The delusional Cereal Killer Café owners aren’t victims of ‘hate crime’

They’re barely even victims at all

brick lane cereal cereal killer cafe chatsworth road chatsworth road murder east london hipster shoreditch

Every so often something nasty occurs which also happens to be both funny and revelatory at the same time. 

Last night a group of anarchists marched on Shoreditch, carrying flaming torches and pig’s heads, their hoods up, their V for Vendetta masks fastened to their faces.

It could have been mayhem. Blood might have been spilt.

Instead, the gentrification haters calmly and heroically arrived at their target – the Cereal Killer Café in Brick Lane – and covered the place with paint. Someone also wrote the word “scum” (fairly illegibly) in black marker on one of the windows.

Almost inevitably, the twins who run the place were shaken, unhappy and hysterical. Alan and Gary Keery — who both sport sleeve tattoos and Moses-like facial hair — compared the renovation work on their property to the worst lynch mobs of the Middle Ages.

Alan told the Evening Standard“I can’t agree with what they’re doing, the way they are dealing with gentrification. It feels like it’s been taken back to the Dark Ages – an angry mob with fire – it’s a bit of a witch hunt. 

“We’re being targeted as the poster boys of gentrification and that’s not our fault.”

Then one of them tweeted this:

A hate crime is generally defined as “a prejudice motivated crime that occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group”.

What happened to the boys who sell cereal for £3.20 a bowl in an area synonymous with existent poverty and nonexistent infrastructure wasn’t a hate crime. It was pantomime with some criminal damage thrown in.

Urban theatre

It wasn’t a particularly nice thing for those anarchists to do, either to the Keery brothers, or their customers. But then again, this isn’t a particularly nice part of London either.

Tower Hamlets, with its reeking fast food pits, breeze block shacks, multi-storey pound shops, brazen ISIS recruiters, festering junkies and lunatic local politicians is simply too real, too claustrophobically human an environment for a twee, kidult catering business like the Cereal Killer Café to operate in without fear of reprisal.

The warm endorsement by Boris Johnson of the twins (“gentle bearded hipsters”) probably sealed their fate more than anything else.

On the same day the café received its new paint job a man was gunned down in broad daylight on Chatsworth Road in Hackney, around 20 minutes drive away.

He was 25 years old and his murder was witnessed by dozens of people, including children. In London there’s never a shortage of actual victims, of real violence.