By Theo Russell, The New Worker
(Weekly newspaper of the New Communist Party of Britain)

Serious rioting took place from 30 July to 5 August in English cities across the country, with scenes more familiar to Belfast: bricks and bottles thrown at police and police vehicles, and a police station wrecked. And the groups involved do in fact have connections and common views with Loyalist (pro-British) organisations in Northern Ireland – the only other part of the UK where major violence broke out. 

These disturbances were not the usual localised friction between police and Muslim or poor white communities, they were being coordinated by a resurgent right wing populist group led by the maverick Tommy Robinson, and still known as the English Defence League despite various name changes.

Two other organisations have been laying the ground for anti-migrant protests for several years: the right-wing populist Unity News Network website, led by David Clews, which in turn is linked with the openly fascist Patriotic Alternative which sprang up during the Covid pandemic, and led by antisemitic conspiracy theorist and former British National Party director of publicity Mark Collett.

The rioters, apart from attacking the police, targeted mosques and hostels for asylum seekers. The new Labour prime minister Kier Starmer quickly declared that these riots were “crimes and not protest”.

These events are unprecedented in the history of far right violence in Britain since 1945. Until recently the EDL seemed to be gradually fading away after a wave of protests against immigration and Muslim influence in the 2009-16, with their eccentric leader Tommy Robinson facing a growing string of various criminal charges.

Robinson now faces arrest after fleeing the country last Monday, the day before he was due to appear at the High Court in London.

But only two days earlier he was the star speaker at a rally in Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London, which was possibly the largest far right far-right rally in England since Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirt movement in the 1930s. According to the anti-racist group Hope Not Hate, 25-30,000 of his supporters packed the square waving English, British and Israeli flags.

The wave of violence followed the horrific attack on a community centre in Southport near Liverpool (where the first riot took place the next day) on 29 July, in which a mentally ill teenager killed three children. After false claims that the attacker was a Muslim terrorist who had arrived on a migrant boat went viral on X and Telegram, the violence began the next day in Southport near Liverpool. In Southport before spreading throughout England. 

Social Media Anarchy

The EDL supporters and agitators have taken advantage of a totally uncontrolled online environment to stoke lies, rumours, provocations and bigotry.

Ironically, the website which released the fake “Muslim terrorist” post which triggered the riots, Channel3 Now, is a small American news outlet whose main coverage is of murders and deaths across the USA with contributors in the US, UK, Pakistan and India. It quickly removed the story and issued an apology.

But Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter) stands out as a major instigator of the violence. Since he bought Twitter and created the sinister sounding X, Musk has restored Donald Trump, along with many other right wing populists, under the “libertarian” banner much loved in the US which advocates complete freedom of expression regardless of content.

In the midst of the violence Musk issued a shocking post on X stating simply “civil war is inevitable in Britain”. He then recycled accusations by right wing populist Reform Party leader Nigel Farage that prime minister Kier Starmer was operating “two-tier policing” – being soft on ethnic minority criminals and “terrorist” (read “Palestinian”) supporters, while cracking down hard on right wing anti-migrants. 

(EDL protesters see the police as part of the enemy and have chanted “you’re not English any more” at them).

Under Musk’s control ‘X’ has become a factory for churning out lies and fake rumours. The 100 top X posts promoting fake conspiracy theories about the Trump assassination attempt reached 215 million people, and only 5% of these posts underwent a token X “community fact-check”. 

He has now emerged as a self-appointed global political influencer, and by moving into an effective alliance with Trump is using his immense wealth and reputation to actively intervene in politics, even though he represents nobody.

His posts were particularly galling to the vast majority of British people who saw them as blatant external interference. Even the former head of English police for ten years, Sir Thomas Philip Winsor, hit out at Musk, sating he should “stick to batteries, cars and rockets” and flatly denying claims of two-tier policing.

It is true that the police response to the violence has been overwhelmingly focused on right wing protesters, but that is simply because they have been responsible for almost all the violence, including attacks on the police and on small businesses and shops.

It is important to understand that American internet giants almost totally dominate Britain’s web space and are massively reshaping our politics and economy. 

Other far right online influencers include the “Europe Invasion” X hashtag #enoughisenough, and a wave of YouTube videos warning of an Islamist takeover of Britain.

Two more mainstream media outlets, both launched in the last three years, have also created the political space for the far right to grow. The GB News TV and radio channel, and online TV channel Talk have stoked the ‘soft’ far views which flourished in the Conservative government under Rishi Sunak.

