...And Breathe

The UK Puts Out the Fires

Anyone who has ever been in a crowd will have experienced those moments in which you seem to have become part of something larger than yourself. Such moments can be joyous, liberating and life-affirming. In politics, they can provide strength, power and unity of purpose.,

But crowd-emotions can also be dark, cruel and bitter. They can be whipped up by demagogues, and channelled into leader-cults. They can be a kind of liberation from restraint, in which anonymity enables its members to do things that were previously forbidden. In these moments, the crowd can turn into a lynch-mob or a pogrom, in which individual conscience, fear of the law or censure all dissolve into rage and hatred, and its members feel that none of them are responsible for anything.

Ten days ago, these were the crowds that found their moment of collective liberation in streets up and down the UK. Over two days and nights, racist mobs, fuelled by malicious misinformation about the Southport murders, burned a library, a citizens’ advice centre, and a hotel housing asylum-seekers, set fire to police vans and private cars, dragged Asian taxi-drivers from their cars, and smashed shop windows, cars and peoples homes - especially homes where black people lived. They threw rocks at police and at Filipino health workers. In Hull, they stopped cars and instigated ‘traffic checks’ in which only white drivers were allowed to continue.

While angry tanked-up men snarled and threw punches at the police, others took the opportunity to engage in festive looting of sausage rolls, vapes and crocs. Parents brought their children along to watch a mob set fire to a Travelodge housing asylum seekers, and rioters took giddy videos of lootings and burning police vans on their mobile phones.

All these events were part of the flashmob insurrection-cum-pogrom that shook towns and cities across the UK, egged on by an ex-kickboxer, misogynist and alleged-rapist, a former failed contestant from a reality tv show, an oily provocateur dozing on a sun-bed in Cyprus with a mobile phone, and amplified by the richest man in the world - though he may not be for long.

According to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon - the 5-star Wat Tyler and enemy of the state - this was the moment when ordinary British folk had had enough. Watching the country go up in flames from his swimming pool, Yaxley-Lennon was careful to use the word ‘peaceful’ as he issued summons to the faithful to attend ‘protests’ that were already anything but. Others were more forceful - on Twitter/X, at least:

If this was war, Fox was nowhere to be seen fighting it, and quickly deleted this tweet when the ‘war’ began to turn against those who were. Throughout this process, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice and other Reform UK luminaries did what they could to legitimize the ‘protests’ and undermine the Labour government, while also carefully distancing themselves from any negative legal consequences. A screenshot from Reform UK’s FB group gives an indication of the game they were playing:

A good brave lad, but not part of the ‘solution.’ That role is reserved for the ludicrous Nigel Mosley-Farage, simultaneously an agent of chaos and also the cure for it:

It’s easy to laugh at Mosley-Farage’s Poundland Fuhrer schtick, but just because you’re ludicrous, doesn’t mean that you aren’t dangerous. Farage, Robinson, Hopkins & co are dangerous, because of the movement they belong to, the money they can draw on, the constituencies they are able to reach, and most of all, because of the volatility and fragility of a country that, in 2016, leapt into the dark without knowing where it was going to end up, and has never really stopped falling.

Now, a single weekend of violence and mayhem has undermined decades of the slow, sometimes difficult, but not unsuccessful construction of a multi-ethnic society from the ruins of empire. There are now Muslims and people of colour who have been frightened enough by the violence to stay in their homes, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ‘anti-immigration protests’, as the BBC politely calls them, them, were intended to dominate the streets and terrorize communities who the ‘protesters’ believe have no right to be in the UK, and who they refuse to accept as their equals even if they were born here.

The videos, mugshots and potted biographies of the rioters who have been arrested tell a bleak and sorry story: of men and women of all ages who vented their spleen on people who are no more privileged than they are. Some of them already had a record of criminal violence. Others now have one, and will be in jail for a year or more, because they drank or snorted too much, or because they were too readily seduced by the lies and provocations of people who will never feel the consequences of the lies they told, because they got caught up in the atmosphere of festive destruction and collective cruelty.

Whatever their personal motivations, all of these people will have received the messages about ‘illegals’, migrant ‘invaders’ and queue-jumpers, ‘stopping the boats’, Rwanda, grooming gangs, and white ‘replacement’, emanating from a wide spectrum that extends from far-right internet provocateurs, Russian bots, and Tory and Reform UK politicians present white people and the white working class as marginalized outsiders in a country that no longer belongs to them.

For the last ten days, many of these politicians have been pumping out the brazenly dishonest accusation of ‘two-tier policing’ in order to keep the resentment and white victimhood boiling over. On 6 August, Douglas ‘Genocide Doug’ Murray, looking and acting very much like Joachim Phoenix’s psychotic emperor in Gladiator, gave an interview for Australian tv in which he pontificated on the ‘protests’ in the following terms:

Clearly they’ve lost control of the streets. Now is it time to send in the Army at some point? Probably yes, but if the army will not be sent in then the public will have to go in and the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very very brutal… We have thousands, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who have no love at all for the UK, but yet live here. I don’t want them to live here. I don’t want them here. They came under false pretences. Many of them came illegally and continue to come illegally and we don’t want them here, and I’m perfectly willing to say that because it needs to be said.

