Sympathy for the Plebs

Why the Hard Right is Weeping for the Rioters

It’s a truth, generally unacknowledged, yet demonstrated time and time again in British politics, that there is a certain breed of very right wing politician or commentator who will always love the working classes - or at least that section of the working class that shares their racism, bigotry and xenophobia.

Ex-Etonian vicars, army officers from the Raj, gouty Thackerian squires, assorted lords and ladies, hedge fund managers mouldering on the Dubai sea front, ex-pat newspaper editors ensconced in their French chateaux - there is a long history of men and women of means who will always find time to amplify any ‘concerns’ about certain categories of foreigner from those of little or no means at all.

These friends of the common people will rarely be heard in any debates about de-industrialisation, pay, working conditions, zero hours contracts, high rents, public housing, youth services, social care, child care, maternity leave, or access to public services - unless any of these issues can be linked to immigration.

Don’t expect them to be on your side if you lose your job. End up on benefits and they will likely suggest, as Boris Johnson memorably did back in 1995 in an article on the ‘appalling proliferation of single mothers’ (ahem), that ‘blue-collar men’ are ‘likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment.’

Take a break in your workplace, and they’ll say you’re slacking, as the Gordonstoun alumnus Isabel Oakeshott once did, about NHS nurses. Go on strike, and you become a greedy train driver, a greedy doctor, a union bully boy etc.

But if you’re white and working class and you loathe the EU, immigration, or the liberal/woke ‘elites’, then these same people will swoon over you, politically-speaking, like Constance Chatterley over her gamekeeper.

And when violent racist mobs go on the rampage, only a few weeks into a Labour government, some of these politicians and commentators will inevitably see opportunities in the chaos and disorder - though don’t expect them to express these possibilities out loud. Because riots and pogroms, like collecting the bins, are work for the proles, not them. Their role is stand on the sidelines and see how far they can go and how much they can get away with.

All of which brings me inevitably to Nigel Mosley-Farage.

Some of Reform UK Party Limited’s critics have looked askance at the ‘anti-elite’ credentials of this man of the people, just because he happens to be the highest-paid MP in Parliament, elected by one of the poorest constituencies in the UK where he has yet to hold a surgery.

Such criticisms are unfair. Mosley-Farage did find time to ‘represent Clacton on the world stage’ at the Republican Party Convention, just as I found time to represent Sheffield on the world stage when I went to Barcelona on holiday this summer - though my trip wasn’t paid for. And, equally importantly, he also found time to ask important questions during the riots, about what the police ‘weren’t telling us.’

Who cannot be grateful for that? Who would be cynical enough to think that he does these things merely for his own political gain? Who can doubt that he genuinely feels the pain of those who feel the need to attack a mosque, rip off a hijab, throw bricks though windows, or burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers, in order to express their ‘concerns’ about ‘immigration?’

Not that the frog man would ever condone such acts, but their pain is his pain too - the outrage of the upper-crust white reactionary forced to hear foreign accents on the underground, and share his country with people who aren’t like him.

For a few days, Farage saw himself as the man on horseback, bringing severity and order to a troubled nation as he dripped petrol onto the flames. But now the riots have ended, and the government didn’t collapse. Farage was not called upon to save the nation. And no sooner has all this become clear, than his ‘party’ and all the other pundits and politicians who called on Starmer and Cooper to resign and engaged in ‘what can you expect?’ fatalism, are now portraying the rioters as victims of state tyranny.

In an article in the Spectator on ‘The persecution of “the plebs”’, Douglas Murray condemned the government’s response to ‘this month’s spontaneous and grass-roots riots’ as ‘anything but intelligible, clear or predictable.’

Why was that? Because, in cracking down on these ‘grass roots’ riots, the keen-eyed ex-Etonian could not help noticing that it is indeed “the plebs” who have been marched to court sharpish during the unexpected speeding up of our justice system.’

Not since Enoch Powell quoted the ‘decent, ordinary fellow Englishman’ who predicted that ‘the black man will hold the whip hand over the white man’, has a man of such breeding shown so much concern for the men and women who would normally only cross his threshold through the tradesman’s entrance.

