As I write, the UK has just experienced its third night of racist rioting in a month. What even recently would have been shocking now seems routine. After the horrific murders in Southport in July 2024, there followed a wave of pogromist reaction across parts of England and Northern Ireland. That week featured some of the worst acts of racist violence seen on British soil, events which reached their apogee when hundreds of rioters in Rotherham attempted to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers. A year later, in the summer of 2025, an orchestrated campaign saw thousands of flags attached to lampposts, spreading from Essex and the outer suburbs of London to the north-east and beyond, coinciding with yet more protests outside migrant hotels.
Britain, we heard from every quarter that summer, was a “tinderbox” which, in the words of Telegraph, “would need just the tiniest spark to go up in flames”. Leading the charge in this was David Betz, professor of war in the modern world at King’s College London, whose dark premonitions of urban decay became a regular feature in the right-wing press. Britain’s cities, Betz and his ilk warned, were crime-infested hellscapes pockmarked with ethnic no-go zones, from which civil war will soon erupt.
Such a vision will be familiar to anyone who has spent time on social media. Your daily scroll is now likely to be filled with decontextualised videos of fights, riots, violent crime and intercommunal strife – some real, much – sitting next to nudge-nudge-wink-wink images of the multi-ethnic “Yookay”. Many of us would once have dismissed this kind of content as the fevered products of a few racist cranks – led, of course, by the crank-in-chief: the world’s richest man and the oligarchic owner of one of its primary modes of communication – and, in doing so, been backed up by the fact that Britain beyond the phone screen looks little like the one within. The sad reality, however, is that for millions of people today what happens online is as real, perhaps more so, than anything that happens in the world outside. The real world, for many, is mediated so densely by social media that it is increasingly difficult to disentangle the two. In this mediated world, a spiral of radicalisation, facilitated by algorithms designed to push extremist eyeballs-at-all-cost content in the name of engagement, can easily draw people to the furthest fringes.
There are more complex reasons than online radicalisation that mean we cannot simply dismiss the violence as just another outburst of a hardened racist few. Not least because to do so would seem to leave us destined to regular summer bouts of pogromist violence. We also cannot discount the powerful local forces in Northern Ireland that have caused the current disturbances. As Luqman Saeed wrote in a powerful account of the riots for the LRB, “In a society where sectarian identities still determine political affiliations, immigrants and ethnic minorities have become the new other.”
Beyond the Irish statelet, the reality is that for much of the country immigration has come to stand as a synecdoche for the broader failures of the British state. Stagnant wages, flatlining productivity, rising rents and energy bills, decaying high streets filled with vape shops and cash-in-hand barbers, potholed roads, the now-ubiquitous fly tipping: all these and more are symbols of the country’s deep dysfunction. If the government cannot get a handle on a few thousand people crossing the Channel in inflatable boats every year, many are now saying, what chance does it have of sorting any of this mess out? It’s likely that this, rather than some sudden mass outbreak of social sadism or racism, lies behind the YouGov polling last year that found nearly 60 per cent of people favoured a military solution to the small boats issue.
Of course, the blame for this situation must go, to a large degree, to parts of the media and to mainstream politics and politicians. It is they who have consistently and repeatedly, over many years, drawn a direct line between economic and political dysfunction and race, producing what I have characterised elsewhere as a structure of feeling dominated by a form of racialised declinism – in which the decline of the country at large is fused onto questions of immigration and demographic change. Such has been the effectiveness of this coordinated effort by parts of the political and media establishment that discussion of the “remigration” of foreign nationals, even threats to deport British citizens, have become commonplace.
Now, setting the pace on the right is Rupert Lowe. The leader of the far right Restore Britain, a strange patrician figure as much redolent of parts of the old Tory right as of the very online new right, has in recent months opened a dangerous front on Reform’s right wing, openly appealing to ethnonationalists with his slogan that “millions must go”. As Daniel Trilling recently said, this has put Nigel Farage in a bind: “on the one hand [Farage] needs to moderate his party’s image in order to broaden its electoral coalition – but on the other hand, faced with this pressure … [he] has to signal to his base that he is the bearer of their radical right-wing nationalist hopes.” This, Trilling says, is a signal of Farage’s weakness, not his strength: losing parts of his base to those to the right of him, he risks alienating large chunks of the wider population by chasing after them.
Perhaps. It is certainly true that in recent weeks Farage has appeared uncharacteristically flustered, complaining of Restore’s backer Elon Musk who, he said, “has decided he will try to split the right of British politics as best he can”. He has also struck a far more inflammatory line in response to the riots than he would once have done; only a few years ago Farage was claiming that mass deportations were “politically impossible”. Now he’s staging mock deportation flights to announce his deportation bill and using the phrases like “White Lives Matter”. But, with so many now pushing harder and faster to the right, it could less a sign of weakness than a symptom of the ground already gained by the project of political and social reaction.
The period from the start of the 19th century until the late 1970s and early 1980s, following Raymond Williams, can be seen as the “long revolution”, in which following the advent of industrial capitalism, the widening of political democracy and the development of various forms of mass communications and culture, once-entrenched forms of inequality were challenged, if never quite overthrown. Now, we are at the start of what could be a long counter-revolution. Equality has gone too far; now, we hear, is the time for reaction. It is the emboldening of this agenda, as much as electoral calculation, that lies behind the shouts of “two-tier policing” and remigration.
The right will react to the riots in its now-standard way. Rupert Lowe and his gang of broccoli-haired reactionaries and ethnonationalists will no doubt double down on the dehumanising rhetoric and their talk of “”. The Tories and Reform will no doubt tail them, although perhaps with the occasional caveat that it’s not quite all black and brown people they take issue with thrown in.
How the left reacts is far more uncertain. Of course, it all depends what happens in Makerfield next week. Keir Starmer, it should be clear, has neither the vision nor the ability to make any kind of galvanising appeal to the nation at large. Nor does he seem to grasp the severity of the issues affecting the country. Whether Andy Burnham can is another matter.
Responding at all will require a root and branch reform of the dominant political and economic system: nationalising failing utilities; largescale state investment in housing, key services and industry; an end to the regime of outsourcing and privatisation that has done so much to hollow out state capacity. Its watchwords should be “taking back control”: offering to voters a vision of a renewed and democratic economy that can reverse the decades of damaging neoliberalism; not just tinkering around the edges with policies of tax and spend.
It’ll also require severing the associations between immigration and decline, dysfunction and loss of control. The small boats crisis is such a charged and emotive force now that any vision that fails to confront it is doomed to fail. We have a responsibility to offer safe and legal routes for those seeking asylum, but the sight of unvetted young men landing on the beaches of Kent and Sussex is such a glaring signal of state failure that something must be done to stop it and to stop those who profit from it. This must be done humanely, and must be allied to a humanist politics of what Paul Gilroy has called “conviviality” – the recognition that Britain as it actually exists, as a multi-ethnic and post-imperial polity, is for the most part a well-functioning and integrated society. Non-white Brits are our family, neighbours, friends, carers. Maintaining that requires an honest conversation about immigration in Britain, one that can counter the absurdity of the false narratives of white replacement.
In this, the stakes are high. If we cannot get this right, the ever-hardening right will capitalise. That should scare us all.
[Further reading: The Belfast riots: new targets, old hatred]
Content from our partners
Related
