The UK riots
On refusing to join dots
I watch from afar the riots in the UK, riding later into the evenings and then the nights in Latin America. The road and the night was perhaps always my favourite place for thinking. The dark horizon always a simplicity; the illumination of electricity, lighting in the darkness ahead, always an optimism. For all the immersiveness of the moment, I am seldom in it, but rather it helps me think of elsewhere.
There is no use describing the gravity of events in any real detail. Images, of which we now live among so many, are often by their very nature, and certainly by their abundance, grotesque in their ability to eclipse and finally distract from the underlying moral point they should seek to make.
Aside from all the images of battered or burned shops and cafes—ordinarily or always belonging to immigrants, or simply to non-white people — the one that resonates deepest with me, as it perhaps did for many, was the far-right mob attempting to set fire to a hotel known to be hosting human beings, who also happened to have been refugees.
That all of this violence was undergirded by a truly shocking level of Islamophobia, that has taken even me by surprise, at least — while never denying individuals their agency to not follow racist propaganda—points a helpful finger of blame back to the elites, politicians, newspaper barons and editors who have spent decades encouraging this very thing in British public life.
It is, as always, these elites that bear most discussion, too, because history shows nothing if not their ability to mobilise street violence in behalf of their own interests. Socially this is truly the greater problem, rather than the unfortunate souls who are the preferred target of any one particular year or era.
First of all and most conspicuous, after watching almost a year of the most punishingly cruel and violent Israeli genocide in Palestine, upheld at every point by lies, atrocity propaganda, impunity, Islamophobia and the Zionist right to draw upon extreme, far-right violence, is the oddity by which members of British polite society deny the British far-right the same entitlement to Islamophobic violence they have not only witnessed on their phones all year, but are broadly aware that the UK military, politicians and taxpayers are supporting elsewhere in Palestine. To recap: the UK is supporting all this by the refusal to condemn the Israelis in Palestine, but also by the provision of aircraft carriers to the Israelis, by bombing missions against the Palestinian support front in Yemen, by weapons sales and gun-running missions from UK military bases on the island of Cyprus.
Keir Starmer — at the time only the media-anointed next UK Prime Minister— expressed clearly his determination that Israeli concentration camp guards had the right to deny electricity and water to the Palestinian population of the Gaza concentration camp. This was a clear statement of the now-Prime Minister, approving the Zionist right to deny life to Palestinians, a population that — Muslim, Arab, or both— it does not need saying is a target population for both Zionist Islamophobic propaganda and Zionist violence.
As the Arabic saying goes; the fish rots from the head. There is something quaint if evil to the elite surprise attached to the idea that the far-right— having seen their expensively-educated, besuited and by most accounts respectable Prime Minister extol the Islamophobic right to deny life to a Muslim or Muslim-perceived population— might decide that there is in fact a right to deny or immiserate lives on these very grounds. Why can the Zionist and the Islamophobe genocide in Palestine but not even riot in Britain? There is at the very least an im/moral consistency to the far-right view that what happens in Place A is actually also acceptable in Place B, the difference between two places after all being only geography. The elite meanwhile becomes vexed that the rules have been misunderstood; while they may be the same rules, the arenas are supposed to be recognised as different.
Networked racism
None of this, either, is empty philosophical conjecture. UK far-right darlings and riot ringleaders like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka, for more working-class charm “Tommy Robinson”) has been mentored by representatives of the Jewish-Zionist lobby group “Board of Deputies, been paid by the far-right Gatestone Institute (a Zionist policy group to which the idea of the Israeli state in Palestine is of course foundational), and made numerous mutually promotional trips to the Israeli military in Palestine. Yaxley-Lennon spent the riots doing Israeli media in (the keen Israeli ally) South Cyprus, to which he recently fled on account of breaking a UK court order.
British fascism being what it is, however, Yaxley-Lennon’s faux working-class faux-roughness is nothing without its high-brow counterpart, provided of late by Douglas Murray. Murray referred to the Scottish former-First Minister, Humza Yousaf — who is Muslim and had Palestinian family members besieged in the first stage of the Gaza genocide —as having “infiltrated” UK politics (an odd charge to make against someone openly elected to his position), and while Murray has rightly attracted the ire of UK polite society for his too-overt far-right language, they nonetheless, and as with Yaxley-Lennon, are more than willing to separate his unstinting support for the far-right at home with his unstinting support for the Israelis in Palestine.
Murray — and again it is the same im/moral consistency— of course does no such thing. Israeli society being what it is, Murray in his neo-nazism has become a darling of Israeli media, and of far-right western media embedded with the Israeli army, while also appearing in Tel-Aviv concert halls to talk of Israeli goodness and his view that the west may yet save itself from infiltration, if only it can bring itself to adopt a more Israeli attitude to immigration in general and to Muslims in particular. That this kind of opinion is what Israeli bourgeoisie will pay money to go and listen to, in places that are the equivalent of the Barbican or Carnegie Hall, should also tell you something of Israeli society.
And yet—again consenting to the contortions of permissible and impermissible speech, which is in this instance consenting to fighting a boxing match with a hand tied behind the back—the politely anti-racist classes consent to have this discussion about far-right Zionist instigators without locating them inside the organised network of globalised far-right violence and ideology to which they belong; a network to which the project of Israeli Zionism in Palestine is both the blueprint and crown jewel. In a world of informational, communal and ideological currents that are transnational, these gatekeepers of public discourse consent to take-on these bete noire primarily within the confines of the nation state. This domestic convention does lapse where it comes to naming other, socially-approved, bete noire such as Donald Trump or Elon Musk, but mentioning the Zionist project that Musk and Trump also follow so devoutly remains as ever, for now, a step too far.