The only example of these ‘plebs’ in Murray’s piece is Bernadette Spofforth, the wretched Twitter/X conspiracy-monger who was arrested for posting the following incendiary tweet, immediately after the Southport murders:

If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.

Southport Stabbings suspect, Ali-Al-Shakati, was on MI6 watch list and was known to Liverpool mental health services. He was an asylum seeker who came to UK by boat last year.

I’m done with the mental ‘health excuse’. You should be as well!

Spofforth is not the most obvious representative of the plebeian class. The owner of a swimsuit company who lives in a £1.5 million house in Chester, she has a long history of out-there Twitter activism, mostly related to pandemic conspiracy theories, climate change denialism, 15 minute cities and globalist plots, before the analogue world exploded in her face.

Spofforth deleted the tweet when she realised it was false, and apologized for it, and she and her supporters have made much of this. But the key issue in deciding whether or not she is actually charged, relates to her prediction that ‘all hell is about to break loose’, and her final exhortation regarding the mental health ‘excuse’ - a reference to a widespread conspiracy theory, in which the British police is supposedly concealing the identities of murderers who happen to be Muslims and asylum-seekers.

In other words, those ‘concerns’ again. Spofforth clearly expected her readers to feel as angry as she did, and tweeted in order to feed that anger. That doesn’t mean she wanted to cause a riot, and it’s up to the police and the CPS to decide whether or not all this amounts to a criminal offence. But that hasn’t stopped this obnoxious troll from becoming a free speech martyr.

Toby Young’s ridiculous Free Speech Union has promised to pay her defence costs if she is charged. In the Telegraph, Isabel Oakeshott has accused Keir Starmer of embarking on a ‘terrifying crusade against free speech’ akin to McCarthyism’ and described Spofforth as ‘the victim of a witch hunt – and it’s all because the Prime Minister is desperate to shut down uncomfortable debate.’

Oakeshott doesn’t say what debate Labour is trying to close down, but she does say this:

This is not about the remarkable acceleration of the normally glacial judicial process for carefully selected “far -Right thugs”. Though there is something quite sinister about the gleeful public parading of a particular cohort of (white) criminals, most voters will be pleased to discover that justice can be so swift when ministers want to make a political point.

If you detect a conspiratorial whisper in that ‘remarkable acceleration’, or the scare marks around “far-Right thugs” you’re probably right. It’s a bit rich to hear someone like Oakeshott opining about ‘McCarthyism’ when she herself once helped remove Kim Darroch from his job as US Ambassador after publishing his emails, but this ‘road to 1984’ hysteria has already become part of the right’s default position on the riots.

In the same paper, ‘Lord’ Frost also joined in, in an article declaring that the UK is ‘no longer a free country’, and favourably quoting Javier Milei’s claim that ‘those crazy socialists in Britain are putting people in prison for posting on social networks.’

Elon Musk, who did do much to try and undermine the government during the riots, has also attacked its treatment of the rioters. When a Sellafield worker was jailed for eight weeks for posting three ‘grossly offensive’ and ‘racially aggravated’ memes on Facebook relating to the storming of a hotel housing asylum seekers, Musk tweeted to his 194 million followers on Twitter/X: ‘The judge is the one who should be arrested!’

Musk has also criticized what he calls the ‘messed up’ sentences handed out to some rioters. Liz Truss - an ex-politician and hyperactive non-entity who you can never be certain is mad, bad or dim, has leapt to Musk’s defence against the EU ‘bullies’ who are supposedly trying to ‘silence’ ie. regulate him.

These criticisms of Musk appear to have accelerated his metamorphosis from Tesla climate-saver to sociopathic far-right troll. Yesterday, he claimed ‘The UK is turning into a police state’ because of the government’s ‘Operation Early Dawn’ plan to hold defendants in police cells before trial. This measure was adopted to relieve pressure on prisons, but Rocket Boy has now dubbed it ‘Operation Orwell’.

No one familiar with the depressing intellectual dishonesty of Brendan O’Neill, will be surprised to find him opining on the riots in identical terms. Here he is, in the Spectator, discussing the wretched Julie Sweeney, who received a fifteen-month sentence for sending a communication threatening death or serious harm:

The post-riots climate is turning ugly. Yes, many of the rioters deserve stiff sentences, especially the weapon-wielding bigots who descended on mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. But when I read about a 53-year-old carer being banged up for a gross post online, and a 13-year-old girl being convicted of violent disorder, and people getting jailtime for ‘dancing and gesticulating’ at a line of police officers, I can’t help but wonder if this is morphing into a judicial shaming of the lower orders.

