Britain’s Fascist Riots

By Mostafa el-Shazly

Over the past two weeks, Britain —or, more precisely, England and Northern Ireland— have experienced a wave of violent pogroms organized by fascists targeting asylum seekers, minority Muslim communities, and working-class people of color as a whole. The images have been horrifying, with the fascist mobs violently assaulting minorities, destroying the businesses of refugees, and setting fire to hotels re-purposed by the previous Conservative government to house stranded asylum seekers as part of its failed Rwanda deportation scheme.

This current wave of fascist violence was principally spurred by disinformation generated around the murder of three children by a Welsh-born Briton in the northwest seaside town of Southport. Long-time fascist agitators, such as the leader of the English Defence League, Stephen Yaxley Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson)—re-galvanized by opposition to the country’s pro-Palestine movement and supported by Zionist organizations—have exploited social media to falsely identify the perpetrator of the Southport attack as a Muslim asylum seeker. While the Southport killings can be understood as the catalyst for this current wave of violence, dis-information campaigns orchestrated by the likes of Lennon—recently reinstated to Twitter by billionaire white supremacist Elon Musk—have been actively targeting Muslims, both in relation to recent unrest in Leeds between the Roma community and police and an incident of police brutality against Muslims at Manchester Airport.

Structural Crisis

Though a significant factor in the re-emergence of organized far-right violence, disinformation campaigns are not solely to blame. While successive British governments have sought to portray the United Kingdom as a multicultural haven free of its colonial baggage, the far-right has been ever-present, with a storied tradition of organizations rooted in and exploiting the deficiencies of neo-liberal capitalism including the British Union of Fascists, National Front, British National Party, English Defence League, UK Independence Party, Britain First, and Reform UK, to name a few.

Four decades after Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal revolution, followed by fourteen years of Conservative austerity, the United Kingdom finds itself a low-wage and low-productivity economy with weak tax receipts and a national aversion to borrowing. Its state has been infantilized by the private sector and the post-WW2 welfare contract, in which the working class, who had fought and died in the trenches against Nazi Germany and the Axis, securing for themselves unprecedented social protections and services has been all but destroyed. The United Kingdom is an aging nation where nothing works, where young, working-class people struggle to secure housing, and where poverty is ignored. It is a country where migration is the only reliable way to fill labor gaps and achieve a modicum of growth in nominal gross domestic product (GDP) figures. While the outlook is grim for the vast majority of British citizens, the bourgeoisie has grown exponentially wealthy, with the kingdom at the top of global inequality standings, second only to the United States.

Rather than admit to the failure of “trickle-down economics” in fulfilling working-class aspirations of “social mobility” or relative dignity, the bourgeoisie and country’s political elites— Conservative and Labour— have lampooned migrants as the source of the country’s inability to provide services to its white working-class constituencies, for over two decades. This rhetoric, increasingly hostile and ingrained with the discourse of the Global War on Terror, mainstreamed the re-introduction of discourse surrounding the “cultural integration” of Muslims and the right to asylum for those displaced by war, famine, or persecution, particularly following the 2011 Arab Uprisings and unrest elsewhere.

As the predominantly white-working class audience for this rhetoric grew, so did the outsized influence of the fringe far-right. So too, did the need for the mainstream Conservative party to court a radicalized and xenophobic base that had grown increasingly hostile to markers of diversity and broad immigration. This need eventually spurred David Cameron’s Conservative government to gamble with Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union in the face of Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party’s growing popularity, vowing to “take back control of Britain’s borders” and end “uncontrolled immigration.” While this had ostensibly referred to the right for EU citizens to travel and work freely across the union, much of the right-wing base took it to mean the deportation and refusal of immigration from Muslim-majority nations and the wider “developing” world.

The enduring dilemma for Conservative administrations following the Brexit vote was their need to tighten migration controls and be rhetorically aggressive increasingly, all while relying on migrant influxes to keep the British economy growing at any perceptible rate. The dissonance of this position eventually led to the failure to stop migrant boats crossing the English Channel, precipitated by the unavailability of legal travel routes and the Rwanda scheme, in which all asylum applications would go unprocessed, and applicants indefinitely housed in hotels at exorbitant government expense. The inability of the Conservative government to curtail migration would eventually lead its radicalized base to consider other options, including Nigel Farage’s rebranded party Reform UK, which split the right-wing vote in the summer 2024 elections and helped Keir Starmer’s Labour party to a historic landslide.

Reaction

Starmer’s reaction to the fascist violence has been typical of his background as a prosecutor, namely his experience leading the response to the 2011 London Riots: full support for the police, increases in capacity to the prosecution services, orders to seek harsh sentences; and direction to courts to expedite trials and sentencing. His government has sought to downplay the violence as right-wing criminality rather than that of a fascist political movement seeking to terrorize minorities and confront the state more existentially.

However, immediate police response to this wave of far-right violence has appeared to be lacking. Beleaguered by more than a decade of cuts, the UK’s police forces are stretched thin and have lacked the necessary aggression, intentionally or not, to prevent the arson against hotels housing migrants or assaults on people of color. In their stead, Muslim communities and leftist, antifascist fronts have sought to mobilize to counter these mobs and deter pogroms. Unsurprisingly, both right-wing and mainstream media have already sought to demonize these groups as the opposite side of the same coin, going so far as to adopt the fascist terminology of “two-tier policing.”

This recent wave of right-wing violence in the United Kingdom is perhaps the most serious confrontation with fascism the country has had since the emergence of the British Union of Fascists and the National Front in the 1930s and 1970s, respectively. Though the fascist movement in the country remains fringe in terms of overall size and perhaps even popularity, its influence on mainstream politics has been outsized, pulling national opinion and policy further right. If it is not defeated in the street and de-constructed in the underground, Britain and, indeed, the Global North’s neo-liberal capitalisms lurch toward fascism will grow ever closer.