Serious rioting has taken place in English cities across the country, with scenes more familiar to Belfast: bricks and bottles thrown at police and police vehicles, and a police station wrecked. And the groups involved do in fact have connections and common views with Loyalist organisations in Northern Ireland – the only other part of the UK where major violence broke out.
These disturbances are not the usual localised friction between police and Muslim or poor white communities, they are being coordinated by a resurgent right wing populist group led by the maverick Tommy Robinson, and still known as the English Defence League (EDL) despite various name changes.
The rioters, apart from attacking the police, targeted mosques and hostels for asylum seekers.
A neo-Nazi group which sprang up during the Covid pandemic, the Patriotic Alternative, is also playing a major role in inciting the violence.
The new Labour prime minister Keir Starmer quickly declared that these riots were crimes and "not protest".
These events are unprecedented in the history of far right violence in Britain since 1945. Until recently the EDL seemed to be gradually fading away after a wave of protests against immigration and Muslim influence in the 2005-15, with their eccentric leader Tommy Robinson facing a growing string of various criminal charges.
Robinson now faces arrest after fleeing the country last Monday, the day before he was due to appear at the High Court in London.
Only two days earlier he had led possibly the largest far-right rally in England since Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt movement in the 1930s. 25-30,000 of his supporters packed Trafalgar Square in the heart of London waving English and British flags.
The current wave of violence followed the horrific attack on a community centre in Liverpool in which a mentally ill teenager killed three children last Monday. After claims that the attacker was a Muslim terrorist who had arrived on a migrant boat went viral on X and Telegram, the violence began the next day in Southport, near Liverpool, before spreading throughout England.
The EDL supporters and agitators have taken advantage of a totally uncontrolled online environment, to stoke lies, rumours, provocations and bigotry.
Ironically the website which released the fake “Islamic terrorist” report which triggered the wave of violence, Channel3 Now, is a small American news outlet whose main coverage is of murders and deaths across the USA with contributors in America, Britain, India and Pakistan. It quickly removed the story and issued an apology.
But Elon Musk's X platform (formerly Twitter) stands out as a major instigator of the violence. Since he bought Twitter and created the sinister sounding X, Musk has restored the accounts of Trump and other right wing populists under the “libertarian” banner much loved in the USA – complete freedom of expression regardless of content.
In the midst of the violence Musk posted a shocking statement that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain. He then recycled accusations by Nigel Farage that the new Labour prime minister Keir Starmer was operating “two-tier policing” - being soft on ethnic minority criminals and "terrorist" (read “Palestinian”) supporters, while cracking down hard on right wing anti-migrants.
Under Musk’s control ‘X’ has become a factory for churning out lies and fake rumours. The 100 top X posts promoting fake conspiracy theories about the Trump assassination attempt reached 215 million people, and only five per cent of these posts underwent a token X "community fact-check".
It is important to understand that American internet giants almost totally dominate Britain's web space and are massively reshaping our politics and economy.
Other far right online influencers include the "Europe Invasion" X hashtag #enoughisenough, and a wave of YouTube videos warning of an Islamist takeover of Britain.
Many other organisations have created the political space for the growth of right-wing extremism. The GB News TV and radio channel, and online TV channels Talk (previously Talk TV), have stoked the ‘soft’ far-right views which flourished in the Conservative government under Rishi Sunak.
The right-wing populist Unity News Network (UNN) website led by David Clews is linked with the openly fascist Patriotic Alternative, led by antisemitic conspiracy theorist and former BNP director of publicity Mark Collett.
Clearly considerable sums of money have gone into these entities, we know some of it from right-wing business millionaires.
There are now widespread calls for online social media platforms to be properly policed considering the role they have played in this crisis. Ofcom, the British regulator for the broadcasting and telecommunications industry, sent an open letter to UK online service providers on 4th August demanding that they “protect their users from videos likely to incite violence or hatred”, warning that after a new Online Safety Act is passed later this year, these services will have three months to stop such videos appearing or act quickly to remove them.
Such calls have been made for many years. but for the past 14 years the Conservative government’s business policy has been effectively dictated by lobbyists and wealthy donors representing major business interests, resulting in an online free for all.
Limitations of the Far Right
But it is important to realise that despite their ability to create chaos and violence, the far-right organisations are extremely small in size and represent a tiny proportion of the population.
This became clear on 6th and 7th August when counter protestors came onto the streets across England in huge numbers, dwarfing the EDL protests. Videos show that there were also considerable numbers of younger people clearly ready to use physical force against the rightists. In many places the racists were only saved from a beating by the police keeping the different groups separate to avoid violence getting out of control.
But the causes of the deep class divisions in Britain are far more complex. While the EDL clearly involves actual fascist agitators, it has successfully mobilised a mainly poor white section of the working class.
