A strange and dramatic metamorphosis has happened over the last few days. On the one hand, Tommy Robinson, the Right-wing activist and former leader of the English Defence League, has shapeshifted into a Left-leaning analyst of political protest. On the other, those who formerly occupied that role have suddenly embraced the Right-coded rhetoric of moral disgust and zero-tolerance policing.
Granted, Robinson hasn’t gone as far as to declare that the riots are an inarticulate rebellion against capitalist society, much less a “form of queer birth”, as Vicky Osterweil might put it. But he has suggested that they are an all but inevitable response to white working-class grievances that have been ignored by the elites in the media and government.
At the same time, progressives who once expressed support for those who participated in the George Floyd protests of 2020 have adopted a decidedly harsher line on the current anti-immigration protests. Back in June 2020, for example, the former head of British counter-terrorism policing, Neil Basu, encouraged his colleagues to show empathy towards BLM protesters and their “legitimate anger”. “We need to listen to our communities, and our people, and focus on what we in the UK can do better,” he counselled in a conciliatory tone conspicuously missing from his comments about the riots of the past week. They are “bullies and cowards”, he said of the rioters, coming close to describing those who had tried setting fire to a hotel in Rotherham as terrorists. “Not only does it fit the definition of terrorism, it is terrorism,” he remarked. Basu may well have a good point; it’s just not one he showed much interest in raising about the torching of the Minneapolis Police station amid a George Floyd protest on 28 May 2020.
The ironies here are obvious and worth probing for the light they shed on today’s confused discourse. Consider, first, the Left-sounding apologia of the Right, as expressed by Tommy Robinson in the following post on X: “When British people are ignored and labelled ‘far-Right’, when children’s safety isn’t a priority, and when fighting age men from foreign lands come here to take the piss, something has to happen. This is on the British government, they own this problem, because they created it.”
This is not a fringe view. Matthew Goodwin, for example, wrote in a recent piece on the riots: “What did you expect? Seriously? What do you expect ordinary British people to do given the deeply alarming things that are now unfolding around them, in their country, on a daily basis?” Among those things, he singled out the mass rioting in minority communities in Harehills, the stabbing of a British Army Officer by “a member of a minority community”, and a Kurdish migrant who pushed a man onto the tracks at a London Underground station. Douglas Murray, too, has similarly lamented how “completely predictable” the riots were. “Labour and Conservative governments”, he said, created “a powder-keg”.
It is important to note that Robinson has not openly justified the riots, and both Goodwin and Murray have explicitly condemned them. But the substance of their remarks and the shifting of ultimate blame onto the Government serves, in effect, to minimise the agency of the rioters, who were somehow launched or pushed into violence by circumstances beyond their control. Indeed, the current insistence on “understanding” the roots of the riots bears a striking resemblance to the way that apologists of the 2005 London bombings insisted that they were “only” trying to understand the causes of that atrocity, while also firmly pinning the blame for it on Britain’s involvement in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Consider, next, the progressive narrative of the riots. This is typically clobbered up in the garbs of an undergraduate-level media sociology that holds that the riots are being fuelled by a combination of misinformation and Right-wing populist demagoguery. As has already been exhaustively documented, many prominent X accounts had circulated false information about the identity of the Southport attacker, claiming that he was a Muslim asylum seeker who had illegally entered the UK by boat; he was, in fact, born in the UK to Rwandan parents. According to a report by Marianna Spring, the BBC’s “disinformation and social media correspondent”, this served to “inflame pre-existing tensions” and likely affected the trajectory of the events that followed. Alan Rusbridger went even further, arguing in Prospect that “a foul virus” of misinformation and far-Right hate speech on X had “led to the rioting” in Southport; Owen Jones blamed “a much broader Right-wing populist ecosystem” that had whipped up ordinary working-class people into an “anti-migrant and anti-refugee frenzy”.
There are two key problems with this line of analysis. The first is that it assumes that, had the rioters in Southport not been exposed to false information, they wouldn’t have taken to the streets in protest or violently targeted a mosque in the town. But this doesn’t really hold up, since the disturbances in Southport happened after it had become clear who the perpetrator was. Indeed, in the violence that unfolded, the police and the mosque had, in effect, become reviled effigies for the Southport attacker and the indifferent government the rioters blamed for producing him.
The second problem is that, by assuming that the protesters had been radicalised by a far-Right online outrage machine, progressives fail to take seriously the possibility that they may have had reasons of their own for protesting. If the rhetoric of Tommy Robinson resonates among this quarter, it might just well be because it faithfully captures their “lived” experiences and not because Robinson himself has mythical powers of rhetorical manipulation.
An alternative and more promising way of analysing the riots would be to focus on the profiles of the violent few at the forefront of them, what links (if any) they have to Right-wing activists, and whether their violence was planned in advance. But we won’t know this until convictions are secured — and this will take a while. Based on online footage of the disturbances, the majority of the violent few appear to be young men and the violence itself looks poorly coordinated and incompetent. There also seems to be a carnivalesque aspect to some of the violent exchanges between rioters and the police: a not-insignificant number of rioters are clearly enjoying themselves and it’s not inconceivable to think that their involvement may have been driven by the sheer thrill of smashing things up and defying authority.
In his brilliant study of English football hooliganism, Among the Thugs, Bill Buford writes of the “state of adrenalin euphoria” that comes with crowd violence and how the euphoria itself, and not deeper social scientific factors, is the key to understanding it. We shouldn’t underestimate this as a factor in the current riots, especially in places where joy is in short supply. Many participants, too, are filming the disorder on their phones, and perhaps they too are getting some vicarious pleasure from doing so, just as the actual rioters are perhaps getting an additional pleasure high from knowing that they are being filmed.
Returning to the issue of the protestors’ grievances, it is obviously important that we understand what they are and take them seriously. After all, many protesters and their supporters have been clear about what they are. They believe that there is a system of two-tier policing in this country that favours Muslims and other minorities over whites; they believe that the mainstream media is biased in its reporting of crime and disorder; and they believe that privileged elites in government hate them and their culture, while going out of their way to appease Muslims and other non-whites.
Keir Starmer was right to unequivocally condemn the rioters. But this should not come at the expense of addressing these concerns. Whether or not you are sympathetic towards them, it’s undeniable that we really do need an urgent and open conversation in this country about uncontrolled migration, the involvement of asylum seekers in violent crime, and how this impacts citizens with already limited opportunities and resources.
At the same time, we also need to recognise the vast causal chasm between deeply or even rightly held grievances and actual violence, property destruction and looting. Most aggrieved people who protest do not carry out acts of violence, while many of those who do commit violence do so for reasons that are not always related to rational grievances. Any explanation that elides or fudges that chasm is unlikely to tell us much about how and why riots happen — and, as we have seen, may even end up excusing those who are responsible for the ensuing carnage.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/