by RIHARD SEYMOUR
What just happened? For almost a week, towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland were in the grip of pogromist reaction. In Hull, Sunderland, Rotherham, Liverpool, Aldershot, Leeds, Middlesborough, Tamworth, Belfast, Bolton, Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster and Manchester, networked mobs of fascoid agitators and disorganized racists were thrilled by their own exuberant violence. In Rotherham, they set fire to a Holiday Inn hotel housing asylum seekers. In Middlesborough, they blocked roads and only let traffic through if drivers were verified as ‘white’ and ‘English’, momentarily enjoying the arbitrary power of both the traffic warden and the border official.
In Tamworth, where the recently elected Labour MP had inveighed against spending on asylum hotels (incorrectly claiming that they cost the area £8m a day), they rampaged through the Holiday Inn Express and, in the ruins, left graffiti reading: ‘England’, ‘Fuck Pakis’ and ‘Get Out’. In Hull, as crowds dragged a man out of his car for a beating, participants shouted ‘kill them!’ In Belfast, where a hijabi was reportedly punched in the face while holding her baby, they destroyed Muslim shops and tried to march on the local mosque, chanting ‘get ’em out’. In Newtownards, a mosque was attacked with a petrol bomb. In Crosby, a Muslim man was stabbed.
Worryingly, while far-right activists played a role, it was probably secondary. The riots, rather than being caused by handfuls of organized fascists, provided them with their best recruiting grounds in years. Many people who had never been ‘political’ before, and perhaps never even voted, turned out to burn asylum seekers or assault Muslims.
The occasion for this carnival of racist inebriation was a terrifying mass stabbing in Southport on 29 July. The alleged attacker, for reasons not yet discernible, descended upon a Taylor Swift dance class, attacking eleven children and two adults. Three of the children were killed. Because the suspect was under eighteen, his identity was initially protected. It took only a few hours for the stabbings to become a rallying point for the far right, thanks initially to coalescing waves of online agitation. The suspect, according to rightist disinfotainment accounts, was a migrant on an ‘MI6 watch list’ who had arrived on a ‘small boat’: ‘Ali al-Shakati’. ‘Uncontrolled mass migration’ was to blame for the stabbings.
This fantasy, which came just days after a large rally in support of Tommy Robinson in Trafalgar Square, was signal-boosted by the usual reactionary grifters, Robinson and Andrew Tate among them. The rumour was further infused with vitality thanks to a swarm of reactionary social industry accounts based in the US. A Telegram account, set up either by fascists or the fash-curious, gained 14,000 members and played a direct role in incitement. Like sparks flying from a furnace, the agitation spread from social media into meatspace. On 30 July, a loose collection of racist vigilantes and neo-Nazis gathered on St Luke’s Road in Southport and attacked the mosque with bricks and bottles. Although residents participated in the clean-up and repairs the next day, the furies were only beginning. From the end of July, the cycle of riots swept the UK for over a week. They slowly petered out when, following the announcement of dozens of intended far-right protests across the UK on the evening of 7 August, tens of thousands of anti-racists turned out in London, Liverpool, Bristol, Brighton, Hastings, Southend, Northampton, Southampton, Blackpool, Derby, Swindon and Sheffield. Most of the racist gatherings failed to materialize, and those that did were outnumbered.
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