White Riots

England's Summer of Hate

Societies can rot for a long time before they fall apart, and when the collapse comes, it can be swift, abrupt and impossible to ignore. It’s little more than a week since a Cardiff-born teenager of Rwandan parents who once dressed as Doctor Who in a Children in Need advert carried out the atrocious murders of three young children at a Taylor Swift dance party. Within hours, the horror and grief at this appalling crime had triggered a vicious eruption of street violence and near-pogroms that has no precedent in modern English history.

‘Protests’ have turned into brutal brawls with the police and acts of looting and arson, attacks on mosques and on hotels housing asylum-seekers. In Southport, 57 police officers were injured. In Sunderland a police station and a citizen’s advice centre were set on fire. In Liverpool rioter burned a library. In Hull, they looted Greggs and dragged an Asian man from his car before setting it on fire. In a protest outside Downing Street, more than 100 arrests were made. In Rotherham a mob set fire to a Holiday Inn supposedly housing asylum seekers, yelling ‘kill them.’

Let no one think for a minute that these events were caused by grief and anguish at the murders of three children, or concern for their families. We are witnessing one of those historical moments, which can happen to any country and at any time, in which the veneer of civility vanishes and a society succumbs to its worst instincts, and makes a bonfire of decency, humanity, morality and logic.

The participants in this nativist bacchanal don’t like to be called ‘far-right’, and up to a point they are correct. The boozy flashmobs and Tiktok ‘patriots’ throwing bricks at police or setting fire to cars and police stations are not Mussolini’s paramilitary arditti, or Hitler’s brownshirts - yet. Some of them seem to be barely aware of what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. But you don’t have to carry a Nazi party card, or strut around in leather boots and a black uniform to be part of the ethno-nationalism, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bigotry which have defined the far-right, alt-right and identitarian ‘take our country back’ movements in so many countries in recent years.

Nor are these mobs as inchoate as they sometimes seem. In fascist Italy and pre-Nazi Germany, paramilitary forces practised what was then a new form of militarised politics and politics-as-war, in order to terrorize their opponents and bring down democratic governments. In Germany, stormtroopers systematically attacked communist meetings and demonstrations not only to intimidate their left-wing enemies, but to send a wider message to society - that the government of the day was unable to provide basic security.

In cultivating an atmosphere of panic, insecurity, and disorder, the Nazis created the disease and then presented themselves as the cure. A similar dynamic can be detected in the UK right now, in the cynical haste with which a motley combination of politicians, trolls, far-right activists and radicalised ‘protesters’ have turned the murders of three schoolchildren into an opportunity to take ‘their’ country back from the Muslims, immigrants and the liberal, multiculturalist ‘elites’ who have supposedly stolen it.

At present, their tactics are only embryonic. Like the anti-lockdown and anti-15 minute city demonstrations, this week’s disaggregated ‘protests’ relied heavily on ‘leaderless’ mobilisations, and snippets of fake news transmitted through social media, originating from various sources, some of which may be Russian. On the evening of the murders, a formerly Russian-owned news site called Channel3 Now circulated a fake story that the suspect in the Southport murders was an asylum seeker named Ali Al Shakati, who was supposedly on a terrorist watchlist.

By the time Merseyside police revealed that none of this was true, it made no difference. Aided by the dregs of social media - Atherton, Fox, Hopkins, Spofforth and so many others - the lie had done it’s work. Wrapped in their Saint George flags and Union Jacks, few of the brick-throwing ‘patriots’ raging against Muslims or Islam cared that ‘Ali Al Shakati’ was Arabic for ‘I have to go to my apartment’.

This is not to say that Russia was responsible for this descent into the vortex. Disinformation only works when it has a credulous audience. And in our conspiracy-obsessed reactionary times, there is no shortage of people willing to believe anything, particularly when it comes to Muslims. Even if there is no central direction behind the ‘protests’ coordination is not absent. The EDL may no longer exist, but the expatriate sun-lounger Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson - has been celebrating these ‘protests’ all over Twitter, inevitably with an anti-Muslim slant.

Yaxley-Lennon has also posted dates and places for further protests, while crowing that ‘Britain is rising.’ He is one of the organizers of a ‘pro-UK rally’ to be held in Glasgow on 7 September, in order to ‘share our distrust and fear of the future’ - quite possibly one of the most bizarre reasons for a demonstration in British political history. As Searchlight magazine has pointed out, Yaxley-Lennon’s minion in the UK, cokehead-turned-Christian Danny ‘Tommo’ Thomas, filmed himself in his car, in order to deliver the following messages:

“Every city has to go up.”

