What just happened? For almost a week, towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland were in the grip of pogromist reaction. In Hull, Sunderland, Rotherham, Liverpool, Aldershot, Leeds, Middlesborough, Tamworth, Belfast, Bolton, Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster and Manchester, networked mobs of fascoid agitators and disorganized racists were thrilled by their own exuberant violence. In Rotherham, they set fire to a Holiday Inn hotel housing asylum seekers. In Middlesborough, they blocked roads and only let traffic through if drivers were verified as ‘white’ and ‘English’, momentarily enjoying the arbitrary power of both the traffic warden and the border official.
In Tamworth, where the recently elected Labour MP had inveighed against spending on asylum hotels (incorrectly claiming that they cost the area £8m a day), they rampaged through the Holiday Inn Express and, in the ruins, left graffiti reading: ‘England’, ‘Fuck Pakis’ and ‘Get Out’. In Hull, as crowds dragged a man out of his car for a beating, participants shouted ‘kill them!’ In Belfast, where a hijabi was reportedly punched in the face while holding her baby, they destroyed Muslim shops and tried to march on the local mosque, chanting ‘get ’em out’. In Newtownards, a mosque was attacked with a petrol bomb. In Crosby, a Muslim man was stabbed.
Worryingly, while far-right activists played a role, it was probably secondary. The riots, rather than being caused by handfuls of organized fascists, provided them with their best recruiting grounds in years. Many people who had never been ‘political’ before, and perhaps never even voted, turned out to burn asylum seekers or assault Muslims.
The occasion for this carnival of racist inebriation was a terrifying mass stabbing in Southport on 29 July. The alleged attacker, for reasons not yet discernible, descended upon a Taylor Swift dance class, attacking eleven children and two adults. Three of the children were killed. Because the suspect was under eighteen, his identity was initially protected. It took only a few hours for the stabbings to become a rallying point for the far right, thanks initially to coalescing waves of online agitation. The suspect, according to rightist disinfotainment accounts, was a migrant on an ‘MI6 watch list’ who had arrived on a ‘small boat’: ‘Ali al-Shakati’. ‘Uncontrolled mass migration’ was to blame for the stabbings.
This fantasy, which came just days after a large rally in support of Tommy Robinson in Trafalgar Square, was signal-boosted by the usual reactionary grifters, Robinson and Andrew Tate among them. The rumour was further infused with vitality thanks to a swarm of reactionary social industry accounts based in the US. A Telegram account, set up either by fascists or the fash-curious, gained 14,000 members and played a direct role in incitement. Like sparks flying from a furnace, the agitation spread from social media into meatspace. On 30 July, a loose collection of racist vigilantes and neo-Nazis gathered on St Luke’s Road in Southport and attacked the mosque with bricks and bottles. Although residents participated in the clean-up and repairs the next day, the furies were only beginning. From the end of July, the cycle of riots swept the UK for over a week. They slowly petered out when, following the announcement of dozens of intended far-right protests across the UK on the evening of 7 August, tens of thousands of anti-racists turned out in London, Liverpool, Bristol, Brighton, Hastings, Southend, Northampton, Southampton, Blackpool, Derby, Swindon and Sheffield. Most of the racist gatherings failed to materialize, and those that did were outnumbered.
Throughout, the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the marauders had been defended by a well-heeled faction of the lumpencommentariat, including Matthew Goodwin, Carole Malone, Dan Wootton and Allison Pearson. More insidious were the routine obfuscations of major broadcasters, such as the BBC insipidly referring to these Poujadist enragés as ‘protesters’, while the hosts on ITV’s Good Morning Britain scoffed and guffawed when the left-wing Muslim MP Zarah Sultana described the riots as racist. In Bolton, where local Muslims organized in their self-defence against a movement that had shown murderous intent, the BBC called the far-right rally a ‘pro-British march’, while ITV described how ‘anti-immigration protesters’ were met by ‘300 masked people shouting Allahu Akhbar’.
