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This time it’s worse

Daniel Trilling

The past week marks the third time in eleven years that Britain’s far right, in response to a shocking act of murder, has redirected hatred and violence towards people who had nothing to do with it. In 2013, the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby by two Islamic fundamentalists outside an army barracks in Woolwich breathed new life into a moribund English Defence League. Thousands of people demonstrated under the EDL’s banner in London, Birmingham and elsewhere, and several mosques were firebombed, before the anti-Muslim street movement collapsed amid infighting. In 2017, a series of jihadist attacks in Westminster, at Manchester Arena and at London Bridge prompted the largest anti-Muslim protests this country has yet seen. The protests eventually coalesced around the former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, who became a symbolic rallying point for far-right activists internationally.

This time, it’s worse. The racist riots across much of England and in Northern Ireland stand out for their geographical reach, for their viciousness and because they involve a far wider range of participants than the small groups of committed fascists who helped instigate the violence. Football hooligans, sympathisers with the anti-Islam and anti-immigration messages that have circulated online since the murders, bored kids who want to fight the police or engage in looting and curious onlookers have all joined in. Muslims, refugees and people from visible ethnic minorities have been the targets: beyond the attempts to attack mosques and set fire to hotels housing asylum-seekers – and in Belfast, the firebombing of immigrant-owned businesses – there has been a stream of smaller incidents of violence and intimidation, such as the attack on a group of Eastern European men while they were driving through Hull.

Why is this happening now? False claims that circulated on social media after the Southport murders, wrongly stating that the perpetrator was Muslim, or had arrived in the UK on a small boat, have received the most attention. (Axel Rudakubana, the alleged attacker, was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents. As he is seventeen, his identity was revealed only after reporting restrictions were lifted on 1 August.) This was neither an entirely grassroots phenomenon nor a campaign orchestrated by foreign powers (though it wouldn’t be surprising if Russian propagandists were trying to make hay with the disorder). Rather, it is an integral part of the way far-right activists now operate.

In Britain today, the organised far right – consisting of groups with a formal structure and membership – is small and relatively marginal. (The EDL, for instance, no longer exists, except as a slogan chanted by some rioters.) Far more influence is wielded by entrepreneurial individuals who have built up large online followings, such as Robinson. They have the power to pick up misinformation, amplify it, embellish it and incorporate it into a longer-term narrative blaming immigration, multiculturalism, Islam and a liberal elite that supposedly conspires against the ethnic majority.

In particular, social media has become a more favourable environment for far-right influencers since Elon Musk took over Twitter, renaming it X. Robinson, who had been banned from the platform in 2017, had his account reinstated by Musk – who claims he acts in the interest of ‘free speech’, but spends a lot of time on his personal X account amplifying far-right content – in November last year. Since then Robinson’s follower count has climbed to over 900,000. ‘What will it take for you to be angry enough to do something about this?’ he asked his followers the day after the murder in Southport.

Other online grifters, such as the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate (whose Twitter/X account was reinstated in 2022) got in on the action too. His false claim on X that the Southport murders were committed by an ‘undocumented migrant’ who had ‘arrived in the UK on a boat’ was viewed twelve million times before it was removed, according to the anti-fascist organisation Hope not Hate.

But that’s only part of the picture. While far-right activists like Robinson may inflame a situation, the ideological fuel comes from ostensibly more respectable sources. Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment has been a staple of Britain’s right-wing press for decades, but we are emerging from a period in which a Conservative government made right-wing populism a central part of its platform. The damage done on this front by the Johnson-Truss-Sunak government needs to be recognised. At each inflection point since 2019, the Conservatives and their media cheerleaders chose to double down on the populist rhetoric, painting their opponents as enemies who threatened the integrity of the nation. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were treated as signs of an ‘alien’ culture that had taken over Britain’s cities. Demonstrations demanding a ceasefire in Gaza were smeared as ‘hate marches’ by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary.

The last government presided over record levels of net migration – because immigration is a structural feature of our economy and our public services rely on it – while introducing new rules to ostentatiously punish the workers who keep vital services such as social care running; for example, by banning their loved ones from coming to live with them. It mismanaged the asylum system to the extent that asylum-seekers have been languishing in ‘emergency’ hotel accommodation for months or years at a time, while leaning into the far right’s ‘invasion’ rhetoric.

