Civil war may not be ‘inevitable’, as the world’s wealthiest psychopath, Elon Musk, claims but, TOBY ABSE argues, the riots delivered a stark warning about far-right culture wars
THE rioting that spread across England and Northern Ireland at the start of August was not a spontaneous reaction to the brutal murder of three young girls at a dance class in Southport on 29th July. No such violent response occurred after the three brutal murders in Nottingham in June 2023 – another crime in which a mentally disturbed individual went on a killing spree against random strangers. Horrible as the initial triggering event at Southport was, the police response was admirably rapid, the killer was soon caught and it was obvious, both that he had acted alone and that he was not part of a criminal gang, let alone a terrorist group. Even such rioting as occurred in Southport itself was largely the result of an intervention by outsiders, not a panic response by the victims’ relatives or witnesses of the crime scene.
What is extremely significant is that the nationwide wave of rioting occurred a few days after a large fascist march through London by the followers of the career criminal who calls himself ‘Tommy Robinson’ in a conscious attempt to hide his Irish Catholic origins, which would have been so ill-fitting in the leader of the English Defence League (EDL) with its constant ostentatious waving of the flag of St. George. Despite the EDL’s claim to have dissolved itself years ago, it is very hard to believe that violent disorder could have occurred almost simultaneously in places as distant from one another as Aldershot and Bristol in the south and Sunderland and Hartlepool in the north without some residual skeleton of a national network, even if social media posts undoubtedly swelled the crowds. It seems reasonable to suppose that the EDL hard core had already decided to use the first available pretext to unleash a wave of racist violence, believing that the 14% General Election score of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK earlier in July had indicated the time was ripe.
The fake news that the murderer was a Muslim who had arrived illegally in England on a small boat was deliberately spread in bad faith, and repeated long after the police had lifted their usual restrictions about naming juvenile delinquents, and had revealed that the 17-year-old had been born in Cardiff of parents from Rwanda, a 98% Christian country. Whilst a fair number of individuals played a role in using the internet to incite murderous racial violence, a few stand out.
One of them of course is ‘Robinson’ himself. Whether or not there is any truth in the story repeated on some occasion by the BBC that ‘Robinson’ was hiding in some five-star hotel in Cyprus, it is very odd that no effort was made by any section of the British state to track him down and charge him with something that would have allowed the authorities to hold him in custody and deprive him of access to phones and social media at a time of such serious civil disorder.
Dog-whistling
Whilst Farage was a little more cunning and evasive in his social media tactics, whatever legal protection may be given to MPs’ statements in Parliament, such parliamentary privilege does not apply to their use of Facebook and other social media. Since Farage seemed to pipe down as police action against the violence became more robust, one suspects he was aware that his dog-whistling may well have crossed the line.
The third individual, and by far the worst in his use of social media was the world’s wealthiest psychopath, Elon Musk. Although this South African-born white supremacist has long since bought himself American citizenship (the one type of citizenship which seems in practice to ensure immunity from extradition to the UK), surely some action could have been taken against somebody who issued a proclamation that ‘civil war was inevitable’, and repeated an outrageous lie by the leader of the neo-Nazi BRITAIN FIRST group that the arrested rioters were being sent to a detention camp in the Falklands. Whilst no reasonable person can have any sympathy with those arrested, charged and convicted of offences linked to the riots, the state response was very much aimed at the foot soldiers and not the generals.
Stupid, desperate Starmerism
Although Starmer and his minions eventually and very reluctantly started to use the words ‘far right’ rather than just referring to lawlessness, criminality, violence or hooliganism, the Labour leadership was never willing to talk about Fascism, despite the blindingly obvious character of well-organised paramilitary racist violence of a type not seen on the British side of the Irish Sea since the 1970s at least.
This brings us to the issue of the long-term causes of the riots. Given the rioters’ use of slogans about ‘stopping the boats’, it is quite obvious that the rabid anti-migrant rhetoric of leading Conservative politicians, the tabloid press (especially the Daily Mail) and the Starmerite Labour leadership gave those engaged in street violence the impression that trying to burn down buildings housing asylum seekers was quite legitimate.
It is noteworthy that, although the bulk of the violence was directed against mosques and against black and brown people (regardless of their religious faith or immigration status), one attempt to murder three people inside a car was directed at Romanians, whom even the dimmest EDL supporter would not believe to be black or Muslim. In other words, the riots were the product, not just of murderous Islamophobia and anti-Black racism, but also of straightforward indiscriminate xenophobia – ‘we want our country back’, the direct legacy of the Brexit campaign.
During the Blair era, the official ideology of the British establishment was anti-racism, even if in practice its policies on immigration and asylum revealed its superficial inclusivity to be somewhat hypocritical. Now Starmer’s stupid and desperate pursuit of lost ‘Red Wall’ voters means that he can only condemn the illegality of the rioters’ violent actions, not the racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic ideology behind them, which to a large extent he and his reactionary Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have themselves adopted.
Standing up to racism
I will end by pointing out that the peaceful nationwide anti-fascist mobilisation that brought together a wide variety of people of different faiths, ethnicities, ages and political beliefs, and destroyed the Fascists’ sense of invulnerability, not only had nothing to do with the Labour Party leadership, but was indeed condemned by it, with the Starmerites issuing orders that Labour MPs and Councillors should not participate in ‘counterprotests’ (as if arson against a mosque or library counted as a protest), but leave the task of tackling the rioters to the police. Paradoxically, it was the self-proclaimed ‘revolutionary socialists’ of the Socialist Workers’ Party who through their front organisation Stand Up to Racism in practice played the role of liberal anti-racists, protecting the Muslim and/or Asian shopkeepers of Walthamstow from the threatened arson and looting that ‘Robinson’s’ followers had planned for Wednesday 7th August.
Toby Abse is a member of the Socialist Alliance and AGS national committees
Alliance for Green Socialism 