After the Riots, Will the British Right Do Anything?

Landing at Luton Airport, as I began a holiday in Britain, I wondered if I would see luggage being hurled across the terminal. Taxis set alight. Travelers doing battle in the car park. 

To joke is in no sense to diminish the seriousness of the violence that struck cities like Southport and Rotherham last week. Senseless hooliganism—which followed the murder of three girls, allegedly by a young man of Rwandan heritage—led to dozens of police officers being injured and hotels hosting migrants being set alight.

Still, the volume of reports on violence and destruction may have led an outsider to think that localized violence was more ubiquitous than it was—not least when Elon Musk was claiming that “civil war is inevitable”.

Actually, the spasm of rage and opportunism that fueled nativist rioting appears to have burned itself out in days. The “counter-protests” that brought tens of thousands of antiracists out into the street last Wednesday in such left-leaning areas as Walthamstow and Brighton had a surreal quality because it was unclear who the counter-protestors had expected to arrive. Wall-to-wall headlines about how campaigners had “faced down” the “far right” obscured the fact—accepted even by Nick Lowles of the left-wing anti-racist watchdog Hope Not Hate—that rumors of massive far right demonstrations had been based on petty online chatter.

Since then, leftists have been furiously trying to demonstrate that the riots were more systematic than they were. Attempts to blame the violence on Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage for indulging misinformation about how the Southport killer was a Muslim refugee or known to the security services range from dubious to farcical. First, they suggest that rioters who were moved to violence by the suspect allegedly being an immigrant would have been unmoved by his being the son of immigrants. Second, it ignores the fact that the violence was a symptom of a chronic lack of organization on the right. Leaderless and directionless, rioters struck out with futile and reckless abandon.

Now, the weighty hand of the state is doing its best to deter future aggression. The police might have proved themselves to be ineffective, but the courts are mopping up. When Labour came to power, their emphasis was on rehabilitation over imprisonment. Criminals up to and including men who had been imprisoned for manslaughter were being released early. Now, rioters and their advocates are being banged up en masse. Of course, it is only natural that violence and incitement to violence will be firmly prosecuted. The jailing of men, on the other hand, who had done no more than post racially provocative memes points towards a broader crackdown on speech. Establishment commentators are banging the drum for expansive censorship, such as when Alastair Campbell of The Rest Is Politics urged the Metropolitan Police to investigate the author Douglas Murray. (If I were Campbell, who famously worked on the dossiers that promoted British involvement in the Iraq War, I would be careful who I accused of encouraging violence). 

The fact is that excitable voices on the right and the left are exaggerating the potential for nativist violence. That is not to claim that such violence does not happen and will not happen (a claim that would be purblind at best given recent events). It is to claim that the numbers, organization and resources are not sufficient to support and sustain concerted violence. Pro-Trump demonstrators in the USA in 2021 had a charismatic leader and access to arms, and all that they achieved was to roam around a government building. British rioters don’t even have those. Most of the public, meanwhile, including people who are sympathetic to peaceful protests, oppose them. There is neither the will nor the way.

This is not to be regretted. Concerted violence would only benefit gravediggers and the legal profession. But the thought has a seductive appeal for some commentators in the face of slow British decline. It offers the chance for catharsis, if nothing else (a catharsis that someone like Elon Musk could appreciate vicariously). As Paul Brian and Charlie Nash wrote in these pages in 2020, “apocalyptic political posturing” can reflect “yearning for a climax and a resolution”.

Yet it can be pure escapism. It would be careless to rule out the possibility of large-scale violence in the future (because, if nothing else, one never knows quite what the future holds). But far likelier is a grim drumbeat of localized atrocities, fueled by sectarian resentment and mental illness, set against a backdrop of state dysfunction and economic decline. People are likelier to separate than they are to clash, such as when white Londoners moved out to Kent and Essex. The writer Sam Bidwell has wittily referred to the reshaping of social and political norms as “Lebanonization”. 

We right-leaning commentators who deplore violence should be self-aware enough to acknowledge our own failure to establish political means through which ill-feeling towards these circumstances can be addressed. Beneath the violence that leapt out of the surface of British communities seethed a hot and deep outrage towards a political establishment that has ignored and misused the popular will for decades.

As a migrant myself, it is less and less my place to insist on the specific direction of British politics. But the blatant antidemocratic nature of the neglect and exploitation of majority feeling on the changing state of British society is a fact as plain as the greenness of the grass—a fact that makes outrage over events like the Southport killings ever more acute. 

The challenge for right-wing commentators and politicians is to not yammer impotently about such circumstances but to form the institutional and strategic means of promoting and establishing restrictionist and patriotic policies—at the national level, when it comes to future governance, and at the local level, when it comes to resisting top-down attempts to reshape demographics. If the right is all talk then its outrage, justifiable as it is, towards top level power plays and low level hooliganism will be vacuous. Talk is cheap.