‘Consortium news’: What is behind England’s riots?

Van on fire during riots in Southport, England, on July 30, 2024.
Photo: Consortium news

The series of race and anti-migrant riots that have been sweeping across England’s vast deindustrialised regions in the North West, North East, Midlands and Yorkshire have been ineffably ugly to behold, notes ‘Consortium news’ from USA.

Gangs of masked up men attacking hotels occupied by asylum seekers and trying to set them on fire, launching missiles at thin police lines, burning down libraries, attacking businesses owned by black and brown people, throwing Nazi salutes and launching broadsides against mosques: this is not Germany circa 1934 and ’35, it is England in 2024.

That the far right has been emboldened across England by Brexit in 2016 is now not in doubt. Brexit was never about democracy; it was about identity. It was about who is really British and who is really not. It was about who really belongs in England and who really does not. And it was about what it really means to be British and what it really does not.

Millions of poor working class whites in beleaguered communities across the North and Midland were told and believed that Brexit would solve all their problems. They were bombarded with anti-migrant and xenophobic propaganda by a clutch of rich white hate preachers and opportunists — Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees Mogg, Boris Johnson, etc. — and they believed it.

They were lied to.

Used as electoral fodder by the most reactionary section of the British ruling class and political elite, their focus was turned to an enemy they could see in front of them, among them, visible to the eye. Add to the mix a large sprinkling of base English nationalism and obscurantist tropes regarding the legacy of Winston Churchill and World War II, and what we are witnessing now was a crisis just watching for a spark.

This spark came with the horrific mass stabbing attack at a children’s play centre in Southport, just north of Liverpool, on July 23. The result was three infant girls killed and a community and country understandably and justifiably enraged. That the alleged attacker turned out to be a 17-year-old second-generation Rwandan migrant merely added to the rage already induced by the belief that initial police refusal to reveal his identity was down to him being a Muslim — someone who’d arrived on the shores of England on one of the migrant boats, whose existence has been cynically and effectively weaponised.

It is, this migrant crisis, the fruits of Western foreign policy stretching back decades. In other words, we, the West, destroy and destabilise countries across the Middle East and North Africa and those affected come to the West to escape the destruction. In this, these desperate and traumatised people are doing what any one of us would do under the same circumstances.

Migrants and asylum seekers are not pets to be lavished with the sanctimonious guff so beloved of a liberal intelligentsia the denizens of which have never known a day of economic insecurity. They are people whose arrival in increasing numbers has posed a challenge socially and economically for working class communities that have been forced to endure 14 years of brutal and unremitting austerity.

The amplification of cultural differences between different ethnic groups as a wedge issue by the right conceals the dire economic plight shared by all. Asylum seekers sitting in hotels are victims of the self-same neoliberal and colonial system as those who’ve been attacking them.

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