Clearly considerable sums of money have gone into these entities, we know some of it from right wing business millionaires.

There are now widespread calls for online social media platforms to be properly policed considering the role they have played in this crisis. Ofcom, the British regulator for the broadcasting and telecommunications, sent an “open letter to UK online service providers” on 4 August demanding that they “protect their users from videos likely to incite violence or hatred”, warning that after a new Online Safety Act is passed they will have three months to stop such videos appearing or act quickly to remove them.

Such calls have been made for many years, but for the past 14 years the Conservative government’s business policy has been effectively dictated by lobbyists and wealthy donors representing major business interests, resulting in an online free for all.

Limitations of the Far Right

It is important to realise that despite their ability to create chaos and violence, the far-right organisations are extremely small in size and represent a tiny fraction of the population. 

This became clear on 6 and 7 August when counter protestors came onto the streets across England in huge numbers, dwarfing the EDL protests. Videos show considerable numbers of younger people among them clearly ready to use physical force against the rightists. 

In many places the rightists were only saved from a beating by the police keeping the different groups separate, to prevent the violence getting out of control. 

Deep class divisions in Britain

The causes of the deep class divisions in Britain are extremely complex. While the EDL clearly involves actual fascist agitators, it has successfully mobilised a mainly poor white – but not only white – section of the working class.

Many of these supporters insist they are not racist, and the there are a considerable number of ‘ethnic minority’ EDL activists. Their main targets are alleged growing Muslim influence in Britain, and illegal migrants.

These are communities which in the past 50 years have seen local industries shut down or relocated overseas, and the disappearance of secure, long-term, well-paid jobs which have been replaced by far fewer, very low paid, short term and ‘zero hour’ contracts.

They have very high levels of crime and are riddled with extremely violent gangs linked to drug trade.

In parallel the total number of trade union members declined, reducing the proportion of working people with at least some class consciousness and political education. 

These are areas where local councils cannot cope with local demand for services, particularly housing, with large numbers facing waiting years or even decades for affordable housing, and hundreds of thousands of families in extremely poor quality temporary housing across the country.

Professionals such as doctors and dentists avoid these wastelands areas, and the  few practices there are can’t cope with the demand. They are also shunned by national retail chains meaning that local people are dependent on small, expensive shops offering poor quality, unhealthy food, and cheap unhealthy fried chicken and pizza joints.

Poverty in Britain has reached such shocking levels that it has been the subject of several UN reports. 30% of UK children are now classed as living in poverty, there are almost two million people suffering undernourishment. Food banks (to which only people on benefits are sent) are quite possibly Britain’s fastest growing ‘industry’.

Wages in Britain are so low that over a third (35%) of people who have jobs are also claiming social benefits, but even with top-ups it is common families to run out of money before payday. There are frequent media reports of parents going without food for days before payday in order to feed their children.

Added to all this is the surge in energy costs – a basic necessity for all – caused by the sanctions on Russian oil and gas.

In large parts of Britain schools have to provide breakfast to the children because so many of them get no breakfast at home.

Housing and Asylum Seekers

To save on accommodation costs, asylum seekers have been housed in hotels exactly in these poor communities. One commentator pointed out that many people in these areas “can’t even dream of staying in a hotel”.

A particularly sore point that local councils have a legal duty to house asylum seekers, not only putting a huge strain on their finances, but angering many who can’t obtain affordable social housing themselves.

Under the Conservatives virtually no new house building took place, and the government went to great lengths to create the perfect conditions for landlord and property developer exploiters to flourish.

This explains why the focus of the violence in many towns was on migrant hotels and hostels.

At the same time these communities watched the staggering increase in wealth in the UK for the middle and upper classes in the past 14 years, and a Conservative Party rife with nepotism and corruption. For them the mainstream political and media classes they sum up as ‘Westminster’ inhabits a different planet from their own.

Beyond the shocking poverty and crumbling national infrastructure are the fundamental weaknesses of Britain’s economy. It is based on a generally low skilled, low paid workforce, a massive lack of infrastructure investment and training, and an overwhelming focus on the service and consumer sectors which doesn’t actually create anything. It is an economy incapable of anything more than slow or zero growth.

The Migration Question

From around 2000 onwards there has been inward migration to Britain on an unprecedented scale which can’t simply be ignored.

When the EU introduced freedom of movement, the UK (under a Labour government) was the only EU member to approve immediate movement from any EU member state. 

