Any discussion of the riots must first pay tribute to the families of the three children who were tragically murdered.
The murders weren’t the sole cause of the riots but a tipping point for fomenting rage, waiting for a pretext, however misinformed, to detonate. The government and police responses were swift, efficient and humane. And the supporting counter-protests were truly heartening.
But it was a week in which the UK scared itself even to the point of right-wing media self-correction. Seeing the Daily Mail and Express headlines siding with the counter-protestors against the thugs was remarkable. The riots were a graphic reminder that the cancer of far-right thinking is coursing through the system. The Muslim London mayor, Sadiq Khan, and Scotland’s previous first minister, Humza Yousaf, have expressed anxiety about their safety in the UK. This troubling throwback to the fears of earlier eras reverberates with many UK ethnic groups and is also heartbreaking to hear.
Who riots?
The rioter group is heterogeneous, ranging from Shoe Zone looters to far-right political ideologues, nihilists, and away-day opportunists, out for some bonding via the exhilaration of recreational violence. Some had only a rudimentary sense of the mission, and participants varied in the extent of their allegiance either to anti-immigrant views, Islamophobia, or racism. The broadest motive was racism which agglomerates “everything non-white into an enemy” (Paul Mason). So, whilst some rioters focused on asylum hotels or mosques, others attacked anyone of the ‘wrong’ skin colour.
Lying and self-deception also complicate the picture. The rioters tend to present themselves publicly as either caught up in the moment or aggrieved about perceived unfair advantages gained by immigrants. Some believe these excuses, but others deploy them because they are less incriminating than admitting to being racist.
Progressive take overs
The political triggers for the riots were also manifold. Arguably, they were partly a response to the arrival of Labour in Downing St. The new leadership triggered furious push back from the recesses of the far right, angered by the threat of an emasculating take-over in which ‘woke lefties’ gain the upper hand.
Complementing this progressive shift in the UK are the extraordinary changes in the US. Kamala Harris’s confirmation as the next Democratic presidential candidate has radically overturned a hitherto bleak prognosis for American democracy. These coinciding UK and US progressive shifts have shocked and provoked the far right.
Monster offspring
The riots are also the abominable child of the previous government, incubated by five years of unremitting extremist rhetoric, including Suella Braverman’s rantings on ‘invasion’, Lee Anderson’s on ‘Islamists’, and the party’s disingenuous defence of Frank Hester, the donor who said a black MP ‘should be shot’. Robert Jenrick, Tory leadership contender and the UK’s very own JD Vance, has joined the poisoned procession, attacking ‘2-tier policing’ and calling for anyone shouting “Allahu Akbar” in public to be arrested. Against this background, the riots look like a last gasp of populist viciousness at the demise of the Tory party, the far-right’s most promising potential carrier – a post-death belch from their own body politic.
But the rioters’ anguish also contained resentment. Fattened on unicorn promises, many leavers believed that the culprits depriving them of their sovereign rights would be whisked off the face of the UK to Rwanda. Since this was Sunak’s leading message for two years, the rioters, no doubt, also felt betrayed by his failure to remove the perceived cause of their woes.
Five years of dog whistling have taken their toll and rage finally erupted. Emanating from the heart of the Tory government, and enthusiastically repeated by their client media, the dog whistling both legitimised far-right ‘righteous anger’ and fuelled expectations about solutions. The Tories ultimately failed, but Reform UK Limited, who hastened their collapse, cranked up the whistle volume further.
Know your hate
Far-right anger is often viewed as a socio-economic problem, solvable by reducing poverty, inequality and alienation. Certainly, improving standards of living and setting the record straight on the irrelevance of immigration to the UK’s economic woes will help.
But these changes aren’t sufficient because, behind the misguided feelings of unfairness, rioters are often driven by a pure tribal hatred for their chosen outgroup. This hatred is a raw, blind emotion of hostility which runs deep, occupying a different, resistant part of the brain and often acting as the sui generis cause, not the effect, of a grievance. It seeks out post hoc reasons to justify itself which, if proven false, are simply replaced by other concoctions. This aspect of hatred is a hard psychological dimension of the riots that won’t fizzle out by improving living standards, and ‘making life fairer’.