Many of these supporters insist they are not racist and claim there are a considerable number of ethnic minority EDL supporters. Their main targets are the alleged growing Muslim influence in Britain and illegal immigrants. These are communities which over the past 40-50 years have seen local industries shut down or relocated overseas, and the disappearance of secure, long-term, well-paid jobs which have been replaced by far fewer, very low paid, short term and ‘zero hour’ contracts. In parallel the total number of union members declined, reducing the proportion of working people with at least some class consciousness and political education.
These are areas where local councils cannot cope with local demand for services, particularly housing, with large numbers facing waiting years or even decades for affordable housing, and hundreds of thousands of families in extremely poor quality temporary housing across the country.
These areas also have very high crime levels and are riddled with extremely violent gangs linked to the drug trade.
Professionals such as doctors and dentists are in no hurry to move to such areas, so what practices there are can't cope with the demand. They are also shunned by national retail chains meaning that local people are dependent on small, expensive shops offering poor quality, unhealthy food, and cheap, unhealthy fried chicken and pizza joints.
Poverty in Britain has reached such shocking levels that it has been the subject of several UN reports. 30 per cent of UK children are now classed as living in poverty, there are almost two million people suffering undernourishment, and food banks (to which only people on benefits are sent) are quite possibly our fastest growing ‘industry’.
Wages in Britain are so low that over a third (35 per cent) of people who have jobs are also claiming social benefits. But even with top ups it is common for families to run out of money before payday, with parents going without food for days in order to feed their children.
Added to all this is the surge in energy costs - a basic necessity for all - caused by the sanctions on Russian oil and gas.
In large parts of Britain schools have to provide breakfast to the children because so many of them get no breakfast at home.
To save on accommodation costs, asylum seekers have been housed in hotels near long-neglected poor communities. One commentator pointed out that many in these areas “can’t even dream of staying in a hotel”.
A particularly sore point is that local councils have a duty to house asylum seekers, not only putting a huge strain on their finances, but angering many who can’t obtain affordable social housing themselves.
Under the Conservatives hardly any new house building took place, and the perfect conditions were created for landlord and property developer exploiters to flourish.
This explains precisely why the focus of the recent violence was on migrant hotels and hostels in former industrial towns and cities.
The poor working class communities have seen a staggering increase in wealth in the UK for the middle and upper classes in the past 14 years, a Tory party rife with nepotism and corruption, and see the mainstream political and media classes – ‘Westminster’ - as inhabiting a different planet from their own.
Fundamental economic problems
We also need to take into account the fundamental weaknesses of Britain’s economy, which is based on a generally low skilled workforce, a massive lack of infrastructure investment and training, and an overwhelming focus on the service and consumer sector which doesn’t actually create anything. This is an economy incapable of anything more than slow or zero growth.
From around 2000 onwards there has been inward migration on an unprecedented scale which can’t be ignored. When the European Union introduced freedom of movement, the UK (under a Labour government) was the only EU member to approve immediate movement from any EU member state.
At that time the EU had just expanded into Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Baltics, so the UK became a magnet for workers in countries where wages were 20 or 30 times lower, which were themselves suffering the effects of the collapse of socialism, and there was little social provision or job protection.
A separate wave of migration has been triggered by the devastation of economies in the global south after the collapse of the Soviet Union and some other people’s democracies through unequal trade, debt bondage, regime changes and ‘colour revolutions’, wars, sanctions and climate change.
This led to the emergence of a large network of purely criminal people-smuggling gangs, facilitating the mass movement of purely economic migrants from parts of Africa as well as genuine refugees from countries like Syria and Iraq.
The numbers arriving on illegal small boat crossings is a very small proportion, but they lie behind the EDL chants of “Stop the Boats“. In the last recorded year 12,800 migrants arrived illegally compared to 685,000 legally.
This legal migration is due to post-Brexit labour shortages, mainly in the NHS and hospitality sector.
This very large influx of people is not a problem in itself, but the extreme neo-liberal and austerity policies of the Conservative government meant that instead of providing extra services for them, there were severe cuts to spending on schools, hospitals, local councils, housing, policing and transport.
The British state has also encouraged and in some cases made special provision for asylum seekers from countries (Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Ukraine) where British imperialism was deeply involved in regime change and wars.
It has poured huge resources into reactionary proxies such as Wahabi Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, Syria and Libya and the Banderite Nazi gangs in Ukraine. These groups in turn carried out a series of horrific terrorist attacks in Britain itself which were a godsend to the far right.
In the 2010s major scandals erupted over claims that Muslim gangs organised the sexual exploitation of teenage girls in Rotherham and Rochdale in the north of England. These claims lie behind the EDL chants of “Save Our Children” and “paedo Muslims off our street”.
These claims certainly had some credibility, however research has shown that such exploitation is widespread across England and that, according to a Home Office report, the offenders “are most commonly White (people)”.
Blame the Russians!
One of the most despicable episodes in this crisis has been the attempt by reactionary elements to blame the riots on hordes of Russian bots and trolls.
This was started by a former security minister, Stephen McPartland, with support from MI6, former BBC journalist asset Paul Mason, and the increasingly rabidly right wing Daily Telegraph, who accused Vladimir Putin of mounting a “disinformation operation” to foment violence in Britain, describing it as "part of the Russian playbook".