At that time the increasingly expansionist and imperialist European Union had just expanded into Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Baltics, so the UK became a magnet for workers in countries where wages massively lower, with little social provision or job protection, and where working people were suffering the effects of the collapse of socialism.

A separate wave of migration was triggered by the devastation of economies in the global south after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc as a result of unequal trade, debt bondage, regime changes and ‘colour revolutions’, wars, sanctions and climate change. 

This led to the emergence of a vast network of criminal people smuggling gangs, facilitating the mass movement of genuine refugees (from countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Iraq) along with purely economic migrants (from areas such as West and parts of East Africa.

The numbers of non-legal migrants arriving on small boats is in fact a very small proportion of inward migration, but they lie behind the EDL chants of “Stop the Boats“. In the last recorded year around 12,800 migrants arrived illegally compared to 685,000 legally.

This legal migration is due to post-Brexit labour shortages, mainly in the NHS and hospitality sector.

This very large influx of people is not a problem in itself, but while it has taken place the extreme neo-liberal and austerity policies of the Conservative government meant that instead of providing extra services for them, there were severe cuts to spending on schools, hospitals, local councils, housing, policing and transport.

British Imperialism

The British state has also encouraged and in many cases made special provision for asylum seekers from countries (Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Ukraine) where British imperialism was deeply involved in regime change and wars.

Unfortunately many of the migrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan have been reactionary Islamists who have allied in the past with British and US imperialism.

Britain, France and the US have poured huge resources into reactionary proxies such as Wahabi Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, as well as the Banderite Nazi gangs in Ukraine. The Wahabist groups in turn carried out a series of horrific terrorist attacks in Britain itself in between 2005 and 2017 which were a godsend to the far right.

The last major attack, at the Manchester Arena in May 2017, was carried out by a Libyan migrant whose brother and father were active militants in the Libyan Al Quaeda groups which received British military support to overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Muslim Child Exploitation Claims

In the 2010s major scandals erupted over allegations of Muslim gangs organised sexual exploitation of teenage girls in Rotherham and Rochdale, in the north-east of England. While these claims certainly had some basis, according to a Home Office report such exploitation is widespread throughout England, and most such offenders are white people.

These claims lie behind the EDL chants of “Save Our Children” and “paedo Muslims off our street”

Blame the Russians!

One of the most despicable episodes in this crisis has been the attempt by the most reactionary, warmongering elements of the British ruling class to blame the riots on legions of Russian web bots. 

On 31 July former security minister, Stephen McPartland, claimed that a “disinformation operation” orchestrated by Vladimir Putin behind the social media claims leading to the Southport riot.

The next day the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, said “I would not be surprised if the riots in Southport, London, Hartlepool, Manchester were stoked by Kremlin bots”.

Dearlove then claimed that the Channel3 Now news website, which posted the claim that the Southport attacker was a Muslim terrorist, was a Russian disinformation outlet.

These claims were supported by former BBC journalist, and widely believed MI5 asset, Paul Mason, who in 2022 mounted a campaign against any opponents of Britain’s military, economic and political support for the Banderite junta in Ukraine.

In fact Channel3 Now’s only Russian connection is that it bought a Russian-language YouTube car rallies channel many years ago to use as a platform.

Unfortunately the Channel3 Now story was reposted by the Russian RT News channel and some pro-Russian Telegram channels, this hardly amounts to a genuine disinformation operation.

In fact, far from having any Russian link, the original ‘Muslim terrorist’ lie was a post on X by woman in the North of England, and yet another right wing maverick who removed from Twitter for Covid-19 pandemic misinformation and later reinstated, who has since reached over a million views.

She has since admitted to creating the post and apologised for the horrific consequences.

On the eve of the 2017 UK election, Dearlove warned in a front page artcile in the Daily Telegraph that Jeremy Corbyn would be a serous threat to Britain’s security if he was elected prime minister – a blatant interference in democratic politics by a senior intelligence figure.

Under the 2010-2014 Conservative government wild accusations Russian, Chinese, Iranian ‘North Korean’ of hacking and political interference against reached ever more hysterical levels. 

The Daily Telegraph also claimed recently that Russia and China were working to boost the following of popular rapper Lowkey, an opponent of Britain’s wars, to manipulate public opinion in Britain in favour of the Palestinian cause through using fake social media accounts.

But the Telegraph forgot to mention that its source for these claims was the Israeli “social threat intelligence” company Cyabra. Cyabra is led by Israeli military veterans, and 40 of its employees are Israeli military reservists who have been called up to fight in Gaza.