These pronouncements are certainly more articulate than your average Twitter/X troll, but they come from the same dank place. And if you talk quasi-mystical racist gibberish in a plummy accent about people ‘trampling on the English soul who are gleeful in their trampling’ who have ‘defaced and defiled our holy places’, there will always be people who mistake your rantings for pearls of wisdom.

As for Murray’s throwaway mathematics - thousands, tens of thousands - when it comes to ‘them’, who cares about accuracy? Never mind that the ‘public’ were ‘sorting things out’ by dragging random Asians from their cars or throwing rocks at Filipino NHS workers.

That is the task of these fine English yeomen who are now spending time at His Majesty’s pleasure. The task of Murray, Farage, Tice, and so many others, is to turn their anger into money, clicks, and political gain.

And yet despite all this, they haven’t got what they want. Zero Tolerance Nigel has been plummeting in the polls, even amongst Leave voters, as a result of his devious posturing during the riots. The government did not lose control of the streets; the Army was not sent in. This was partly due to the rapid police deployment and legal response, orchestrated by a government that, unlike any of its Tory predecessors, knows when urgent action is required.

Faced with this disappointment, the pot-stirrers have switched their lines of attack, and are now condemning the arrests of social media trolls as an attack on free speech. They have described the harsh sentences handed out to rioters and online hatemongers as draconian, ‘Two-tier Kier’ etc. The world’s richest man has trolled the UK government with tweets like this:

And Reform UK have amplified these messages, and bowed down before Psycho SpaceX’s inanities, no matter how brazenly racist and Islamophobic:

This is what they will always do. But despite their worst efforts, the government has weathered this storm. The tough sentencing will have made some would-be ‘protesters’ think twice about getting stuck in a second time, and the police presence has provided reassurance where it is needed.

But the other reason why the insurrection has fizzled out is because of the popular mobilisations that took place last Wednesday, in response to the list of immigration lawyers’ offices and other targets listed by the far-right on social media. In cities across the UK, anti-racist gatherings were so huge that only a few ‘protesters’ showed up in the places they had been summoned to.

The mood of these gatherings was very different to the destructive mobs that wrought such havoc ten days ago. The crowd I joined in Sheffield on Wednesday was serious, defiant, and united in its determination to oppose the fascists and racists, and defend Sheffield’s many ethnic communities from violence and intimidation. In Walthamstow, more than 10,000 people came out onto the streets:

After the horrors of Southport, Hull and Tamworth, these were heartening expressions of solidarity, that even the Daily Mail and the Daily Express felt obliged to praise.

This movement is impressive, and it will hopefully continue to grow, because there are limitations to the ‘thug’ narrative emanating from the tabloids and from the government. But ‘thugs’ may participate in riots: they aren’t necessarily the cause of them. Their thuggery was directed at very specific targets: Muslims, asylum-seekers, and people of colour. They were violent expressions of what the late Ambalavaner Sivanandan once called ‘xeno-racism.’

This needs to be understood and faced up to. If Labour adopts a purely law and order position on the riots, and takes ‘controlling immigration’ and reinforcing ‘community cohesion’ as its main takeaways, it will find itself exactly where the Blair and Brown governments once found themselves - indirectly reinforcing the legitimacy of far-right positions without actually being able to neutralize them.

This month, Home Office visa figures recorded a drop of 81 percent in applications in Health and Social Care compared with last year, and a drop of 16 percent in sponsored study applications at UK universities, and an 81 percent drop in sponsored study dependent applications.

Losing care workers and foreign student should not be something to celebrate. But incredibly, politicians like James Cleverly have been boasting about this figures, as if they were an achievement. This is what the toxic anti-migrant politics has made us - a country that cuts off its nose to spite its face.

We need to ask ourselves if this is the kind of country we want the UK to be. Because if we continue along this trajectory, the UK will become exactly what so many of the rioters and their intellectual fellow-travellers what we saw ten days ago.

Lastly, and by no means least, Labour needs to help the communities where these riots began, and where they might start again. It has been laughable - and contemptible - to see the likes of Richard Tice, Alex Phillips, Ben Habib, Isabel Oakeshott or Douglas Murry pretending to care about the lack of opportunity and public services amongst marginalized white working class communities.

Debates about neglected and abandoned communities should not be left to pundits and politicians who have no concern with the working-class beyond their use as footsoldiers in a nationalist/nativist project. A Labour government should do better than this. It is not necessary to depict the racism as a cry of pain or a call for help. But there are communities in the north of England in particular that have been left to rot ever since Thatcher’s ruthless de-industrialization. If some of them had received help in the past, they might not be so disposed to listen to the toxic and divisive messages that brought them out into the streets.

For now, we can breathe. Because last week’s mobilisations represent a defeat for the racists and also for their fellow-travellers and intellectual authors. They have shown us the possibility of another country - a country that is not frightened of the racists, a tolerant country that does regard refugees as dehumanised ‘illegals’, and does not hate the men and women who have come to live and work here.

But even though the fires have been put out, the hatred still smoulders, and it’s up to all of us who believe that this country can be better, to make sure that it never erupts into our streets again.