Some ex-ministers are now seeking to distance themselves from the result. Priti Patel, a former home secretary and a Tory leadership contender, has come out strongly condemning the rioting and misinformation of the past week. In October 2020, however, she ignored warnings from colleagues to stop her rhetorical attacks on ‘lefty’ lawyers after a knife attack on a prominent firm of immigration solicitors. Only this week, far-right activists have been sharing a call for protests outside the offices of immigration advice centres across England.

As the Tories’ post-Brexit electoral project lies in ruins, there is a battle for hegemony within the right. Even before the Southport murders, Robinson was making a renewed effort to pull together an extra-parliamentary movement. On 27 July, he held a rally in central London attended by twenty to thirty thousand people, with up to half a million watching online. The event drew together a range of conspiratorial themes, with a series of far-right influencers giving speeches attacking immigration, asylum-seekers, trans rights, Net Zero, ‘Big Pharma’ and vaccines.

Now that far-right activists have fomented unrest, they will be seeking to profit from it. Going by past evidence, rallies like the one on 27 July are unlikely to maintain their momentum. Either they peter out, as people get put off by the more extreme, neo-Nazi elements in the crowd, or the organisers fall out with one another. What’s more, as the anti-fascist historian David Renton points out, Robinson isn’t much of a leader, as his main passion appears to be garnering donations from his supporters. (Robinson has recently been tweeting from a holiday in Ayia Napa, having left the country the day before he was due in court for allegedly breaching an order not to repeat lies he told about a teenage Syrian refugee.)

What’s more likely is that some version of ‘you may not like what the rioters did, but they had a point about immigration and Islam’ will become a dominant theme on the political right. Nigel Farage is likely to be the biggest beneficiary. (‘I hope you are listening to us, Nigel Farage, because we are your constituency,’ said one of the speakers at the Tommy Robinson rally.) The Reform leader specialises in pushing mainstream discourse as far to the right as he can get away with, then presenting himself as the only reasonable solution to the problem. Immediately after the Southport murders he published a video on social media asking why the incident wasn’t being treated as terror-related and wondering whether the ‘truth is being withheld from us’ – a classic Faragist nudge and a wink. With the support of the wider ecosystem of right-wing populist commentators and media outlets, there will be a concerted effort to excuse the motivations of the rioters, if not their actions. ‘Are the left elite to blame for the violence in Southport as they continue to smear and ignore angry communities?’ GB News asked in an online poll on 1 August.

This makes the Labour government’s response all the more crucial. So far, Keir Starmer has pursued a strictly law-and-order approach, sounding more like a director of public prosecutions – his old job – than a prime minister. This may damp down the unrest, but a political response is vital. Over the coming months, there will be no end of voices telling us that the rioters had ‘legitimate concerns’ and ethnic conflict is the inevitable result of immigration. They will inaccurately link immigration to crime and recycle the right-wing myth of ‘two-tier policing’, according to which ethnic minorities and the left are supposedly given an easier ride. They will focus on the 52 per cent of people who, according to a recent Ipsos poll, say immigration is ‘too high’, but ignore the plurality, revealed by the same poll, who believe immigration has been good for the country – or that diversity is a simple, everyday fact of life in Britain. It’s vital these arguments are confronted directly.

It’s also important to resist the temptation to believe that the violence has a simple economic explanation. It’s no accident that much of the rioting is taking place in parts of the country from which political power and wealth have drained away as Britain has become a more unequal place – and where, as in many other places, vital social institutions that keep communities happy and healthy have been gutted by fourteen years of austerity economics. But these riots are not a cry of pain from the most deprived. They are perpetrated by people who can only find a sense of belonging by singling out and attacking others on the basis of their ethnicity, and who indulge in the destructive fantasy that their own frustrations will diminish so long as other people are having it worse. If our society is encouraging people to behave that way, then we have to start talking about how to repair the damage. But that needs to come with a wholesale rejection of the racist lies on which the violence thrives.

Comments

  • 6 August 2024 at 4:19pm
    CarpeDiem says:
    Thank you, Daniel, for that thoughtful post. I sometimes think we live in an era of "strategic racism" where most political parties use racism consciously and cynically to maximise their political gains. The fate of who and how many get hurt when violence finally and inevitably erupts being largely inconsequential in the calculus employed.
  • 6 August 2024 at 4:23pm
    whatnot says:
    "Since then Robinson’s follower count has climbed to over 900,000" - given the amount of follower requests from assorted porn bots and verified 'crypto experts' I have to politely decline on my private account each week, how that count translates into direct reach is perhaps debatable, but then the main objective of the numbers game these days is to trigger the algorithm into polluting random timelines with uncalled-for 'recommendations', which thankfully, just like whatever is deemed to be 'trending' at any given moment, you are still free to ignore.

