UK Riots Have Their Roots in a History of Hate

Starting on July 30, England has been swept by a wave of racist and Islamophobic violence (which also affected Belfast in Northern Ireland). Occasioned by false rumors that the horrific murder of three children at a summer dance class in the town of Southport were committed by a Muslim migrant, these latter-day pogroms have spread terror across communities of color in more than 20 British cities and towns. As Daniel Trilling observed, they stand out both for their viciousness and ​“geographical reach” — stretching from Sunderland in the north to Plymouth in the south — but also because they drew ​“a far wider range of participants than the small groups of committed fascists who helped instigate the violence.” 

It’s hard to overstate the gravity of the situation. As long-time anti-fascist activist Balwinder Singh Rana, who organized with both the Indian Youth Federation and the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1960s and ​‘70s, declared, in the 55 years he’s been fighting racism and fascism, ​“I’ve never ever seen this situation before … it’s never happened at this scale.”

While the authorities have acknowledged the far-right character of the riots, they have largely refrained from centering the Islamophobia, racism and anti-immigrant animus that have driven them. Instead, they’ve talked about criminal ​“thuggery,” called for new police powers and leaned into false equivalency — equating racist rallies that the BBC dubiously termed ​“pro-British” protests with anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstrations against them. 

Authorities and pundits have similarly emphasized the dominant role of social media in providing the digital infrastructure for this explosion of hatred, circulating fake news and coordinating chauvinist violence with unprecedented speed and without relying on the UK’s traditional, largely moribund white nationalist groups.

Yet to reduce the cause of these events to disinformation and hooliganism is an exercise in historical amnesia and whitewashing. In Great Britain, as elsewhere, the racism in the streets was seeded by the racism promoted by the state, as well as the media (especially tabloids like The Daily Mail and The Daily Express), think tanks and academics — all of which have been happy to promote the claim that racist abuse and physical assaults are grounded in ​“legitimate concerns.” 

The 14 years of Tory rule that ended a few weeks ago with the election of Keir Starmer’s aggressively centrist Labour Party were marked by relentless anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation, as well as by a counter-terrorism agenda that consolidated anti-Muslim sentiment. As home secretary, Theresa May instructed vans to patrol the streets of diverse neighborhoods with billboards telling migrants to ​“Go Home.” The Brexit campaign’s mantra, ​“Take Back Control,” clearly implied that sovereignty had to be wrested both from Brussels and ​“foreigners” (and was interpreted by some as license for violent attacks on Eastern European workers). Boris Johnson parlayed his career as a jingoist hack peddling racist stereotypes into a Prime Ministership by promising to ​“Get Brexit Done” — a vow undoubtedly received by some as a euphemistic echo of ​“Keep England White.”

The last few years of Conservative Party rule brought an intensification of state racism under two far-right home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman — both past speakers at National Conservatism conferences — who made the grotesque plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda a centerpiece of their tenure. Former PM Rishi Sunak’s electoral promise this year to ​“Stop the Boats” was so potent a rallying cry that it was chanted by some of the racists rampaging through England’s streets this past week. Not content with the Tories’ migrant-bashing, in early July, 14.3% of the British electorate voted for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party, one of whose canvassers was caught using the same slurs against Sunak that are now being chanted by the fascist flash mobs.

The Labour Party is not immune to this ideological rot. The targeting of Muslim communities and the framing of immigration as a ​“problem” were already present under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour government, in power from 1997 to 2010. Blair initiated the damaging scheme to distribute asylum seekers across economically depressed areas of the country, while Brown flirted with the slogan ​“British jobs for British workers.” More significantly, the Labour government’s support of the U.S. ​“War on Terror” and its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan played a major role in accelerating destabilization and displacement across the Middle East, laying the groundwork for much of today’s ​“migration crisis.” The famous aphorism of anti-racist thinker A. Sivanandan, ​“We are here because you were there,” applies as much to the historical relationship between migration and the British Empire as it does to the UK’s more recent role in abetting U.S. imperialism.

What’s more, the internal purge of the Labour Left after 2020 — which used weaponized accusations of antisemitism to destroy the legacy of Jeremy Corbyn — has also meant dismantling the possibility of a progressive politics on race and migration. Instead, the Labour Party has followed the bankrupt notion that it can undermine the far Right by taking hardline positions against refugees and foreign workers — the same logic that French philosopher Jacques Rancière diagnosed in his country as ​“taking official and reasonable racist measures to disarm wild racist passions.”