“Get prepared. Be ready. We have to.”

 “It has to go off in different cities.”

“We have to show them we’ve had enough.”

 “I’m ready to go. I know that a lot of you are. I’m speaking to other people at the moment”.

 “We’re ready to go. We are, literally, ready to go.”

“Just get ready.”

This isn’t an explicit call for violence, but it doesn’t have to be. Yaxley-Lennon and his pals have learned how to stay just within the limits of legality, while creating the conditions in which violence is likely to occur. And if it kicks off, then there’s nothing to pin on them. It’s a dirty game, and they aren’t the only ones playing it, because the ‘protests’ are not simply an explosion of social media madness.

The people’s tribune, Nigel Mosley-Farage seized immediately on the opportunity the murders provided, with a despicable video flanked by two Union flags in which he pretended to ‘ask questions’ about spurious conspiracy theories, before delivering a part-warning, part-invitation, to his Alan Partridge fascist apocalypse:

Mosley-Farage would never advocate violence, of course, but violence suits him, because chaos and division suit him, just as much as they suit the hundreds of anonymous accounts all over Twitter, with their football club profiles and their sinister messages accusing the police of ‘two-tier policing’. And not all of them are anonymous:

This, like so much that comes out of Wootton’s uniquely-depraved mouth, is a lie. In more than ten months, not one of the Gaza demonstrations has degenerated into the kind of violence that took place last week, and if it had, you bet we would have known about it. But the suggestion that last week’s ‘protesters’ are somehow victims of police discrimination is another chapter in a longer narrative of ‘indigenous’, (white) working class victimhood that is as central to 21st century ethno-nationalist politics as it once was for the Nazis .

The Nazis once depicted the German people as victims of Bolshevik and Jewish conspiracies that took advantage of their good faith. They also framed ‘popular’ acts of anti-Jewish violence as expressions of righteous anger. Some of our present-day ‘commentators’ have responded to the events of the last week in exactly the same way:

Note the capitals. Goodwin is NOT one to get his own hands dirty and throw a brick at ‘cops.’ There are a lot of things that people never voted for, but organic intellectuals like Goodwin are only ever interested in one of them, and this ‘ what can you expect?’ faux-empathy is also part of the game. As Richard ‘Tricky Dicky’ Tice, put it, while sharing Goodwin’s pearls of wisdom last week:

To paraphrase Mick Jagger, what can a poor boy do when the ‘elite’ seek to ‘silence’ him, except drag a dark-skinned man from his car, loot Greggs, or burn down the local citizen’s advice centre? And no one familiar with the fiery fireman-turned-culture warrior Paul Embery’s output, will be surprised to find that all this is the fault of the liberals:

The ‘dominant liberal class’ - that would be (checks notes) the Tories who have run the country for 14 calamitous years? And as for those ‘legitimate concerns’, please.

I came back to this country from the West Indies as a child in 1967, at the age of eleven. Since then, there has barely been a single year when English ‘concerns’ - were not being directed at some group of undesirable foreigners. Caribbean immigrants; Enoch Powell; Indians and Pakistanis; Ugandan and Kenyan Asians; Margaret Thatcher’s ‘swamped by another culture’ vote-scraping; Kosovans and Roma people; the asylum-seeker ‘scum of the earth’ who were supposedly ‘targeting our beloved coastline’ at Dover in 1999; Muslims; Romanians and Bulgarians; EU nationals - if the ‘elite’ was silencing ‘concerns about immigration’, it wasn’t very good at it.

No British government has ever seriously challenged this rhetoric. Too many have pandered to it. In the years leading up to Brexit, there were very few weeks when a right-wing tabloid didn’t have a front-page story about Poles swamping English villages, Romanian gangs, asylum-seekers staying in 5-star hotels. For the last three years, a succession of wretched Tory governments have allowed the asylum application process to collapse, and transformed ‘stop the boats’ - the same call heard on many ‘protests’ this week - into another ‘Brexit freedom’ and a rallying cry against a migrant ‘invasion.’

Now, the same people who have done so much to fuel the violence that erupted last week are seeking to present its perpetrators as victims:

Not everyone expresses their ‘passion’ by attacking a mosque which had nothing to do with the issue they are ‘passionate’ about. But don’t expect the likes of Michelle Dewberry to give a damn - that’s not what she’s paid for.

