As I write, the UK has just experienced its third night of racist riots in a month. What would have been shocking even recently now seems routine. After the horrific murders in Southport in July 2024, a wave of pogrom reaction followed in parts of England and Northern Ireland. That week saw some of the worst acts of racist violence seen on British soil, events which reached their climax when hundreds of protesters in Rotherham tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers. A year later, in the summer of 2025, an orchestrated campaign saw thousands of flags attached to lampposts, spreading from Essex and outer London suburbs to the north-east and beyond, coinciding with other protests outside migrant hotels.
Britain, we heard from every quarter that summer, was a “black box” which, in the words of Telegraph“it would only take the tiniest spark to ignite it into flames.” Leading the charge in this one was David Betzprofessor of war in the modern world at King’s College London, whose dark premonitions about urban decay became a regular feature in the right-wing press. Britain’s cities, Betz and his relatives warned, were crime-infested hellscapes, dotted with ethnic no-go areas from which civil war would soon erupt.
Such a vision will be familiar to anyone who has spent time on social media. Your daily scroll is now likely to be filled with decontextualized videos of clashes, riots, violent crime and communal strife – some real, many AI was created – sitting next to images of multi-ethnic “Yookay”. Many of us would once have dismissed this kind of content as the feverish products of a few racist rabble – led, of course, by the maniac in chief: the world’s richest man and the oligarchic owner of one of the main modes of communication – and, in doing so, would be supported by the fact that Britain beyond the phone screen looks a little like it. However, the sad reality is that for millions of people today what happens on the Internet is just as real, perhaps more so than anything that happens in the outside world. The real world, for many people, is so densely mediated by social media that it is increasingly difficult to separate the two. In this mediated world, a spiral of radicalization, facilitated by algorithms designed to push extremist content at all costs in the name of engagement, can easily pull people to the farthest extremes.
There are more complex reasons than online radicalization, which means we can’t simply dismiss the violence as another outburst by a hardened racist minority. Not least because to do so would seem to leave us destined for regular summer periods of pogrom violence. We also cannot discount the powerful local forces in Northern Ireland that have caused the current unrest. As Lukman Seid wrote in a powerful riot account for LRB“In a society where sectarian identities still define political affiliations, immigrants and ethnic minorities have become the new other.”
Beyond the Irish state, the reality is that for much of the country immigration has come as a synecdoche for the wider failings of the British state. Stagnant wages, falling productivity, rising rents and energy bills, dilapidated high streets lined with cash shops and barbers, potholed roads, the now-ubiquitous tipping of flies: all these and more are symbols of the country’s deep dysfunction. If the government can’t cope with several thousand people crossing the Channel in inflatable boats every year, many now say, what chance does it have of solving any of this mess? It is likely that this, rather than some sudden mass outburst of social sadism or racism, is behind the YouGov poll last year which found that almost 60 per cent of people favored a military solution on the issue of small boats.
Of course, the blame for this situation must go, to a large extent, to sections of the media and mainstream politics and politicians. It is they who have consistently and repeatedly, over many years, drawn a direct line between economic and political dysfunction and race, producing what I have characterized elsewhere as a structure of feeling dominated by a form racialized declinism – in which the decline of the country in general is fused over issues of immigration and demographic change. Such has been the effectiveness of this coordinated effort by sections of the political and media establishment that discussion of “emigration” of foreign nationals, and even threats to deport British citizens, have become commonplace.
Now, setting the pace on the right is Rupert Lowe. Far-right leader Restore Britain, a strange patrician figure as much a blur of parts of the conservative old right as of the very online new right, has in recent months opened a dangerous front on the right wing of Reform, openly appealing to ethno-nationalists with his slogan that “millions must go”. Like Daniel Trilling said recentlythis has put Nigel Farage in a quandary: “on the one hand (Farage) has to moderate his party’s image to broaden its electoral coalition – but on the other hand, in the face of this pressure … (he) has to signal to his base that he is the bearer of their radical right nationalist hopes.” This, says Trilling, is a signal of Farage’s weakness, not his strength: by losing parts of his base to those on his right, he risks alienating large parts of the wider population by following them.
Maybe. It is certainly true that in recent weeks Farage has appeared uncharacteristically shaken, lamented Restore backer Elon Musk who, he said, “has determined that he will try to divide the right of British politics as best he can.” He has also struck a much more inflammatory line in response to the riots than he once would have done; just a few years ago Farage was claiming that mass deportations were “politically impossible,” he is now organizing deportee flights to tout his deportation bill and using phrases like “White Lives Matter.” But with so many now pushing ever faster to the right, this may be less a sign of weakness than a symptom of the ground already gained by the project of political and social reaction.
The period from the early 19th century to the late 1970s and early 1980s can, following Raymond Williams, be seen as the “long revolution,” in which, following the advent of industrial capitalism, the expansion of political democracy, and the development of various forms of mass communication and culture, once entrenched forms of inequality were challenged, if not challenged at all. Now, we are at the beginning of what could be a long counter-revolution. Equality has gone too far; now, we hear, is the time for reaction. It is the bravado of this agenda, as much as the electoral calculation, that lies behind the calls for “two-tier policing” and re-immigration.
The right will react to unrest in its now standard way. Rupert Lowe and his gang of broccoli-haired reactionaries and ethno-nationalists will no doubt double down on their dehumanizing rhetoric and talk of “the savagery of the third worldThe Conservatives and Reform will no doubt follow them, though perhaps with the occasional caveat that it is not entirely all of them black and brown people they have a problem with thrown in.
How the left reacts is much more uncertain. Of course, it all depends on what happens at Makerfield next week. Keir Starmer, it should be clear, has neither the vision nor the ability to make any kind of galvanizing appeal to the nation at large. He doesn’t even seem to understand the gravity of the issues affecting the country. Whether Andy Burnham can is another matter.
The answer at all will require a radical and branching reform of the dominant political and economic system: the nationalization of failed enterprises; large state investments in housing, key services and industry; the end of the outsourcing and privatization regime that has done so much to drain state capacity. Its watchwords should be “taking back control”: offering voters a vision of a renewed and democratic economy that can reverse decades of harmful neoliberalism; not just tinkering around the edges with tax and spending policies.
It will also require disentangling the links between immigration and decline, dysfunction and loss of control. The small boat crisis is such a charged and exciting force right now that any vision that fails to meet it is doomed to failure. We have a responsibility to provide safe and legal routes for those seeking asylum, but the sight of unverified young people landing on the beaches of Kent and Sussex is such a clear signal of state failure that something must be done to stop it and those who profit from it. This must be done humanely and must be allied to a humanistic politics of what Paul Gilroy has called “adequacy” – the recognition that Britain as it really exists, as a multi-ethnic and post-imperial state, is for the most part a well-functioning and integrated society. Non-white Britons are our family, our neighbours, our friends, our carers. Maintaining this requires an honest conversation about immigration to Britain, a conversation that can counter the absurdity of false narratives of white replacement.
The stakes are high in this one. If we cannot get this right, the ever stronger right will be capitalized. This should scare us all.
(Further reading: Belfast riots: new targets, old hatred)
