Photo: Steve Eason
That the first big event of the Labour government would have been far-right racist rioting across the country was not widely anticipated. There are, however, two different reasons why it might have been.
First, the right has frequently deployed extra-parliamentary force against Labour governments as a form of political pressure. Elements are always unreconciled to any Labour government ever.
Even Tony Blair was exposed to this, with the anti-fuel tax mobilisations of 2000 bringing the country briefly to a standstill. That drama was organised and promoted by the Daily Mail and justified by the Telegraph on the grounds that parliamentary democracy, which had recently yielded a huge Labour majority, was defunct.
That was three years into a Labour government, rather than three weeks, but then Blair enjoyed a genuine popularity which Keir Starmer’s administration does not.
Just days after Starmer’s election, the Telegraph ran a column urging business to move jobs overseas in protest, boycott all the government’s initiatives and even challenge them in the European courts — imagine! The extra-parliamentary deployment of the power of capital in effect.
The second road leading to the riots begins in Gaza. From the perspective of the right wing, not the least objectionable feature of the mass movement of solidarity with Palestine which has dominated the streets for 10 months has been the very obvious participation of huge numbers of British Muslims.
Take Tommy Robinson’s word for it, he has been quite outspoken on the matter. Clearly it has been a red rag to the racist bull.
Suella Braverman, notably entirely silent on the subject of the riots thus far, was guilty of misjudged timing and targeting in summoning the rioters of this August onto the streets last November to confront… the police, as it transpired.
But she had her finger held to the breeze from the right. She saw the enemy — anti-imperialism uniting communities, including those whose very presence the far right remains unreconciled to. Perhaps Braverman will shortly be taking these insights with her into Reform, having failed to make even the preliminary cut for the Tory leadership.
Since then, things have only got worse for the racists and authoritarians. The movement elected several MPs, a development greeted with Islamophobic bile and sweeping smears. If sore losing was an Olympic sport, Jonathan Ashworth would be nailed on for gold.
Clearly, Plan A was for the police to put a stop to the movement on the streets. Even had the Met been so inclined, it does not have enough juice to stop hundreds of thousands of demonstrators.
As for “two-tier policing” — that the cops might prefer demonstrators who do not throw rocks and flaming wheelie bins at them to those who do should not be the occasion for wonder.
But the election brought comfort to the racists too, with Reform’s five elected MPs, and 14 per cent of the poll. That was followed by the large demonstration mobilised by the feckless Robinson — not as big as the Gaza protests by a stretch, but not insignificant either.
So to the riots, the main driver of which is racism in general and Islamophobia in particular. Specific attention should be paid here to the role of social democracy.
The Starmer election campaign had a sharp racist element, from the ditching of Faiza Shaheen as a Labour candidate at the start through to Starmer’s own remarks, echoed by Ashworth, about deporting Bangladeshis at the end. Not to mention the indifference to the suffering of the Palestinians.
Responding to the riots, Starmer could not bring himself to utter the word “Islamophobia.” He has continued to refuse to meet representative Muslim organisations.
This is far from accidental — it reflects both the government’s commitment to supporting the continuing slaughter in Gaza and the fact that Reform is now the main challenger to Labour in no fewer than 89 parliamentary constituencies. Policy and politics alike mandate facing right while maintaining public order.
In that last respect, Starmer leans into his own strengths, as a familiar of the powerful determined to uphold the state’s monopoly on lawful violence.
Thus Labour’s stern injunction to its parliamentarians and local authority representatives to avoid the mass anti-racist movement which has arisen to counter the fascist initiative. Popular mobilisation is anathema to social democracy.
As in the 1930s it preaches passivity by the masses and exclusive reliance on the state, without even the promise of a serious reform programme to address whatever social problems, other than racial prejudice, underlie the violence.
And that state is not our friend. Relying on summary justice delivering long prison sentences — the Starmer playbook when dealing with the riots caused by police violence and racism in 2011 — is a poisoned chalice.
Better by far that anti-fascism relies on its own mobilising powers, so dynamically and deeply displayed over the last couple of weeks.
There has never been an occasion when fascism was more popular than anti-fascism. The former has always had to rely on the indulgence, and often the active support, of the bourgeois state to come to power.
That is not on the cards today. The fascists themselves lack leadership, even of the limited kind that the National Front offered in the 1970s.
“Robinson,” a shameless grifter basking In Cyprus under the shadow of possible imprisonment should he return to these shores, is a no-mark.
The real impact of the violence will be to shift politics to the right, specifically in an anti-migrant direction, if unchecked. The putative beneficiaries will be the Farages and the Jenricks, shameless in peddling Islamophobia, and happy to hint coyly at unspeakable conspiracies, while keeping a fastidious distance from the arsonists and brick-throwers.
They will be given cover by the likes of academic Matthew Goodwin, always keen to emphasise the ethnic background of the British-born suspect accused of the Southport murders, and by thinkers like Jonathan Rutherford, who paraded his intellectual limitations in the New Stateman, arguing that “for the first time in national history, people are living alongside others with radically different civilisational values,” a very fanciful reading of history.
Rutherford’s nostalgia has a sharper focus, expressed in his own words: “The writ of the British state which once stamped its authority on half the world is now barely capable of maintaining domestic social order.”
Yes, once the British state could commit massacres on several continents simultaneously, now it arrives late to a disturbance in Hartlepool. You would have to have your chauvinist blinkers on very tight not to allow for an element of global progress in this.
It may also be as well to recall that there have always been many liberals who, when the chips are down, would prefer fascism to socialism.
That is what led numbers of French thinkers to express a preference for Marine Le Pen over the New Popular Front in the recent elections. Even the preposterous Bernard Henri-Levy, in the trenches for empire on every intellectual battle front, could not make up his mind.
Better anti-semitic pro-Israel politics than anti-racist pro-Palestinian is the right’s default. Their appreciation of slaughtering Muslims is fully reciprocated by those doing the killing.
For example, far-right polemicist Douglas Murray, in an interview recorded before the riots, declares himself happy to tell migrants that he “doesn’t want them here” and believes the public may take matters into their own hands with “brutal” outcomes.
Yet he has not only secured the praise of the aforementioned Henri-Levy, but even an award from the president of Israel earlier this year. A racist international emerging before our eyes, with soi-disant liberals in it up to their necks.
So this may not be a popular front moment, any more than the fire-raisers of Rotherham are on the verge of seizing power. Social democracy has enabled this moment, and will likely keep on doing so, while liberalism, admittedly heterogeneous, is compromised by racism and imperialism in a world that no longer allows these connections to work undisclosed.
And while it was quite reasonable to identify Hitler Germany as the main threat to world peace in the 1930s today that role is played a good deal closer to home.
The best answer to the far right is thus the further strengthening of the mass movement for Palestine. More than anything, that will signal the fascists’ defeat — anti-imperialism and anti-fascism, so often injudiciously, even maliciously, posed against each other in the past, united for the future.
Source: Morning Star