    • 6 August 2024 at 6:45pm
      whatnot says: @ whatnot
      'Elon Musk calls PM ‘two-tier Keir’ over police response to UK riots' - so unlike his two-tier cesspit then, where verified-by-debit-card bigotry gets promoted over non-verified one. sometimes you do wonder if his account isn't run by that brain-chipped pig of his...
    • 11 August 2024 at 2:29am
      Lorraine Alexander says: @ whatnot
      I'm afraid I must object to the malicious characterization of the brain-chipped pig or any others as lacking in executive talent. Easy to find research on porcine intelligence. EM himself apparently envisions the implant as capable not only of helping people with spinal cord injury and dementia but also of turning on your Tesla. It's now FDA approved although very few people have benefitted and "fixes" have held up progress. Back to the pig and other non-homo-spaiens, it has been revealed that Elon Musk's rush to get FDA approval for his brain implant has incurred the needless deaths of 1,500 lab animals. It's complicated....
    • 12 August 2024 at 2:26pm
      whatnot says: @ Lorraine Alexander
      a very useful memo, although unlikely to be given much weight by any future executive vetting committee - in Animal Farm With Chips, you just oink, and it happens.
  • 6 August 2024 at 8:13pm
    steve kay says:
    Theresa May, go home or face arrest. Alexander Johnson, picaninnies and watermelons. Rishi Sunak, plane loads to Rwanda will stop the boats. All shamelessly preparing the ground for Yaxley Lennon and Farage, which may not have been the intention but has certainly had that effect.
    • 10 August 2024 at 1:16pm
      freshborn says: @ steve kay
      Keir Starmer, "Israel can turn off the water and power to Gaza".
  • 6 August 2024 at 9:32pm
    Camus says:
    Watching from Germany, I have been surprised by the apparent inability of the police to round up the hooligans and restore control in so many cities. Haven't they been trained to deal with large crowds?
    The German police have had a lot of experience in dealing with large groups of demonstrators and have some effective methods for minimizing the damage on such occasions.
    The marches of the Pegida supporters were kept far away from town centres and opposition groups. They adopt the "herding" method to make sure there is control over the various groups - the system is known as "Einkesseln" - to round up a large group of beings to stop them causing chaos of the sort we have seen over the past few days. In the days when we demonstrated against the construction of " Startbahn West " at Frankfurt the police would keep us captive in one place until the demonstration was over, which was also very effective when it came to getting names and addresses or confiscating fireworks and Mollies.
    There would be some who protest but ensuring the safety of the targeted groups and minimizing the damage would soon silence the moaning Minnie's. A few clicks on YouTube and you will soon find examples of these methods of crowd control.



  • 7 August 2024 at 2:29am
    Graucho says:
    Farage really is a slimy city slicker. The victims of the Southport murders were hardly cold in their graves when he came slithering out of his lair on GBN, his forked tongue tasting the air for the scent of political opportunity to be had out of the horror.
  • 7 August 2024 at 12:25pm
    Debord says:
    I don't think you can pin this solely on Farage or the Tories with regards to politics legitimising racist, Islamophobic, anti-migrant sentiment. Shifting massively to the right on this has been a staple of Keir Starmer's Labour and it has consistently attacked the Tories on immigration *from the right*, complaining that numbers are too high, that e.g. the NHS employs "too many immigrants", that "the boats" are some national emergency which are to be addressed by treating them like terrorism. There is reams of evidence to indicate Labour has been terrified of being viewed as close to movements like BLM or even "anti-racism" broadly because of how apocryphal "red wall voters" might perceive it. Starmer has also eagerly gone along with the demonisation of "the left" (a left which is viewed as interchangeable with the "pro-Palestine" movement and so with "Muslims" generally) as an illegitimate and antisemitic presence in British public life and even in the aftermath of the general election we saw Labour figures filling the airwaves to frame voters to Labour's left as dangerous thugs. This has all fed into what we're seeing now just as much as Farage and the Tories.
  • 7 August 2024 at 4:21pm
    John Plunk says:
    It should be noted that Tory policy on migration was merely an intensification of the dual approach favoured by the Blair and Brown governments: to talk tough – and direct various nasty petty measures at asylum seekers – while allowing immigration to continue largely unchecked. Like most New Labour ideas, it worked in the short term, but only by storing up problems for the future.
    • 8 August 2024 at 12:00am
      whatnot says: @ John Plunk
      it wasn't Labour that cheered the EU's eastern expansion in 2004, and subsequent 'largely unchecked' Polish plumber invasion. now free from EU shackles, the likes of Paul Golding tweet 'meanwhile in Poland' clips of all-white summer bliss.
  • 7 August 2024 at 4:38pm
    Kam Sangha says:
    In addition to Debord there is trajectory of Labour's complicity not only in hardening attitudes and legal impediments to asylum from Blair curtailing seekers' right to work but also pandering to crass populism with the infamous coffee mug of 2015 under Milliband's leadership:
    Controls on Immigration
    I'm Voting Labour. Papers released from the National Archives say Blair "radical" ideas. These included so-called safe havens abroad and advisors wondering if Britain required an asylum system. Segue to the climate of Tory rule since 2010.
  • 8 August 2024 at 10:26am
    MattG says:
    "Football hooligans, sympathisers with the anti-Islam and anti-immigration messages ... , bored kids who want to fight the police or engage in looting and curious onlookers have all joined in"

