What the Anti-Immigration Riots Tell Us About Starmer’s Labour Government
Labour strongly condemned the riots, but can Starmer’s faction confront its own dark history of race-baiting?
August 22, 2024
Source: African Arguments
The anti-immigration riots in Southport, UK, 5 August 2024. Courtesy: By StreetMic LiveStream, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151177179
What we know is that the far-right riots in the UK were not a legitimate outpouring of anger about the stabbing of children because, even after their reasoning justifying their violence had collapsed in the face of facts, something else continued to drive the rioters to attack mosques, Muslims and black people.
It did not matter that the 17-year-old boy who stabbed the children was not a recent foreign arrival, as they had believed. It also did not matter that the boy was not a Muslim, as they had believed. Something else was driving them, but the British political and media classes could not name it.
The riots cannot have been about the raw deal that the average Brit has got out of the neoliberal settlement because, as ex-Labour MP Laura Pidcock noted, these bearers of “legitimate” anger were notable for their absence at sites where communities were fighting hardships. They don’t help at food banks, aren’t bothered by homelessness, and are absent at campaigns against government spending cuts, by Tories or by Labour. Their issues are not economic.
The riots cannot have been about the immigrant question in general, as the media tried to tell us, because if that were true, we would have seen Ukrainians, Eastern Europeans and Australians under attack. The riots were about a specific kind of immigrant: the Muslim. If you were black or brown, that made you a fair target.
We cannot trust the new Labour government to take an honest position on the problem because its leading lights got where they are by way of a strange relationship with the truth. For a while now, Westminster, Fleet Street and the BBC have operated in ways barely distinguishable from a psyop on the general public. We already saw some of this. When anti-fascist groups organised to meet a planned countrywide march on Thursday, 8 August 2024, Starmer’s government instructed Labour MPs not to join any anti-fascist marches. Yet as soon as it became clear that the anti-fascist groups had successfully deterred the planned countrywide marches by the far right, the government and the media were quick off the blocks to give credit to, erm, the good British people for seeing off the rioters. Neatly skipped over was the political identity of the people who came out on the streets to face down the far right, for they were none other than anti-fascists, pro-Palestine protestors and the usual anti-war groups. In short, the same people that Westminster and mainstream media were calling “hate mobs”, “terrorists”, or “antisemites” at the height of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government will avoid as much as possible answering any basic questions, such as: is Tommy Robinson a fascist? Is Nigel Farage far right? Are we racist? Labour is afraid and incapable of naming things; if it can’t correctly name Islamophobic riots, it cannot hope to find the correct solution. Even when Starmer condemned ‘far-right thuggery,’ it sounded dishonest to frame the people involved as a mindless fringe group of thugs whose appearance on the streets was irrational and puzzling when the evidence of recent years is clear: Islamophobia is Westminster’s last respectable bigotry. Eager to investigate antisemitism in the Labour Party, the Equality & Human Rights Commission has steadfastly refused to do anything about evidence of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. The Forde Report found a racism hierarchy in the Labour Party.
In the aftermath of the riots, New Labour veteran Margaret Hodge came forward to say, ‘We’re too frightened to talk about immigration.’ Yet it’s impossible to find one subject that has consistently been at the centre of British politics as much as immigration. In 2005, Tony Blair was panicking over what to do with the high numbers of migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq and how that would impact Labour at the ballot box. In 2007, Hodge earned the applause of the far-right British National Party after talking about the “fear” triggered in her constituency by the sight of “different” faces in schools. Prime Minister Gordon Brown resurrected the National Front slogan “British jobs for British workers”; Labour’s 2015 election campaign featured explicitly anti-migrant coffee mugs, and in the most recent election campaign, Labour was competing with Tories over who could be the most horrible against immigrants. Talking about immigrants, particularly the sort that Boris Johnson called “letterboxes,” helped the Brexit campaign over the line in 2016.
Hodge is one of the reactionary Labour Party grandees who want a Labour Party that is essentially the Conservative Party Light. At the height of Blairism, these are the folks who claimed that everyone was middle class: “We’re all Thatcherites now”.
Blair is famous for “modernising” the Labour Party by dropping clause IV of the party’s constitution. This clause obliged it to represent the interests of working people. Labour is now ideologically incapable of offering working people a path to a place where their first point of identification is social struggle. Lacking a genuine political offer, Labour has chosen to follow Tories’ who are not shy to encourage people to identify along racial lines. A party that once belonged to working people but is now a vehicle of political careering by a group of liberals who can operate the party with a vanishing membership because they don’t need membership fees if the party can be funded by corporate lobbyists, city bankers and vulture capitalists presently waiting for Labour to start yet another round of stripping away public assets for a song. Starmer’s government is available to the highest bidder. And racists bid the highest in this country.
