Fascists on the streets of Southport

“Be careful, when a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.” Albert Camus

The state of Southport this morning is devastating in the aftermath of the English Defence League riot. It looked like the police were taking a battering and failed to have the situation under control for large parts of the evening as the far-right swarmed to Southport in the aftermath of the fatal stabbings of Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, in what police described as a “ferocious attack” on Monday.  Thirty-nine police officers sustained injuries, North West Ambulance Service said, with 27 of them taken to hospital.

Here is the touching tribute left for the people of Southport by the knuckle-dragging racist dickheads who visited last night. pic.twitter.com/eFe2lLS3tH

— Parody Keir Starmer (@Parody_PM) July 31, 2024

In the aftermath of the attack, for which a 17-year-old was arrested, several false accusations were spread on social media with incorrect names of the attacker maliciously spread that he was an immigrant. The only details released about the suspect by police described him as a 17-year-old from the village of Banks in Lancashire who was born in Cardiff.

But if disinformation spread on social media, and the ever-vigilant EDL primed to take advantage of any crisis for their own ends, in truth these were just the sparks. This fire was set long ago.

Was it the decade of appeasement of the far-right, the normalisation of fascism that had Nick Griffin on Question Time? Was it Ben Habib, the deputy of a now ‘mainstream’ political party saying ‘UK should ‘absolutely’ let migrants drown in the Channel? Was it the then Home Secretary’s Hate Van, or her successor’s plans to round people up and send them to Rwanda, a plan only thwarted by the Tories total collapse as a dysfunctional government?

Was it Liz Truss’s silence as she appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast and heard Tommy Robinson being called a hero? Was it the slow-drip feed of bile that sells the tabloids? Was it the fever-dream of Brexit that took scapegoat-politics to new levels as England descended into a period of self-harm precisely because all the narratives about its descent were stacked on – first a notion of a vast and glorious past – and second ‘our’ downfall being the result of immigrants?

Was it the rise of the huckster and the grifter, your Lawrence Fox and Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson and Russell Brand all feeding off the carcasses of people’s fears and insecurities that have grown out of poverty and disorientation? Tate has almost 10 million followers on Twitter.

Was is the disgrace of the Bibby Stockholm or the nurturing of Islamophobia as the acceptable form of racism? Was it the blurring of lines between conservatism and fascism that we have seen over the past ten years? Was it the strange sense of injustice that pervades English nationalism and heightens a sense of threat that motivates these men?

 

Was it the change in language over time that dehumanises people from abroad and subtly shifts our ability to empathise? The language of ‘swarms’ and ‘cockroaches’ used by influencers and commentators disgracefully given platforms in our hard-right wing media outlets, newspapers, podcasts, magazines and public broadcasters has over years consolidated the framing of ‘the problem’ as The Other.

Was it the ever-presence of Farage on our screens and airwaves, groomed and promoted by our media as useful clickbait? Or was it the wider era of post-truth that has unlocked this level of hatred, this hysteria of bigotry and racism? Merseyside Police issued a statement saying that the “#Southport attacker was born in Cardiff and had NO known links to Islam, but it didn’t matter.

Breaking Point

It’s hard to say what is the root cause of last night’s riots, but we do know that racism has become utterly acceptable and normal in large sections of English society where an entire politics has been reduced to three words: Stop the Boats.

Brexit hasn’t gone away it just rumbles on in the background, morphing and taking new forms. It’s never completed, never finished and the drivers which motivate it are never satisfied.

Farage and Patel and Braverman and them all have manifested these scenes from Southport. They are the recruiting sergeants for the mob, everyone who has been fermenting hatred down the years is responsible.

Reform UK deputy leader Ben Habib says UK should ‘absolutely’ let migrants drown in the Channel | The Independent https://t.co/SrWhKHoknR

— William Crawley (@williamcrawley) April 24, 2024

Questions will have to be asked about priorities and intelligence here too. We were moments away from a mosque being burned down and people lynched. It took officers from Merseyside, north Wales, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Cheshire to bring the riot under control. How was it possible for the police – whose excessive surveillance powers we have covered repeatedly here – had no intel of what was coming?

How is it that if its a peaceful women’s vigil, or a peaceful climate protest, the police can make mass arrests, infiltrate zoom calls and throw people in jail, but if its actual known fascists, the police are overwhelmed?

Response

Keir Starmer has promised that the Southport rioters will ‘feel the full force of the law’. I’m sure they will but that response is after the fact. As well as the need to completely change the narrative about immigration any credible political response from Labour would have to respond to the complete failure of public services and the cost of living crisis, instead, as we have just seen, the Labour party have immersed themselves in the Tory economics and will be announcing further cuts. They have no intention to change the narrative about immigration which they clung on to throughout the election.

England now has these narrative framings: of immigration as THE issue destroying the fabric of the country so deeply embedded into its public discourse its going to be hard to unlearn. Champions of a more progressive view are often marginalised or pilloried. The right across the spectrum have access to funds and media profile and there is very little coherent counter-narrative.

The footage from Southport is shocking. But we shouldn’t be surprised. The stench of fascism has been accommodated and explained for years in Britain. It was hinted at by Tebbit and we’ve been on a slippery descent ever since, from militarised police to militarised schools from extraordinary rendition to pleading for our soldiers to be above the law. From Show Us Your Teeth, from systemic police racism, to categorising refugees as somehow sub-human and yes also by standing by and watching the genocide in Palestine, this too is a step into new darker realms of fascism.

Given the nature of the language swirling about the timelines of some disturbed and damaged groups of people, given Labour’s inability to engage with the deeper issues at stake, and given the depth to which the far-right dominates public discourse in Britain, it would seem that we have a long hot summer ahead and Southport is likely to be the start not the end of a new phase of fascist violence.