    That's the correct Venn Diagram. So you wonder why only the anti-immigrant get analysed.
    Football, for example, is where capitalism, nationalism, tribalism, trunken disorder, and misogyny intersect; where young white males get encouraged to take over the street and chant slogans.
  • 11 August 2024 at 12:31pm
    Dr Paul says:
    These guys who rabbit on about a 'two-tier' policing or justice system are quite right, but not in the way they think. A few months back a group of climate-crisis protesters received four or five years' sentences for peacefully holding up the traffic on main roads; those last week who hurled brickbats and bottles at policemen and mosques, threatened passers-by, set fire to hotels housing refugees (which if successful would have almost certainly killed people), motors, shops and a library, have so far been sentenced to a rather less severe 20 or 30 months. 'Two-tier' justice alright!
    • 12 August 2024 at 2:43pm
      whatnot says: @ Dr Paul
      yes, it's a bunch of woke leftist genderless 'citizens of nowhere' against dowtrodden 'patriots', who just want their country back to where it was before they were born, and it's no surprise that the courts, run by 'enemies of the people', have chosen to side with the former.
  • 11 August 2024 at 3:52pm
    ivp says:
    I strongly suspect that, rather like the disorder at Euro 2020, behind quite a lot of this violence is the influence of alcohol and cocaine. Yes, there are plenty of people out there with nasty, small minded, misdirected grievances, but I’m convinced that what prompted people to actual violence is a skinful of beer on a sunny weekend, a few bumps of coke and plenty of bullshit bravado.
    • 12 August 2024 at 4:58pm
      jamesmann says: @ ivp
      They can afford both alcohol and cocaine?
  • 13 August 2024 at 11:20pm
    Howard Medwell says:
    Since the 1960's, political expressions of racism have tended to spike during periods of Labour government. Enoch Powell's "Rivers of blood" speech, and the shocking phenomenon of organised workers striking in his support, happened during the 1964 - 1970 Wilson government; the electoral success of the National Front during the Labour governments of 1974 - 79, that of the BNP during the Blair years. Currently the really big issue in British politics is the housing crisis; if the current government fails to affect this, it is easy to imagine how the far right could interpret the issue in racist terms.
  • 16 August 2024 at 9:24am
    vulpiani says:
    Re affording alcohol. Here in Leicester the drinks were free from opening time and through the afternoon. Smallish group masterminded by a notorious local criminal. Impressively, some Muslim men went to talk to this group to discuss their issues. The police were very good. Of course the riots were planned to destabilise a Labour government. They were just awaiting a trigger. Btw I'm surprised that no one has widened the comments to the rise of fascism on the European continent.
    • 18 August 2024 at 3:52pm
      whatnot says: @ vulpiani
      "Elsewhere, Paul Williams, 45, was jailed for two years and two months for being at the “forefront” of what a judge described as an “orgy of mindless destruction, violence and disorder” in Sunderland, having originally popped into the city centre to collect a takeaway.

      Williams shouted, “Put your shields down and let’s go, let’s fucking go” and took his shirt off as he squared up to police, running at the line of riot shields, the court was told.

      Sophie Allinson, defending, said her client had not been aware of any protest and his “moment of madness” came after he drank eight cans of lager."

      what's eight cans to a true patriot? and what if it had been bitter, not lager... the issue could be not that of affordability, but whether one gets plastered before or after sitting down for a meal deal.
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