Under the recently defeated Conservative government wild accusations of hacking and political interference by Russia and China reached ever more hysterical levels.
The real reason for these claims is the desperate attempts by the most reactionary, warmongering elements of the ruling class to uphold Britain's rapidly declining ‘global role’, who even dream of regaining parts of their old empire, by collaborating with the Americans in wars, sanctions and attempted regime changes around the world.
Let us remember that these imperialist interventions have resulted in the deaths of several million people.
A former head of MI6 claimed in an interview with the Telegraph that the Channel3 Now website, which picked up and spread the lies that the Liverpool attacker was a Muslim terrorist and illegal immigrant, was a Russian disinformation outlet.
In fact Channel3 Now’s only Russian connection is that it bought a Russian-language YouTube car rallies channel years ago as a platform. Unfortunately the Channel3 Now story was reposted by RT News, and some pro-Russian Telegram channels, but none of this amounts to a genuine disinformation operation, and the Channel3 Now claims turned out to be a desperate ploy which was full of holes.
In fact far from having any Russian connections, the original ‘Muslim terrorist’ lie was a post on X by a woman in the North of England – who had also been temporarily removed by Twitter in 2021 for spreading misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines. She has since admitted to creating the post and apologised for the horrific consequences.
The Daily Telegraph also claimed recently that Russia and China were working to boost the following of the popular rapper Lowkey, an opponent of Britain’s wars, to manipulate public opinion in Britain in favour of the Palestinians through fake accounts.
But the Telegraph forgot to mention that its source for these claims was an agency led by Israeli military veterans, with 40 of its employees reserves in the Israeli military who were called up to fight in Gaza.
So claims that Russia tried to encourage the riots are actually part of a “British playbook” to justify spending £16.6 billion in military and economic support for Ukraine (official government figures from July 2024), backing Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza, and its continued participation in the killing of untold numbers of Yemenis – a war which the Western media has almost totally ignored.
The Zionist Hand
One final element in the anti-migrant violence is the role of Israel. Professor David Miller, who was sacked in 0ctober 2021 by Bristol University for his comments about Israel (later ruled wrongfully dismissed), said “the recent Islamophobic riots in the UK should be seen as the latest phase of Israel's war on British Muslims”.
He says “Tommy Robinson… has been working for Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called 'counter-jihad' Islamophobia established by Israel” and is “paid as part of Israel’s Online Influencers Programme in response to Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”.
Miller says that Israel’s “assets and operatives in the British political and media class such as Suella Braverman and Michael Gove” failed to close down pro-Palestinian protests. So “now the State of Israel is weaponising its cannon fodder on the white nationalist far-right, who have greater numbers than either Zionist street thugs or Iranian secularist extremists”.
By 7th August the EDL violence effectively ended with a far bigger mass movement of anti-racists taking to the streets, but also with an extraordinary display of national unity against the right-wing violence. Police chiefs, national newspapers and almost all politicians praised the mobilisation of communities, and it was this, rather than fast track courts and heavy sentences for the rioters, which led the EDL supporters to give up their anti-migrant campaign.
The reality is that without the presence of police the EDL rioters would have been met with overwhelming physical force against them.
However there are elements attempting to justify the protests, led by Nigel Farage and other Reform party leaders, along with some right-wing Conservatives MPs and former ministers alleging “two-tier policing”.
These are exactly the same elements who last autumn accused the police of being hard on right wing protesters and soft on the allegedly pro-terrorist “hate mobs” Palestine protests. Faced with bullying from Conservative ministers, London’s police chief, Mark Rowley, refused to accept that these protests were violent and staunchly defended their democratic right to peaceful protest. The pro-Israel Zionist counter protests at both national and local Palestine protests failed and in June were effectively abandoned.
At the same time the disgusting campaign alleging a wave of antisemitic incidents, including violence, with claims that large parts of British cities were “no-go areas for Jews”, which was widely amplified across the mass media, faded away. If these claims were true, where is the epidemic of antisemitism now?
The truth is that apart from a handful of incidents this “wave” was actually an Israeli-inspired disinformation operation.
The British ruling class has failed to close down the mass pro Palestinian protest movement (supported by 70 per cent of the population). This, along with the defeat of the anti-migrant protests has revealed the mass strength of progressive, anti-racist forces.
During the latest violence the police response has been almost entirely directed against the far right. But we also have to recognise that the deepening crisis of capitalism in Britain has created the conditions for mass discontent and alienation. This involves much larger numbers of working people than the small racist groups who took to the streets last week.
These deep-seated problems have created the conditions for far-right groups to flourish, not only in Britain but in Western Europe and the USA, and the far right has temporarily taken advantage of them to stage an attempted uprising.
The weakness of Britain’s economy and the failure to provide decent incomes and basic, affordable services necessary for a civilised life, have not gone away, and with a ruling class which has set the financial conditions so that money can’t be found to fix those problems, there is no sign of any real solutions to the problems facing working people in Britain anytime soon.
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