And so various Labour politicians have spoken irresponsibly of the policy of housing asylum seekers in hotels, while refusing to consider non-punitive responses to migration. Current Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has responded to protests over the Labour leadership’s complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza by referring to ​“pro-Palestine areas” of UK cities — a clear echo of right-wing rhetoric about ​“no-go zones” in Muslim-majority areas of Europe. And Keir Starmer has vowed to improve on the Tories’ promise to stop migration (in ways not entirely unlike Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent tough talk on U.S. border policies). 

It’s hard to imagine a starker contrast from Corbyn, who delivered one of his first speeches after being elected Labour leader in 2015 at a #RefugeesWelcome rally in Westminster. But today, one of the UK’s boldest left-wing advocates, MP Zarah Sultana — who in 2020 powerfully declared, ​“the enemy of the working class travels by private jet not migrant dinghy” — has been forced out of the parliamentary Labour Party and come under rhetorical attack by former New Labour politician Ed Balls (also husband of Home Secretary Cooper). 

In the UK as in France, as Rancière noted, the ​“reasonable racism” approach ​“has not diminished by an iota the votes of the racist extreme Right.” Indeed, it has increased them, and normalized the narratives of white victimhood that fuel racist street violence.

In different ways, as University of Glasgow sociologist Les Back told me, both of the UK’s main parties have promoted ​“the sense that the ​‘white working class’ has been ​‘left behind,’” thus encouraging ​“the emergence of a form of euphoric and phobic white identity politics that has been emboldened by the Brexit vote and the reemergence of openly white supremacist ideology.”

This revitalization of the most virulent forms of English racism, Back says, has taken its own distinctive organizational forms, combining football hooliganism, Nigel Farage’s far-right ​“populism” and internet victimology orbiting around ​“replacement” narratives. (These have long been promoted by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the former figurehead of the English Defence League popularly known as Tommy Robinson, who headlined a large white nationalist, anti-migrant demonstration in London on July 27.) 

Anti-racist campaigners from Black Lives Matter UK to the Institute of Race Relations have discerned in these developments the lineaments of a homegrown fascism. But responding to this threat doesn’t simply require vigilance about a far Right on the move. It demands we acknowledge the broader trends linking racist street violence, state policies and social crises and their deep roots in UK history.

Hate riots or ​“whiteness riots” in England date back long before the violence we’ve seen in the past week. Just 20 miles from Southport — the initial flashpoint for today’s riots — is Liverpool, where white seamen returning from service in World Wars I and II spearheaded violence against Black, Yemeni and Chinese communities in 1919 and 1948. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall explained more than 40 years ago, that violence was followed by a postwar ​“popular” racism — framed and enabled by the state’s policies against migrant and racialized workers as a means of distracting from the widespread immiseration and insecurity generated by Britain’s economic and political situation. This popular racism crystallized in the Notting Hill riots against West Indian migrants in 1958; then found electoral expression in the Smethwick by-election in 1964, where Tories ran under the noxious slogan, ​“If you want a n — r for a neighbour, vote Labour”; then truly instilled itself with Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 speech, which declared the white British population ​“strangers in their own country” and prophesied ​“rivers of blood” unless migration was severely and immediately curtailed.

A decade later, Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution revived this theme, famously declaring that Commonwealth migration from Pakistan was prompting popular fears ​“that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.” 

Today the song remains largely the same — in Hall’s words, race continues to be the convenient ​“prism through which the crisis is perceived.” 

Those who, confronted with today’s racist pogroms and riots, turn to talk of ​“forgotten communities” and the ​“white working class,” treat this violence and its targets as somehow natural. They obscure how much deliberate political and cultural work goes into defining the problem in terms of ​“migrant dinghys” rather than ​“private jets.” 

While the far Right has made worrying electoral gains, and the Tories continue on their chauvinist track, the struggle to articulate a popular anti-racism that would link the defense of migrants’ human and social rights with broader struggles for equality and redistribution has been deliberately marginalized in the Labour Party. But it is not absent from British society — witness the inspiring mobilizations to defend refugees and Muslim communities from the cruel cowardice of racist mobs, which saw many rallying to mosques and hotels sheltering asylum seekers, putting their bodies in the way of racist violence, and the thousands taking to the streets across England to counter the more than 100 anti-immigration rallies that were announced on social media. 

While Starmer’s government treats such ​“counter-protestors” as an equivalent menace to public order as the hateful mobs they resist, the revival of Britain’s anti-racist and anti-fascist traditions will depend on their courage and solidarity.