The Summer of Hate

WE can make two observations at the same time, first that Scotland is not immune to racism and bigotry, and second that this is a particularly English phenomenon of ethnonationalism we’re witnessing erupt into violence. In fact, an inability to give voice to English identity is paradoxically, one of the drivers of this crisis. As many commentators have noted England is frequently subsumed within ‘Britain’ and ‘Britishness’. To talk about and analyse English politics and culture is not to describe a Scottish exceptionalism it is just to say that English politics and culture exist, and have discernible features, and this is not controversial.

While there has been talk of a ‘civil war’ that is clearly a little hysterical, this is a very bad situation in danger of getting rapidly far worse when the football season kicks off and large parts of urban England a powder-keg. Swift prosecutions are likely to be initiated but understanding what is going on needs to go beyond arrests and surveillance.

First, the litany of commentators who are committed to justifying, excusing and rationalising the far-right is going on after they’ve shown themselves to be who they are. Here’s Isabel Oakeshott straight from her tough-time at Gordonstoun: “The country is erupting. Why? Because nobody voted for mass immigration and the Establishment keeps trying to smear, label, and shut down legitimate debate. Oh yes, and law and order has collapsed because we go soft on everything.”

Apart from the fact that ‘the Establishment’ has been promoting racism as an electoral tool for years, and the recent Tory government had a policy of deporting people to Rwanda, and apart from the fact that rather than ‘going soft on everything’ they have literally done away with the right to peaceful protest, apart from that Isabel is spot on. She is one of many who are surfing the current violence to enhance their careers and bolster their profiles with talk of ‘legitimate debate’. The distinction between commentator and politician is a bit blurry. Nigel Farage has popped up with the foreboding observation that: “What you’ve seen on the streets of Hartlepool, London, Southport, is nothing, to what will happen over the course of the next few weeks.”

He may be right.

There is no excusing the violence on display but a background of urban poverty alongside a deep sense of betrayal and injustice that’s a recurring story in the far-rights English nationalism is a context for these riots. Brexit came and went and delivered nothing other than a momentary sense of gleeful chaos. Grinding poverty was not alleviated by blaming everything on foreigners – and for the likes of Farage blame could be re-apportioned and the grift could continue.

But as Nicholas Boyle has written (‘The problem with the English: England doesn’t want to be just another member of a team‘): “There is a great lie peddled about the referendum: that it expressed the will of the British people. The pattern of voting showed up a colossal divergence between England, with its Welsh appendage, on the one hand, and Scotland and Northern Ireland on the other.”

For Boyle Brexit is the result of an English delusion, a crisis of identity resulting from a failure to come to terms with the loss of empire and the end of its own exceptionalism. This, he argues, underlies the confusion, anger and entitlement behind much of these surges of fascism we are witnessing.

He writes: “The emotion central to the Leave campaign was the fear of what is alien, and this trumped the Remainers’ Project Fear-of-wholly-foreseeable-damage. The true Project Fear was the Leave party’s unrelenting presentation of the EU as a lethal threat to national identity, indeed as the stranger and enemy who had already stolen it: give us back our country, they said, our sovereignty, our £350m a week, let us control our borders, let our population not be swamped by immigrants or our high streets by Polish shops – and to vote against the EU was to vote to recover what we had lost. The voting pattern, however, revealed that appeal to that emotion, and that vision of the EU, worked only in England … Europhobia was shown by the referendum to be a specifically English psychosis, the narcissistic outcome of a specifically English crisis of identity.”

These resentments are not satisfied or even explored in most political discourse. There’s a dark irony here.

Brexit was a massive rupture yet it has done nothing to solve the crisis it erupted from. For Boyle: “The trauma of lost exceptionalism, the psychic legacy of empire, haunts the English to the present day, in the illusion that their country needs to find itself a global role.”

In this analysis England are in a double-bind, both unable to express their own identity and subsumed within a ‘Britain’ that has been used to supplant lost empire:

You can see this in Scotland’s own cadre of Unionist columnists who cleave to the idea of Britain, and Scotland’s relationship to it as a sort of folk memory. They want to remain junior partners in a Greatness that no longer exists. Instead they ask you to remain tied to a country descending into violent racism and mass civil disorder while Starmer’s honeymoon fades into the rear-view mirror.

None of this makes sense. The narratives and excuses that have been being spouted by Britain’s quagmire of far-right commentariat and plethora of networks and mainstreamed media has been predictable but still shocking. The myths of ‘two tier policing’, the paranoia about ‘great replacement’ and the talk of ‘ordinary people’ and ‘legitimate concerns’ are trotted out alongside the idea that these are ‘protests’ not riots or the scolding of anyone pointing out the political nature of the organisers.

The idea that this is all manufactured by ‘Russian bots’ is a fantasy – a mirror of the constant refrain to blame others. ‘We’ have our own cheerleaders here as well as Isabel Oakeshott … Douglas Murray, Matt Goodwin, Melanie Philips, Andrew Neil, Andrew Tate (add your own). There is no doubt foreign powers that have seized on this crisis to promote chaos but the problem is home-made. Blaming social media is a lazy trope, especially when our legacy media has done such an amazing job to stir racial tension for decades.

If the violence forces us to look at specific political dynamics within England, it also asks us to look at what we are in Union with. Ten years ago the Yes movement was stereotyped and derided as ‘narrow nationalists’ and a load of ink was spilt analysing the nature of Scottish nationalism. Famously we were told that such a thing as ‘British nationalism’ just doesn’t exist. Scotland, it was argued, should remain in close proximity to the rest of the nations of the Union because they represented an outward-looking multicultural world that we could only access and be influenced by together. Now we’re being asked to host a riot in George Square (again).

There is so much pain and rage on display but also great signs of solidarity and community in cities across the country. Ironically England has a far better far stronger antifascist network and movement and Scotland needs to learn from that.

If Boyle’s analysis is right, that the crisis of English identity is an unexplored fault-line, the trigger for a lot of this hatred then this is not a phenomenon that can be ignored. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time in 1964 : “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

That pain is about identity crisis but it is also about toxic masculinity, drugs, poverty and the sort of closure and retreat from the world which Brexit signalled. It doesn’t look like there is political leadership to respond to such energy in a meaningful way.