This is not to say that the hatred can’t be tackled, only that we need to know our enemy, including its most intractable part, in order to constructively re-direct or curb it. One valuable approach is immersive exposure. Caolan Robinson, for example, describes how, whilst working for the prominent far right activist, Tommy Robinson, his thinking was flipped by his experience of escaping with refugees from the French police. The immediate task though is to remove the hate catalysts. We’ve already begun this process by deleting one stimulant, the Tory government.
The puppet order
Our next assignment must be the social media network that hardens far right hatred into a cult. Global players such as Nigel Farage, Russian bot farms, GB News, and the US far right orchestrate the hatred as part of a wider cultural backlash against progressive change. This toxic network also draws in Andrew Tate-style ‘machismo’, misogyny, the Great Replacement Theory, anti-LGBTQ sentiment, anti-climate activism and comprehensive anti-wokery.
The network is a hydra, not underpinned by an overarching theme, but a nexus of regenerating, interconnected nodes. For example, the Great Replacement Theory is just one rationale for hatred that links to other nodes like misogyny (through the idea that white women should prioritise procreation in order to prevent a racial take over). Similarly, there’s a cornucopia of ‘hateful others’ for rioters to target, including the police, politicians, ethnic minorities and the white wokerati who welcome them.
Nor does the network have a single platform or leader, but there are prime players. Elon Musk, X’s radicalised oligarch owner, recently endorsed Trump and re-introduced Robinson to the platform. Musk now uses ‘free speech’ as a smokescreen behind which to purvey extremist content. X is now a major online motorway system, clamped like wire mesh around much of the planet, via which the hatred we’ve seen on our streets can flow and grow. Robinson now benefits exponentially from the ability of Musk’s new algorithms to amplify poisonous far right content.
If there is any driver behind ‘the network’ it is the simple lure of two familiar behemoths – recognition and cash. They are the ultimate puppet masters for the players, from the Tory users and far-right online conductors, to the rioters doing their bidding.
Joy
The Tory government had little incentive to control platforms like X precisely because the far-right sewage flowing there under the dodgy guise of ‘free speech’ flattered their own ideological drift. Robinson on X could only assist with malign projects such as post-Brexit lying, excusing ‘Broken Britain’, and the cruel spectacles of Rwanda flights and the Bibby Stockholm.
Now, the riots have forced us to peek below the surface to our subterranean cesspit of hate and thrown up a signal saying ‘tackle urgently’. But the hatred will keep flowing until the online tap is turned off. Labour must act now to rein in the wild west of far-right social media by overhauling Ofcom, tightening the Online Safety Act, encouraging advertising boycotts, and actively use the law’s long arm to grab hate-speech peddlers from behind the online veil of anonymity.
But, unequivocally, after years of submission to the vile corrosiveness of the previous government, the values we cherish are back. Morality, truth and tolerance have the upper hand again and are even a tangible physical presence out on the streets. The UK’s progressive community has spoken, is pushing back and saying ‘no’ to hate, loud and clear. In cities across the country, the thugs have found themselves “marooned by decency” (James O’Brien).
Similarly, Harris’s bold entrance has energised progressive America and revitalised hope for advocates of truth and democracy around the world.
All these events are skin-pinching, breath-taking moments of relief and joy. They also demonstrate our power to halt far-right initiatives, media puppet masters, and rioters. Progressives have shown their muscle by removing the pernicious Tory government and facing down the haters. In the US, integrity has re-surfaced against the odds. These are all exuberant signals that we have agency and can create change.
I hope the ethnic minorities of the UK can hold on, recognising that the riots were inflamed by forces we can challenge, and that the new government cares enough to take firm action to curb far right hatred. I also hope that, given time for these changes to bed in, the UK will come to feel cohesive, inclusive and safe for all.
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