So in reality claims of a Russian hand in the riots are part of a “British playbook”, partly to justify spending £16.6 billion in military and economic support for Ukraine (official government figures from July 2024), backing Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza, and its continued participation in the killing of untold numbers of Yemenis – a war which the Western media has conveniently almost totally ignored for the past ten years.

The real reason for these claims is the desperate hopes of elements of the ruling class to uphold Britain’s rapidly declining ‘global role’, and even dream of regaining parts of the old empire, by collaborating with the US in wars, sanctions and regime changes around the world. And the top five targets of such efforts are Russia, China, the DPRK, Iran and Venezuela.

Let us remember that Britain’s imperialist interventions in the past 25 years have resulted in the deaths of several million people.

The Zionist Hand

One final element in the anti-migrant violence is the role of Israel. According to Professor David Miller, who was sacked in 0ctober 2021 by Bristol University for his comments Israel (this was later ruled to be wrongful dismissal), “The recent Islamophobic riots in the UK should be seen as the latest phase of Israel’s war on British Muslims”, who it sees as behind the mass pro-Palestinian protest movement since 0ctober 2023.

He says: “Tommy Robinson… has been working for Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counterjihad’ Islamophobia established by Israel” and is “paid as part of Israel’s Online Influencers Programme in response to Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”.

After of Israel’s “assets and operatives in the British political and media class such as Suella Braverman and Michael Gove” failed to close down pro-Palestinian protests, Miller says, “the State of Israel is weaponising its cannon fodder on the white nationalist far-right, who have greater numbers than either Zionist street thugs or Iranian secularist extremists.”

An Instagram video has just emerged in which Tommy Robinson admits to being a Zionist and says that “if a war breaks out I would fight on the front line for Israel”.

The Anti-Racist counter protests

By 7 August the EDL violence came to an end with a far larger mass movement of anti-racists taking to the streets, and an extraordinary display of national unity against the right-wing violence. Many of these counter protestors carried Palestinian flags.

Police chiefs, national newspapers and almost all politicians praised the mobilisation of communities, and it was this, rather than fast track courts and heavy sentences for the rioters, which led the EDL supporters to give up their anti-migrant campaign.

The reality is that without the presence of police the EDL rioters would have been met with overwhelming physical force against them.

However there are still elements attempting to justify the protests, including Reform party leader Nigel Farage and right-wing Conservatives, alleging that there is a “two-tier policing” policy.

These are exactly the same elements who last autumn accused the police of being hard on right wing protesters and soft on the mass Palestine protests, which they alleged were “pro-terrorist hate mobs”. Faced with sustained bullying from Conservative ministers, London’s police Chief Mark Rowley refused to accept that these protests were violent, and staunchly defended the democratic right to peaceful protest.

At the same time a disgusting Zionist-inspired campaign alleging a wave of anti-semitic incidents, and claims that large parts of British cities were “no-go areas for Jews”, received massive media backing.

But the efforts of right wing Conservatives to close down the mass pro Palestinian protest movement, whose demand are supported by 70 per cent of the population,  failed comprehensively.

This failure, along with the defeat of the anti-Muslim, anti-migrant protests, has revealed the mass strength of progressive, anti-racist forces in Britain.

The small but extremely aggressive pro-Israel Zionist counter protests at both national and local Palestine protests also failed, and were effectively abandoned in June. They were actively backed by EDL supporters.

Because of the highly selective reporting of the Palestine protests by the leading British news outlets, may people outside the UK may not be aware that they have involved millions in local and national protests.

It is a far more sustained and far more effective campaign than the movement against the 2003 invasion of Iraq (which saw two million people on the largest protest), and has shaken the British political establishment to the core.

The deepening crisis of capitalism

We also have to recognise that the deepening crisis of capitalism in Britain has created the conditions for mass discontent and alienation. This involves far larger numbers of working people than the very small, backward groups who took to the streets.

Those deep-seated problems have created the conditions for far-right groups to flourish, not only in Britain but also in Western Europe and the US. The British far right has temporarily taken advantage of these massive problems to stage an attempted uprising.

The weakness of Britain’s economy and the failure provide decent incomes and the basic, affordable services necessary for a civilised life, have not gone away. With a ruling class which has set the financial conditions so that money can’t be found to fix these problems, there is no sign of any real solutions to the problems facing working people in Britain being found anytime soon.

This means that the new Labour government is faced with continuing crises of one kind or another, and its supporters face many disappointments in the near future.