Such inconsistencies however are not worth pointing out simply because they are the truth and they are correct; they are worth pointing out because consenting to an argument in which you agree to stop shy of the full and correct truth leaves you more likely to lose that argument. When far-right mobs are trying to burn down hotels because they believe them to host refugees or Muslims, then honouring such prim conventions, nurtured by years of Zionist, far-right lobbying and investment, is to put lives at risk.
Who Benefits?
None of this is an exhaustive list; other questions linger. All this hesitation in the face of clear conclusions or at least tempting hypotheses is further conspicuous because much money and time has been spent in recent years on the science of A Far-Right Threat. As the ability for the US and its fellow imperial states to wage war abroad becomes more controversial and costly in terms of lives, the creation of the Domestic Extremist (as well as the attendant intellectualisation and literature) became a helpful pretext to reallocating budgets at home. This has also provided political elites with the opportunity to label as “far-right” any undesirable activities or speech that simply threaten either capital or consent. Those on the political left, particularly those targeted by The War On Terror, have long been familiar with such methods and reasonings. What is suspicious in the case of the UK riots has been a determination—despite this recent hinterland of supposed study in the existence of A Far Right Threat— to not express a nationwide outpouring of seemingly highly coordinated far-right violence as having any sophisticated organisational structure whatsoever.
It is hard to know and easy to speculate why there might exist such hesitation in the face of naming the obvious incentives at play here. A right-wing Labour government has been gifted power by the right-wing billionaire media class, but within months a violent street presence makes itself known. The image presented is that of a country in chaos; it is visual and political capital that can and will be brought out in future and spent by that media, against Labour (particularly if the party rediscovers the meaning of its name), but it is also —in the here and now —a hostile reminder to the Labour Party that Tory politics on immigration should remain. It is a caution to those pliant members of the media who might—now they’ve been elected—finally have approached Starmer and his cronies with the adversarialism that decent politics requires, that worse things await if Labour are out of power, and so, love thy captor. In the subtle BBC language choices whereby far-right mobs were apparently just “protesting” at a mosque— eliding the fact that to protest at another individual’s place and choice of worship is a suspicious way to phrase a suspicious priority in someone’s life— we saw the familiar biases that media have long kept just-below the British surface anyway.
It is, perhaps more than anything, convenient for some to see a far-right and violent street presence brought into existence, and then presented by the worst and most racist people in public life as only a rejoinder to the months of multi-faith and peaceful demonstrations in support of Palestine and international law. Even without the obvious absurdity of such false comparisons, communities across the UK have since been required to take to streets to protest and protect their multi-faith, mixed and open communities. Whatever the obvious warmth of such sights, they are domestic-focused, and those backing and funding and willing-on the Zionist genocide in Palestine will all too happily trade a broad social movement protesting UK foreign policy in Palestine for a broad social movement distracted and obliged instead to resist a threat of domestic racism offered-up gladly by the firmly Zionist far-right.
Mob & Elite
Most dispiriting and dangerous of all perhaps is the anger of far-right types that Keir Starmer is a fake and a liar who does not have the country’s concerns at heart; a man who is in power merely as a plaything of elites.
Despite my view of almost all politics and humanity being a polar opposite of these people’s, of Starmer they are not wrong. Theirs is the right answer with the wrong working-out; they think Starmer is helping elites by smuggling refugees into rudimentary hotels when in reality he is helping elites rather by continuing the genocide that is UK foreign policy abroad while upholding every tenet of Tory austerity and democratic suffocation at home. Even those few exceptionally cruel elements of Tory immigration policy that have been removed by Labour (such as housing refugees on floating prison barges) were done not on a publicly-stated assertion of the humanity of those the Tories had incarcerated; they have been justified as cost-saving measures.
Perhaps most illustrative of all in the situation is the constituency of Clacton, just beyond London, where Nigel Farage, the face of a generation in Brexit and far-right politics, won the seat at the recent election. Farage finally making it into Parliament, after many attempts at trying, and after Starmer forced a local and popular grassroots Labour candidate to stand-down for fear of upsetting the differently right-wing elites and press barons that currently control the Labour Party, is the perfect metaphor for who Starmer is truly in business with, and who and what kind of politics he will thwart to keep them happy. Starmer might not want the mob burning down hotels, but his is unmistakably the version of elite politics that has always relied on the mob for its existence; the street army that carries the threat of something worse.
The biggest danger of all is that Starmer, as well as his cronies in the Labour Party and the media, do not realise any of it. Detached from the reality of the country and the world, to themselves they are — as they have read in articles about them, written by their friends— the adults back in charge.
The one problem is that they are not, in fact, in charge.
There are no easy ways out of this problem, beyond the simple and yet strangely rare commodity that is moral clarity. We need a single-issue voting where basic morality is the single-issue, and — this should not even need saying— genocide is an unacceptable evil that we will always condemn and never enable. A certainty that knows the country willing to starve and kill children abroad will of course finally not blink at the starvation and deaths of children at home.
As always, and demanding acts and not only words, for answers, we must look to Palestine; both the moral outrage and compass of our time.