A hostile environment for fascists

Fixing Britain needs more than tough policing

Britain needs a new hostile environment. Not for migrants, who have been stigmatised and targeted relentlessly, but for the far-right.

Over the past week, there has been a shocking wave of far-right violence carried out in communities across Britain. Individuals have been harassed and attacked for their faith or the colour of their skin. Libraries and hotels have been set on fire. Shops have been trashed and looted. It is easily the worst instance of public disorder since the London riots of 2011. Nationalist chants and Nazi salutes leave little doubt as to the political character of these mobs.

Some suggest that Starmer needs to show leadership on this issue, moving ahead of popular opinion to deliver uncomfortable truths and tough actions. In reality, the initial response does not need to be so bold. It would be enough to merely meet the public where they already are.

Most Brits have no truck with far-right agitators coming into their communities to wreak havoc. Only a small section of our society would even bother to try and excuse these actions. An even smaller group would see them as actually justified.

Online debates over the political science definitions of different ideological strands have been a major focus for those who want to downplay what is happening. These debates are, ultimately, an irrelevance. While it is important to identify this mob as far-right, the exact label we’re attaching to these riots is not the concern of your average person.

What they see, and what no right-wing commentator can argue away, is groups of individuals, often bussed in from outside the local area, bursting into their daily lives with no greater cause than to disrupt the peace. They see thugs, for whom the violence is both means and end, causing harm to their communities, neighbours and friends.

Against the rioters are the great majority of Brits, horrified and appalled by the acts of violence being perpetrated by far-right gangs. They are the people who went out to repair the wall of a mosque that had been attacked. They are the people who stood in watchful vigil over a hotel that is hosting asylum seekers. They are the people who came the day after to sweep the streets of rubbish and debris.

The British right has spent years trying to lecture the left on the importance and value of local communities. So where are they now, when those communities are under attack by anti-democratic extremists? Caught by the fear of being outflanked by the Faragists, many are rolling out justifications and excuses, building a case for why minorities are actually to blame for anti-migrant riots.

Only the left values and defends Britain’s communities as they actually are, rather than as a 1950s picture-book idealisation. Starmer has an opportunity now to step up and demonstrate this.

Part of this will come through a policing response, applying the full force of the law and ensuring that the rioters, wherever they might try and organise, are limited in their ability to damage local buildings and harm innocent bystanders. Any of these extremists that cannot be arrested at the scene should be sought out and identified through the extensive footage of their crimes being posted online. For an ex-prosecutor like Starmer, this will be comfortable territory.

But he should also push beyond the ‘law and order’ aspect of this terror. He must not only side against the far-right but actively side with the ordinary people whose communities are being brutalised. We know there are people out there willing to get stuck in and help repair and rebuild. They should be given the proper resources to do so. More, they should be given support beyond the restoration of the status quo, towards the building of new community institutions – parks, playgrounds, libraries, sports facilities. Even the less glamorous aspects of the public realm, like litter disposal and recycling. The goal should not simply be repair, but creation.

Of course, all of this would only be reactive. It would not deal with the source of the problem that led to these far-right riots taking place and would not prevent them from occurring again in the future.

For many years, perhaps decades, migrants and minorities have been vilified, demonised and even dehumanised by British politicians and British newspapers. The argument that the rioters are simply motivated by their inability to make themselves heard in the corridors of power stands in stark contrast to the reality that their voice has never been louder in mainstream discourse.

Earlier this year, a senior figure in Reform UK said that migrants trying to cross the Channel should be allowed to drown. Was he kicked out of the party for this? Did it abruptly end his career? No, he suffered no real consequences whatsoever.

The Conservatives ran Islamophobic campaigns against London mayor Sadiq Khan, not once, but twice. They were rejected by voters but were their pushed into inspecting the presence of anti-Muslim prejudice in their party? Did they admit any wrongdoing or give any commitment to drop that language in the future? It was only when an MP went all the way and called Khan an ‘Islamist’ that the party took some minimum level of action. Since that MP moved over to Reform, no serious reckoning has taken place.

In the last two years, a former Home Secretary talked of a ‘hurricane’ of migrants and an ‘invasion’ coming to Britain. Did this lead to her being swiftly thrown out of the government? Not even criticism from a Holocaust survivor could convince her to back down.

And why would political leaders face consequences when large sections of the press will egg them on or repeat the same language? Britain’s right-wing media is producing a never-ending stream of articles and headlines blaming migrants for crime, the economy, and housing. Nor are they shy in using dehumanising language.

Large sections of our politics and media accommodate, imitate or belong to the far-right. As a result, the far-right feel emboldened, seeing their views reflected in the mainstream of public life. They are becoming more convinced that people agree with them, that they can act with impunity and that the time has come to step up their anti-democratic agenda.

Policing will be a necessary part of dealing with the far-right but it will certainly not be enough. A process of de-radicalisation is needed to purge far-right views and language from our public life. If we have been witness to a steady normalisation of the far-right then the only sufficient response is a re-stigmatisation of the same. Commentators in the media who promote far-right views should be dropped from their positions. Politicians who push far-right ideas should be ostracised and condemned by moderate parties. Far-right parties should be opposed by all. Britain must, in short, become a hostile environment for the far-right.

Making this happen will not be easy or uncontroversial. It will require breaking up the power of the media barons. It will require cracking down on the radicalisation cycles present on social media. It will require better enforcement of hate speech laws and tougher consequences for those who break the rules. It will require calling out and punishing far-right views in Parliament, with our most senior representatives leading that effort.

Most likely, this will all be too much for our MPs, many of whom would get cold feet long before the job was done. Still, if even a start could be made on the long and difficult job of de-radicalising Britain’s public spaces then that too would be worthwhile. The far-right is too dangerous to risk anything less.