Six Cans And Two Grams

Thankfully, Wednesday's countrywide far-right kickoff failed to materialise—and nowhere less so than in Brighton, where four guys spent a somewhat uncomfortable evening getting roasted by a crowd of thousands. I read in the Financial Times that:

It is in no way an attempt to legitimise violence and hooliganism to say that there are many reasons why people in many parts of the country feel disenfranchised, including the cost of living crisis that has driven up prices of food and housing, and difficulties accessing basic public services.

and that's an interesting point—there have definitely been marches and demonstrations on cost-of-living issues in the past, I wonder whether the rioters were really motived by that? I presume if they were, they would've mentioned it? Let's check in with an account in the Sheffield Tribune from someone who was at the big kick-off in Rotherham that sparked all this:

“Burn them all,” says a man as he walks past me. He’s referring to the people inside the hotel I’m standing in front of. His comment is far from unusual — I could have opened this article with many others. [...] Just after I arrived, a large downstairs window was smashed by the mob. The glass shattered; a cheer went up from the crowd. Rioters taunted the police. Later, a man walked past me shouting “dirty p*** c****” [my censorship] to anyone who would listen. As he did so, he carried a child in his arms. The boy couldn't be much older than two.

Ah. And I wonder whether any prominent politicians might have made any comments about immigrants, maybe in late July?

Nail bars and car washes to see immigration raid blitz, Yvette Cooper says

A blitz you say? I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

While the ostensible facts that people were responding to in the case of the Southport riots where all this started were entirely based on nonsense confected by dickheads on social media, this didn’t come from nowhere. Columnists have been banging this drum in the national press for literal decades, as have many politicians (as we've seen). The well is thoroughly poisoned. It’s like the problem the Remain campaign encountered during the referendum: you can’t get out of years of slow-release propaganda in a short period. You especially can't do that if you're one of the ones who's been fanning it, as recently as a few weeks back.

Now, fundamental feelings of danger, of lack of security, of anger, may in fact be what's in some of those rioters' heart of hearts. No-one's under any illusions about the presence of real, hardcore racists in those crowds but maybe there were a few impressionable, coked-up teenagers who, if you spent long enough working with them, could be shown the error of their ways and brought back onto the strait and narrow.

However, I ultimately think it doesn't matter either way; not because they're still responsible for their actions and those actions were appalling (true though that is), but more simply because even if 99% of them were really motivated by big structural factors, the government isn't planning on doing anything about those either! A government with real big ambitions to change the country for the better might be credible here but that is not the government we have.

While the question of how many of these people are reachable is a not unreasonable one to ask, it's ultimately a pointless exercise if nothing is going to be done that might reach them. The government will happily spend untold millions on Prevent (literally, its budget isn't published), but given their noticeable reluctance to full-throatedly call these riots 'racist', I can't see this being an area of priority for them—easier, I guess, to build a "standing army"(!) of coppers. It might be satisfying to see, for once, the cops arresting the really bad lads rather than beating up actually peaceful protesters again, but they will go straight back to that once the lads are safely away in Spoons.

As for the non-reachable, the truly, deeply racist: they don’t want "controls on immigration". They want to not have to see black and brown people when they leave their houses, at all, ever. Protest slogans aren't vehicles for political nuance but “p***s out” is pretty unambiguous. Labour might be talking about jailing these guys, but right now, as we keep hearing, there's a limit to how many the prisons can accommodate, and when they've finished posturing, they're just going to get back on with the business of asking the people who were slightly too respectable to be out on the street yelling slurs how they might racistly accommodate them.

Frightening though I find it to think about it all, I take solace in thinking about how in Brighton—and many other places—people were able to mobilise a real response, and the streets were flooded with people willing to stand up for others. We might not be able to rely on the authorities but we can, maybe, hopefully, rely on each other.