Counter-protesters collect forward of a potential anti-immigration protest in Walthamstow, UK, on August 7. | Photograph credit score: Getty Pictures
The story to this point: The latest far-right riots in Britain are a continuation of the phenomenon of city riots that the nation usually experiences, particularly in the summertime months, such because the 1981 violence in Brixton in London and Toxteth in Liverpool; or in deindustrialised northern cities corresponding to Burnley and Oldham in 2001. Whereas earlier rounds of violence noticed younger males from black and minority ethnic backgrounds engaged in pitched battles with police, who had been accused of being racially motivated and discriminatory, this yr’s summer time violence concerned males from white working-class backgrounds attacking, in some circumstances, a mosque and accommodations housing immigrants.
What triggered the riots?
On this wave of racial unrest, social media performed an nearly incendiary position, spreading disinformation exponentially. The spark that sparked the violence was the hearsay that the perpetrator of the knife assault within the city of Southport, during which three women died, was a Muslim immigrant who had just lately arrived by boat. Controversial far-right figures, such because the co-founder of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, took to social media to denounce the matter, inflicting a lot of their followers to take to the streets in violence.
The riots are the end result of a long time of dehumanisation of migrants. Former UK Prime Minister Theresa Might, when she was House Secretary in David Cameron’s authorities, created what was referred to as a “hostile setting” to drive unlawful immigrants to depart. This reached much more excessive ranges below House Secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman. Indian-origin Prime Minister Rishi Sunak contributed along with his drawbridge mentality and stop-the-boats slogans.
Indicators from the very best ranges of the British political institution reinforce the unfounded perception that immigrants are detrimental to the British financial system and society. The highlighting and emphasising of immigration additionally serves to obscure the way in which during which unemployment has arisen via deliberate deindustrialisation, reasonably than immigrants taking jobs; the truth that there was a shortfall in social housing development; and the final overstretching, to breaking level, of public providers such because the Nationwide Well being Service (NHS) via a scientific lack of funding.
How have the right-wing media reacted?
A curious phenomenon of those riots has been the preoccupation of the right-wing media and commentators with the English working class. This example was created via the declaration of a real class battle when Margaret Thatcher, through the miners’ strike, referred to as the Nationwide Union of Mineworkers (NUM) “the enemy inside”, drawing a parallel with the “enemy with out” within the type of the Argentine junta that had been defeated within the Falklands Struggle of 1982. Traditionally, working-class unrest in Britain, such because the Peterloo bloodbath of 1819 or the miners’ strike of 1984, has had the potential to problem and alter the British institution on extra equitable and socially simply grounds. Proper-wing commentators don’t view their working-class framing of the present riots on this transformative manner. They haven’t been involved concerning the worsening circumstances of the working class as a consequence of 14 years of austerity measures imposed by conservative governments since 2010.
The present unrest must also be understood as a response by the far proper to pro-Palestinian protests in British cities which have referred to as for a ceasefire within the face of Israeli navy actions in Gaza. These protests had been labelled as hate marches and anti-Semitic by right-wing media. The potential of additional far-right violence was thwarted by anti-racist protesters on the streets to whom the Labour authorities tended to be cool. The Keir Starmer-led authorities is unlikely to problem the far proper, fearing a shift in assist to the immigration-obsessed UK Reform Social gathering, which obtained 4 million votes within the July election. The Starmer authorities’s skill to handle violence is undermined by extended austerity measures which have typically compromised the capabilities of the British state.
Amir Ali teaches on the Centre for Coverage Research, JNU, New Delhi.