Still, on the morning after the anti-racist turnout on 7 August, all right-minded opinion-formers exhaled in relief. ‘Well done decency, well done the police’, sighed former BBC journalist Jon Sopel. Even the Daily Mail, a constant source of front-page panic about migration, saluted the ‘Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down the Thugs’. The Express, ever a redoubt of Robinsonades, cheered: ‘United Britain Stands Firm Against Thugs’. There was, of course, no genuine unity. Those who flooded the streets to stop the riots had recently been slandered as ‘hate marchers’ by politicians and pundits alike when they rallied in support of Palestine. And while the majority of Britons disapproved of ‘unrest’, a surprisingly large number of people, 34%, supported the ‘protests’. Almost 60% expressed ‘sympathy’ with the ‘protesters’. Unsurprisingly, among those who backed the ‘unrest’, supporters of Reform UK, the third largest party by vote share, were disproportionately represented. Still, what a comfort not to have to think.
There followed the inevitable search for foreign subversion. The BBC, the Mail and the Telegraph were joined by Paul Mason and the usual social-media liberals in blaming Russia. There’s scant evidence for this, as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has pointed out. But the implication appears to be that nothing in Britain’s recent history, or in the behaviour of its dominant institutions, could possibly have led to the conflagration. The same mass media that has relentlessly drilled the public with moral panic about migration now denounces social media ‘disinformation’, stressing the importance of ‘facts’ and ‘objectivity’ in public life.
It is true that rumour played a critical role in congealing ad hoc alliances of engorged racists. As in the Knowsley riots in February 2023, inflammatory allegations spread on the social industry formed the inciting incident. But it’s telling that when courts revealed the identity of the suspect on 1 August, proving that he was neither a migrant nor on any ‘watch list’, the rioters didn’t break their stride: the worst attacks happened in the following days. People believed the rumours because it was expedient for them to do so, because it confirmed their prejudices and gave them the opportunity to act out long-brewing revenge fantasies.
This is how it has always worked. Rumours of a coming massacre of whites by black people sparked the pogrom in East St Louis, Illinois, in 1919. In Orléans in 1969, salacious stories about Jewish merchants drugging and selling women led to riots attacking Jewish shops. In 2002 in Gujarat, it was unsubstantiated claims that Muslims firebombed a train with Hindu pilgrims on board that became a pretext for gruesome ecstasies of Islamophobic murder and rape. And in the summer of 2020, the idea that ‘Antifa’ had started the Oregon wildfires to murder white, conservative Christians fuelled armed vigilantism. We can’t ‘fact-check’ the rumours into oblivion because, as Terry Ann Knopf documents in her history of rumours and race riots in the United States, the ‘facts’ are usually irrelevant. In moments of emergency, real or perceived, official sources are distrusted, while unofficial ‘witnesses’ are briefly sanctified to the extent that they fuel the fantasies bred by racial hierarchies and fears of revolt.
Recent moral panics, whether about race, nationality or gender, whether they are obsessed with asylum seekers in ‘five-star hotels’ or ‘bathroom predators’ or a supposed ‘man’ competing as a female boxer, share a sense of borders and boundaries eroding, of people being where they have no business being. Men becoming women, the rich becoming poor. The whites, as David Starkey once worried, becoming black. The majority becoming the minority. This is a surprisingly mobile fantasm, making it easy to switch rationalizations. When the identity of the Southport suspect was revealed, for instance, the subject was swiftly changed. It became about the fact that he was ‘the son of Rwandan migrants’, as Matthew Goodwin put it in a Substack post. Despite knowing nothing about the motive for the crime, it was suddenly a problem of ‘integration’ or as some of the online poetasters put it, ‘British values’.
This is an intriguing pivot: the actions of a white mass murderer (for example, incel killer Jake Davison) would not lend themselves to such pained interrogations. The fact that what is at stake is ‘ethnic’ belonging was clarified by Goodwin, when he was quizzed by Ash Sarkar on the BBC’s ‘Moral Maze’. Many people are English, he said, without being ‘ethnically’ so. Writing on Substack, he channelled the ‘fears’ of the ‘British and the English’ who, he informed us, are worried about ‘majority decline and demographic change’. Even cast in terms of ‘ethnicity’, not ‘race’, it is difficult not to see this as a soft version of what Chetan Bhatt described as the metaphysical obsession of today’s white far-right: the fear of white extinction. It is Britannia dreaming of its downfall.
This is a loose theodicy, which claims that whatever pain people are enduring in a country with stagnant living standards, crumbling infrastructure and an increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian state, it must be the product of ‘broken borders’. Lacking the utopian horizon of an interwar fascism based on colonial expansion, today’s far right has become obsessed with bordering. It has retreated to a defensive nation-statism, as the container for a series of traditional demarcations along gender and ethnic lines, obedience to which is invariably described as ‘integration’.
