Morbid Symptoms

On the riots and their reaction

The scenes of rioting that have spread across Britain over the past six days have shocked many observers, on the left and centre as well as from many parts of the right. These riots and the attacks on mosques and hotels that have followed seem all the more shocking coming just a few days after a large Tommy Robinson demonstration through central London. And as the Novara report on the protest showed, the counter-protest to the Robinson demo was less than inspiring.

Tommy Robinson had been noticeably quiet, if only with his street activity, since he was banned from Twitter in 2018; the space he once occupied as a right wing protest galvaniser taken up by the far less effective Democratic Football Lads Alliance, which fizzled out at some point after in the years after the Brexit vote. The rise of Reform heralded some stirring on the right, but that was seen as being as much down to the disintegration of the Tories as any genuine populist backlash.

There’s a risk here that this can all feel a bit anachronistic: weren’t we supposed to be beyond this street-level revanchism by now? Hasn’t this been consigned to history?

Those familiar with the country beyond its wealthy enclaves could tell you that the government policy of housing migrants in hotels in mainly poor parts of the country has been causing friction since it was first implemented in 2020, initially as an “emergency” measure during the pandemic. As Daniel Trilling wrote last year, these policies, shaped as they were by the both Labour and Tory governments, were designed to “keep people seeking refuge walled off from the rest of society” and dampen hostility, but have only enflamed tensions further. “Subsistence payments and precarious housing,” Trilling writes, “however much these might compound the trauma of people who have fled war and persecution, are maliciously spun as freebies,” and this has been made all the worse by the way the policy of dispersal has placed immigrants away from whatever kinship networks they may have in Britain and almost exclusively in working class communities, many in the postindustrial Midlands and North.

In the town I grew up, and where my parents still live, Crewe, a deindustrialised working class town in the North, it’s hard to avoid talk of the local hotels that have been “taken over” by asylum seekers – like the grand old Crewe Hall Hotel opposite the train station, one of the world’s oldest railway hotels and a place that once regularly hosted royalty in its now slightly shabby rooms, which was closed for 18 months until earlier this year while it provided temporary housing. While so much of the town and its infrastructure is visibly disintegrating, seeing supposed freeloaders put up by the state can feel galling. This is made worst by the decline of local news. Into the communications void step rumour and innuendo, passed between Facebook and Twitter accounts.

What’s clear is that these scenes haven’t come from nowhere. The situation has been brewing for years. But it is important to stress that this isn’t some natural or organic reaction of a native and aggrieved working class either. There does seem to be some form of organisation here, if only by virtue of the roaming nature of some of the participants; the swastika-tattooed man in Middlesborough, for instance, had a noticeable Stoke accent, and one of the participants of the first riot in Southport was a convicted neo-Nazi from St Helens.

The Conservatives have long acted as a bulwark against the far right in Britain, drawing votes and resources from those further to their right, turning lumpen elements into the foot soldiers of the centre. Their collapse has undoubtedly unleashed some particularly morbid symptoms. Recent years have seen strong, if small, organising by various rotten far right groups like Patriotic Alternative and the Homeland Party. There are more freelance racists too, like Steve Laws, the Dover-based “citizen journalist” who has been egging on the violence to his 80k followers on X. Even the Tory party itself seems to be swinging further in that direction. There’s always been plenty of unsavoury people in its furthest, dirtiest reaches, but they do seem to be both more prevalent and more visible in the past year or so.

I initially hesitated to write anything on these events. I’m increasingly allergic to the over-confident pronouncements that many on the left seem to have, on any and all events, at their fingertips. Of course, there’s truth to much of it. These riots are obviously fuelled by deindustrialisation and decline – the marginalisation and demonisation of the working class, the anger of those left behind – as most of the left are quick to point out. I’m sure we’ll be hearing plenty of this in the coming weeks: don’t blame immigrants, blame the economy/government. Which is all well and good, and very obvious.

I’m sure we’ll also be hearing about how we need to create a genuinely diverse and mass militant movement to counter the far right, which will most likely translate into a series of SWP-led A-to-B marches and counter demonstrations that will slowly at first and then rapidly suck all enthusiasm and energy that will quickly emerge after the dust of the past week has settled. If you want a sense of how dull and insipid this stuff is then watch the second half of the Novara video i linked to earlier. It’s difficult to overstate how lacking in ideas much of the British left is.

Not that i have any either. We should probably take a leaf out of the far right’s book and engage in genuinely local actions. We should think about the specifics of place in questions of class. There’s a reason these riots have sprung up where they have. We need to think about what this means, and how we respond.

Of course, when i said i hesitated to write anything on this – i did, of course, end up writing something. If i did overcome my misgivings, it was because of my mum, who i have thought of often over recent days. In particular, i’ve thought about the last time i visited her in Crewe, earlier this year.

At least compared to my father and many of their friends, my mum is socially liberal. A Labour voter, a Remain backer, and far less colicky and curmudgeonly than my dad (less of a racist, too), the last time i saw her though she spent a good half hour complaining about the “takeover” of the hotel and how much damage the asylum seekers had caused to it and to the town.

It was also her that i thought of when the video of the old woman in Ashfield saying Enoch was right did the rounds of X just before the election. While many commentators were shocked that something like this could be said in the present year, and just days before a Labour landslide to boot, i can’t deny that i haven’t heard very similar statement made often over the past few years. In fact, I’ve almost started to expect it.

Anyway, like i said, i have no answers. They’d be suspect if i did. But this won’t be the last we see of this in the next few years. In my more pessimistic moments (which are increasingly frequent) i look at the growing swell of the global far right with a kind of resigned inevitability. How can you counter movements like this, movements that are feeding off people’s anger and disenchantment at a rigged system to which they were once promised a share in the spoils but which now seems to serve them nothing except the contempt of the winners, with symbolic weapons only? It’s not like we can tell them everything will be better for them if only they just listen to us, their betters on the left, and give up their petty grievances for the genuine concerns to which we hold the keys. As things get worse – and all signs point to them getting worse, much much worse, in the coming decades – the reactionary right will only get stronger and more emboldened, here and pretty much everywhere else as well.

Answers are needed, obviously, but they cannot be the same ones we’ve been giving for the past fifty years.