In the 1930s, when Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts marched through Portsmouth, my grandfather – then a young man – would head down to the sea front to protest against them.
You would think, or at the very least hope that anecdote was a relic of a distant past. What a long way we’ve come! Fascists openly, conspicuously taking to the streets – can you imagine such things today?
But then, this week, you didn’t need to imagine it. You could see it for yourself when racist, right-wing riots and violence erupted in pockets across the country.
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The line being trotted out is that this thuggery was a reaction to the horrific knife attack in Southport last week. But I caution against directly linking the violence to the murder of three young girls in any way. Firstly, because it implicitly legitimises the hate by equating it with an apparent ‘cause’ (do these people look like protectors to you? And does this feel like a fitting way to honour the innocent lives lost or irreconcilably damaged) and secondly, because the poison has clearly been brewing for years.
Misinformation spread online might have been a spark that set this wave of riots into action but it is nothing more than an excuse for the anti-immigration, Islamaphobic mob to go mainstream. You want to be racist? I pity you, I wholeheartedly disagree with you, but if that is the ideology you live by, don’t you dare pretend that this has anything at all to do with protecting.
Are these people brandishing the St. George’s Cross the same people who racially abused England footballers? Who are they ‘getting our country back’ from exactly – the desperate families who pile into flimsy rubber dinghies in hope of the stillness we can take for granted? Would they not take medical care from the 35% of foreign doctors in the NHS or stop for a kebab on the way home after a night out? Drink coffee imported from Columbia or drive cars made in China? The ideology doesn’t stand up against facts, let alone logic. What it is, is baked in the bones racism. It is, as Sir Keir Starmer said, ‘thuggery’.
To categorise this as a problem of the white working classes is also an insult. There are billionaires, politicians and public speakers who are at a safe distance and have been dog whistling from afar and using the people on the streets as their puppets.
If some of the images seen in the news over the past week have been truly shocking (I have never felt so deeply ashamed to be British than seeing the hotel housing asylum seekers – people whose only ‘fault’ is to have been born, by the role of the dice of fate, into unlucky, unsafe, unfair circumstances – surrounded and attacked by a mob) what I found equally disturbing was to see that the apparently very ‘normal’ people defending their actions online. Not on shady corners of the dark web, not even under pseudonyms, but very openly, using their own names and with their public profiles very accessible and visible, on mainstream Instagram accounts.
I am embarrassed to admit that that given the insults being chucked around online, I hesitated to write this, lacking the thick skin one needs to efficiently cope with trolls. But what is a white person’s discomfort if not a sign of our privilege and how used we are to living a life that runs smoothly? It is all too easy to be on the right side of history once it has already happened, to say ‘of course I would have been out with my grandfather standing up to the blackshirts’. But history is happening right now, and I do think as white people it is our responsibility to say something, to stand up, to make ourselves heard. Hate wants our silence. This is not a burden for non-white people to carry alone.
Just when decent Britons were looking at our country at its most shameful, twisted and sad, I felt a surge of pride as last night thousands took to the streets in Liverpool, Birmingham, Brighton, London, Bristol and beyond to counter-protest and shield their local communities in genuinely moving scenes orchestrated by the real protectors of Britishness. ‘Refugees welcome here’, ‘Unite to stop the far right’, ‘Nans against Nazis’ their placards read. This is the country that needs ‘taking back’, these are the ideals that need safeguarding. This, I hope, is what ‘our’ country really looks like.
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