This parasitizes on official discourse. In the last few years, we have heard from senior politicians that ‘Islamists’ run the country, that peaceful Gaza protesters are a ‘thuggish mob’, that a parliamentary debate on a Gaza ceasefire had to be blocked to prevent the terrorist murder of MPs, that ‘Hamas’ was to blame for Labour’s poor showing in the West Midlands, that asylum seekers should be tagged, that too many migrants work in the NHS, that asylum seekers are expensive and dangerous, that Rishi Sunak is ‘the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration’, and that both Tories and Labour would ‘stop the small boats’ delivering refugees to British shores. And much as there has been a bipartisan consensus on leaning into the racist culture wars, both major parties are now affiliated with some variant of the transphobic panic.
Much as liberalism fails by blaming it all on ‘Brexit’ or Russia while ignoring the convection cells of the storm that have been gathering in plain sight, so the left often has its own comforting narrative in which plebeian racist violence is a distorted expression of ‘material interests’. This usually translates as a call to focus on ‘bread and butter issues’ rather than ‘identity politics’: as though we could route around the perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity by offering jobs and wages. No doubt we need more bread and butter, but that is strictly orthogonal to what is taking place. Racism sometimes works as a form of displaced or distorted class politics, but not always. The ‘legitimate concerns’ of these rioters pertain to the idea of lost ethnic status. Where the ‘white working class’ is misleadingly invoked, ‘white’ is the operative term: the idea is that workers, far from being exploited, have been denied the appropriate moral recognition as white members of the nation by ‘elites’ too overzealous about extending recognition to minorities. It is about recouping the lost ‘wages of whiteness’.
Meanwhile those drawn to this ethnonationalist politics steadfastly refuse to be particularly poor or marginalized. They may have experienced relative class decline or inhabit declining regions, but they are as likely to be middle-class as workers. Racism does not so much express misplaced class grievance as organize the toxic emotions of failure, humiliation and decline. The terror of white extinction, to that extent, is the fear that without rigid boundaries and borders those who have hitherto been protected will plunge into the toiling mass of humanity. The hypertrophic excitement of the pogromists, and their manifest enthralment at the idea of annihilation, gives them something to do about it. It is their alternative to the pervasive affects of paralysis and depression, in a dying civilization.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
There are probably some interesting ideas in here but I couldn't get past the clutter of pointless verbiage. Is he trying to show off? Coin a phrase? Be original or witty? Whatever it is I don't think it works. He would do well to (re-)read Orwell's guidelines for how to write English good:
i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. - https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
Posted by RaskolnikovX on August 17, 2024, 6:32 pm, in reply to "sigh..."
The hypertrophic excitement of the pogromists, and their manifest enthralment at the idea of annihilation, gives them something to do about it.
Pseud's Corner beckons, probably not for the first time....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: sigh...they might find him dead soon, after choking on that line! (nm)
Posted by Ed on August 17, 2024, 7:23 pm, in reply to "Re: sigh..."
nm
"Theodicy"
Posted by Fionn on August 17, 2024, 8:13 pm, in reply to "sigh..."
I consider myself well enough read but I've never seen or heard that word in my life.
theodicy /thē-ŏd′ĭ-sē/ noun -A vindication of God's goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil. -A vindication of the justice of God in ordaining or permitting natural and moral evil. -That department of philosophy which treats of the being, perfections, and government of God, and the immortality of the soul.
What has God got to do with it? He's not even using the big unheard words correctly.
Re: "Theodicy"
Posted by Keith-264 on August 17, 2024, 8:34 pm, in reply to ""Theodicy""
I was surprised that he banged on about 'fear of gender something-or-other. At least he doesn't deserve to be called a bad-mannered git this time.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Great book Theodicy...love the Cyclops! (nm)
Posted by Ed on August 17, 2024, 9:22 pm, in reply to "Re: "Theodicy""
nm
Become rendered to pyrrhonic quietism Stephen, you of the gonadal rougist tendency! (nm)
I'll reflect on it. It's obvious I could not draw you out to proclaim your preferences. So be it! Myself, I am navigating between the possibilities, hopes and likelihoods. Ish . Not much difference, at the end of the day.
"Shut it Steven, keep your one-eye to yourself, you ginger bollix"....
on August 17, 2024, 12:12 am