O’Neill’s tears for the 53-year-old carer would shame most crocodiles, but there is a lot more where this came from in his Spiked columns. Take his observation that:

It is the identity of the rioters that determines whether they receive sympathy or hatred, pity or bile, Starmer’s slavish genuflection or Starmer’s promise of a savage law-and-order clampdown. The reason the post-Southport rioting so horrified the cultural establishment is not because of what was done but because of who did it. Them. The white lower orders. The people we never want to hear from. Ever.

I suspect most people were horrified by the riots because of their racism, their cruelty, and their lawless violence, not because of any animus towards the ‘white lower orders’. Claire Fox, another Spiked luminary, lent her strident contrarian tones to the choir, describing the sentence handed out to Julie Sweeney on Newsnight as an example of ‘judicial activism.’

Of course it is.

Just to recall, Sweeney was arrested for posting on a Facebook group, after seeing people repairing the mosque in Southport on television, ‘ Don't protect the mosque, blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’

The maximum sentence for the offence ‘sending threatening communications’, under Section 181 (1) of the Online Safety Act 2023, is five years if the message ‘which conveys a threat of death or serious harm is sent with the requisite intention or recklessness.’

It’s difficult to see how a judge could not interpret Sweeney’s message in these terms, regardless of her background. And in these circumstances, her sentence is actually fairly lenient. For an example of ‘draconian’ sentencing’, look at the 55 riot charges that were once handed out to striking miners at Orgreave - an offence which was punishable with a life sentence at the time.

So far only two people involved in this month’s disorder have been charged with riot (a charge which now has a maximum ten year sentence). Yet there is now a chorus which extends from GB News and Turning Point UK to the Newsnight sofa, which suggests that (white)working class people are being singled out for special treatment. For example, in this interview with Richard Tice - a politician who becomes more detestable the more you see of him:

And this, from Turning Point UK, with a malevolent stupidity only matched by its gall:

Further to the fringes, there is now a go fund me crowdfunder ‘supporting the families of political prisoners UK’ and ‘the recent wave of people being sent to prison for social media posts’ which has so far raised £6, 850. If that ‘political prisoners’ tag sounds familiar, it should. This was how the seditionists at the US Capitol building were and are described.

The UK crowdfunder was set up by Laura Melia, a white nationalist, ‘counter-jihadist’, and co-leader of the white nationalist Patriotic Alternative group, whose husband Sam Melia was sentenced to two years imprisonment in March this year for stirring up racial hatred.

These are not the kind of people that respectable politicians and commentators like to associate themselves with, but the ‘persecution of the plebs’ oratorio has room for many different voices. At no point have any of these commentators who make these arguments acknowledged what might have happened if the government had not reacted as quickly.

None of them have expressed any sympathy for the men and women of colour - also members of the working classes - up and down the country who were frightened to leave their homes in case some white mob attacked them.

What do the critics of ‘judicial activism’ think might have happened if these mobs had broken into the Holiday Inn in Rotherham or the Mercure hotel in Bristol or blown up a mosque? What, if anything, should a government do when misinformation, disinformation are routinely pumped through social media, with the support and collusion of the richest man on the planet, that result in actual harm to real people?

These aren’t questions that most of them ask, for the simple reason that most of them don’t care.

Where they once sought to undermine the ‘enemies of the people’ who blocked their hard Brexit, and portrayed lawyers defending asylum seekers as ‘activist lawyers’, they now tell lies and fairy tales, in which (white) rioters are victims of a tyrannical government, in order to keep the resentment boiling over, and detract from a (Labour) government’s competent response.

It’s possible - though none of them would ever admit it - that they know the ‘plebs’ who exploded onto the streets this month were expressing hatred and resentment that they helped nurture.

In this sense, the ‘sympathy for the plebs’ choristers do have a point. It will always be the little people who get punished and go to jail.

Most of those who pretend to care about them, like the world’s richest man, will never pay any price at all, for whatever they have said or will say.