Right missed the point.

In the early, happier, days of the Labour government I saw it trumpeted that some of the cabinet were 'working class' and 'made in Comprehensive schools' in the north east.

But that will all be academic if they don't do anything to improve the lives of those from backgrounds like theirs during their time in power.

The government have to win the fight to prove that they can be trusted to change Britain for the better. But they are up against some dark forces that have so far seized the narrative.

As I said, we need to beware the false messiahs and prophets posing as the answer, pretending to care about working class people of all colours and creeds.

If the PM and his cabinet don't get a grip soon and speak honestly and without fear to those communities then they will lose that trust.

Starmer needs to answer the call for help - not leave a vacuum for the darker forces to step in.

We've seen unrest before. In relatively recent times it's been 2001 in West Yorkshire and 2011 widespread across the UK.

Nothing as far as I can see was done to fix the underlying problems. And once the current violence stops, what's to say anything will be done to fix things once again.

The attitude shown so far suggest it doesn't look likely to me.

People like Paul will get nicked, another three months in jail and then back out to make the call to the only people they trust.

Luckily - for now - he has someone with common sense to ring. Like I said, others don't, and there's dangerous forces bidding for their attention. So it goes.