It seems like decades ago - though it is little more than a week - since these same commentators were ‘supporting’ the Manchester police officer who kicked a (brown) man he had already arrested while he was lying on the ground, and then stamped on his head. The same people were also celebrating the five-year sentences handed out to Just Stop Oil protesters who planned a sit down blockade in a motorway. They were passionate too, but not about the right things.

The devious hypocrisy and stupidity of such responses shouldn’t diminish the seriousness of what is taking place - or the strategy that is now being pursued by Conservative and Reform MPS, of condemning the violence while also subtly legitimising it - the better to pin it on the Labour government. Within hours of the Southport murders, accounts on Twitter were calling for Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper to resign, even though they have barely been in office.

Why they had to resign was not clear, but this is a movement that thrives on deceit and manipulation, not clarity, and even those who are pretending to keep their distance from the ‘unrest’ recognize the opportunities it provides. This is why Priti Patel demanded the recall of Parliament, and accused the Government of ‘appearing to be swept away with events rather than maintaining control of them.’

When Starmer made a strong speech promising to protect British Muslims, in which he (correctly) denounced the ‘protests’ as a manifestation of ‘far-right hatred’, he was immediately accused of disrespecting the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the people who took part in them. In a statement that has since been taken down, Donna Jones, the Tory police and crime commissioner for Hampshire declared:

The announcement of the prime minister’s new violent crime units have led to an accusation of two tier policing, which has enflamed protesters who state that they are battling to protect Britain’s sovereignty, identity and stop illegal migration.

Jones went on to argue:

Whilst the devastating attacks in Southport on Tuesday were a catalyst, the commonality amongst the protest groups appears to be focussed on three key areas: the desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty; the need to uphold British values, and, in order to do this, stop illegal immigration.

With friends like that, the Government doesn’t need enemies, and Jones is not the only Tory seeking to present Labour as the party that failed to ‘stop the boats’ and has lost control of law and order. Reform Public Company Ltd have also sought to use the violence - which they absolutely condemn but also understand - to their own advantage:

The UK is ill-prepared for an onslaught of this magnitude. Its political class has either been complicit in Britain’s toxic anti-immigrant politics or too cowardly to challenge them. Its flagship broadcasting company has repeatedly given Farage and his cohorts a platform, and much of its mainstream media is simply too shallow, too timid, or too right-wing to face up to the calamity that is now unfolding.

Nor is the Labour government the ideal bastion of anti-fascist/anti-racist resistance. Labour is in power in part, because the party’s right-wing, including some of its own MPs, weaponised antisemitism in order to destroy the left. Now Labour faces not ‘tropes’, but raging bare-knuckle racism that is out in the streets, and threatening communities across the country, and beyond. It’s not for nothing that MAGA accounts in the US shared disinformation about the Southport murders, or that the European ‘Identitarian’ group Action Radar Europe, which calls for a ‘European Reconquista’ and ‘re-migration’ (mass deportations) has been publishing posters like this one:

The ethno-nationalist rebellion that brought us Brexit was always part of an international movement, and was celebrated by that movement, just as the far-right insurrection that is now unfolding is being celebrated as the ‘resistance’ and precursor to the ‘civil war’ that the far-right aches for, and that men like Breivik once killed for.

There are a lot of people in Elon Musk’s dystopian ‘X’ playground rubbing their hands with glee at this possibility. Musk himself commented on a picture of the UK riots yesterday that ‘Civil war is inevitable.’

Only for fascists and billionaire psychopaths. They dream of deportations, racial conflagrations and the final showdown that will give them ‘their’ country back. It is incredible and almost surreal to watch a democratic government allowing a tech company to provide a platform that has enabled these people to propagate these messages and terrorize communities.

Faced with this threat, Starmer has spoken well. He has tried to reassure the objects of these attacks and called out their perpetrators for the far-right thugs that they are. Now he must do what he has promised to do in his two speeches, and bring the full force of the law to bear on the perpetrators and their enablers.

But this isn’t something that politicians - even well-intentioned ones - can sort by themselves. We need national networks of solidarity that can protect communities under attack, and defend the multicultural and multi-ethnic society that has taken many decades to build. We need the broadest-possible coalitions and alliances in every city and neighbourhood so that we can marginalise the ‘patriots ‘ and prevent them from dominating our streets.

We saw what was possible in Southport, Manchester, Nottingham and Liverpool. That must be the way forward, no matter who we are or where we are. Because if we can’t do it, and we let these ‘patriots ‘ win, then the well that we all drink from will be poisoned still further, and this foolish, troubled country will continue to sink deeper into the vortex of violence, division and hatred that is now opening up so terrifyingly beneath our feet.