I’m actually a little surprised that it took this long for the far-right to start race riots fuelled by social media, considering how much outrage exists on the right and how mainstream politicians have mercilessly stoked this rage. With Daily Mail front pages decrying immigration, Tory Prime Ministers pledging to stop the boats and Nigel Farage and Tommy Robison becoming accepted figures of discourse on the right, it was only a matter of time.

Throw into the mix social media platforms that seem to take as their maxim Mark Twain’s statement that: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoe.” (Although he probably never said that quote.) Then add in horrendous attacks on children, and we have the ideal circumstances for the kind of destruction that has been filling the headlines. 

These riots are a direct result of the increasingly angry rhetoric on the right about immigration, multiculturalism and wokeness. Continually stoking anger plays into the hands of the most violent members of the political fringes. Now the mainstream right has discovered the perils of flirting with the far-right and are quick to distance themselves. This is despite years of them deploying angry rhetoric at migrants, woke snowflakes (by which they mean immigration lawyers) and elites (by which they mean people who read books, not billionaires or Westminster politicians).

The result of stoking white racial anger

Mainstream politicians of the right, and at times the centre, feel that they can stoke this anger to mobilise people to vote for them when they want, before putting the anger back in a box and forgetting about it when they are safely in power. Boris Johnson did this to make himself Prime Minister. There is also an entire ecosystem of right-wing talking heads adding to the fires to get social media attention and have journalists write about them. Witness Farage’s gig on GB News or Robinson turning himself into a social media personality.

Well, you can’t raise the pressure of white racial anger, use it to drive you forwards when you want, and then vent it safely when it gets too much. Racial hatred is not like a steam engine. It tends to explode in unexpected ways, like a homemade bomb. These riots are the result. Solicitors offices set on fire. Migrants attacked. The residents of asylum seeker hotels terrorised. Not to mention police attacked, destruction rained on town centres and people scared.

The tide of people angry about immigration and people of colour has gotten so extreme that even mainstream centre-left or centrist politicians indulge it. Keir Starmer has talked about the need to cut immigration. Ed Miliband had his controls on immigration mugs, Gordon Brown had ‘British jobs for British workers’ and Tony Blair had the rhetoric around bogus asylum seekers. Even Jeremy Corbyn was more interested in talking about NHS privatisation than he was about strongly challenging the discourse around migration.

Standing up to the tide

I guess centre-left or centrist politicians feel that they cannot argue back to this tide. Or they feel it’s elitist to walk into a Wetherspoons in Workington and tell people that they should be happy that people want to flee Syria and come here, it shows this is a great nation, and they will enrich our culture. Freddie Mercury, Mo Farah and all that.

So instead of arguing with these people’s views on race and migration, they pander to it as much as they can stomach and then change the subject. Starmer can crack heads all he wants to show that he’s tough on violent disorder, but without challenging the narrative that led to these riots, nothing will change.

At least we now know where the line is drawn for right-wing anti-immigration shit heads. It’s when you throw bricks at the police. That, mainstream politicians won’t allow. That, they will stand up to.

“Legitimate concerns”

Everyone is acting like a load of people lost their minds this summer, and I have seen these riots blamed on everything from warm weather to not enough football on TV. Almost no one is acknowledging where this anger came from. People didn’t take up race rioting to fill the gap between the Euros finishing and the Premier League resuming - these far-right thugs have been organising along racial lines for years.

They have been exploiting the cover given to them by mainstream politicians and the right-wing press to amplify the “legitimate concerns” about immigration into a movement that wants to make Britain a white nation; aided by social media platforms that give oxygen to extreme attention grabbing content, and easy access to audiences for the type of people who will stoke racial hatred and white resentment to get a following (Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson, etc).

Make no mistake: this isn’t about people concerned about migration figures, or migrant’s effects on wages, or Polish corner shops appearing in their communities or grooming gangs, or values, or whatever other reasonable sounding thing they claim their dislike of migrants is about. These riots (and the wider anti-migrant discourse) is about keeping Britain as white as possible in this era of globalisation. The whiteness of the country is not a legitimate concern. The rest is cover for this white racial agenda, or being a useful idiot for it.

Making sure this doesn’t happen again

If Starmer, Labour and those on the right who have condemned these riots want to stop them happening again then they need to stop adding to the pressure that recently exploded by challenging the narrative that migration is always bad and that we should seek to reduce it.

This will be uncomfortable for politicians not used to taking a moral stand (or at least one that they’re sure that the small C conservatives swing voters will support) but it needs to be done to prevent further violence. It’s easy for politicians to stand up to Just Stop Oil, it’s harder to stand up to that guy in Wetherspoons with his “legitimate concerns.” However, that guy is spreading fake news about migrants on Facebook today and might try and burn down a hotel full of people tomorrow.

If we want to stop these riots from ever happening again then we need to stop fanning the flames of racial hatred and white grievance, which is where anti-migrant rhetoric and policies - from the left, right and centre - is heading. The alternative is to see violence like this again. Soon. And worse than now.