The anti-immigration riots in Southport, UK, 5 August 2024. Courtesy: By StreetMic LiveStream, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151177179
What we know is that the far-right riots in the UK were not a legitimate outpouring of anger about the stabbing of children because, even after their reasoning justifying their violence had collapsed in the face of facts, something else continued to drive the rioters to attack mosques, Muslims and black people.
It did not matter that the 17-year-old boy who stabbed the children was not a recent foreign arrival, as they had believed. It also did not matter that the boy was not a Muslim, as they had believed. Something else was driving them, but the British political and media classes could not name it.
The riots cannot have been about the raw deal that the average Brit has got out of the neoliberal settlement because, as ex-Labour MP Laura Pidcock noted, these bearers of “legitimate” anger were notable for their absence at sites where communities were fighting hardships. They don’t help at food banks, aren’t bothered by homelessness, and are absent at campaigns against government spending cuts, by Tories or by Labour. Their issues are not economic.
The riots cannot have been about the immigrant question in general, as the media tried to tell us, because if that were true, we would have seen Ukrainians, Eastern Europeans and Australians under attack. The riots were about a specific kind of immigrant: the Muslim. If you were black or brown, that made you a fair target.
We cannot trust the new Labour government to take an honest position on the problem because its leading lights got where they are by way of a strange relationship with the truth. For a while now, Westminster, Fleet Street and the BBC have operated in ways barely distinguishable from a psyop on the general public. We already saw some of this. When anti-fascist groups organised to meet a planned countrywide march on Thursday, 8 August 2024, Starmer’s government instructed Labour MPs not to join any anti-fascist marches. Yet as soon as it became clear that the anti-fascist groups had successfully deterred the planned countrywide marches by the far right, the government and the media were quick off the blocks to give credit to, erm, the good British people for seeing off the rioters. Neatly skipped over was the political identity of the people who came out on the streets to face down the far right, for they were none other than anti-fascists, pro-Palestine protestors and the usual anti-war groups. In short, the same people that Westminster and mainstream media were calling “hate mobs”, “terrorists”, or “antisemites” at the height of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government will avoid as much as possible answering any basic questions, such as: is Tommy Robinson a fascist? Is Nigel Farage far right? Are we racist? Labour is afraid and incapable of naming things; if it can’t correctly name Islamophobic riots, it cannot hope to find the correct solution. Even when Starmer condemned ‘far-right thuggery,’ it sounded dishonest to frame the people involved as a mindless fringe group of thugs whose appearance on the streets was irrational and puzzling when the evidence of recent years is clear: Islamophobia is Westminster’s last respectable bigotry. Eager to investigate antisemitism in the Labour Party, the Equality & Human Rights Commission has steadfastly refused to do anything about evidence of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. The Forde Report found a racism hierarchy in the Labour Party.
In the aftermath of the riots, New Labour veteran Margaret Hodge came forward to say, ‘We’re too frightened to talk about immigration.’ Yet it’s impossible to find one subject that has consistently been at the centre of British politics as much as immigration. In 2005, Tony Blair was panicking over what to do with the high numbers of migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq and how that would impact Labour at the ballot box. In 2007, Hodge earned the applause of the far-right British National Party after talking about the “fear” triggered in her constituency by the sight of “different” faces in schools. Prime Minister Gordon Brown resurrected the National Front slogan “British jobs for British workers”; Labour’s 2015 election campaign featured explicitly anti-migrant coffee mugs, and in the most recent election campaign, Labour was competing with Tories over who could be the most horrible against immigrants. Talking about immigrants, particularly the sort that Boris Johnson called “letterboxes,” helped the Brexit campaign over the line in 2016.
Hodge is one of the reactionary Labour Party grandees who want a Labour Party that is essentially the Conservative Party Light. At the height of Blairism, these are the folks who claimed that everyone was middle class: “We’re all Thatcherites now”.
Blair is famous for “modernising” the Labour Party by dropping clause IV of the party’s constitution. This clause obliged it to represent the interests of working people. Labour is now ideologically incapable of offering working people a path to a place where their first point of identification is social struggle. Lacking a genuine political offer, Labour has chosen to follow Tories’ who are not shy to encourage people to identify along racial lines. A party that once belonged to working people but is now a vehicle of political careering by a group of liberals who can operate the party with a vanishing membership because they don’t need membership fees if the party can be funded by corporate lobbyists, city bankers and vulture capitalists presently waiting for Labour to start yet another round of stripping away public assets for a song. Starmer’s government is available to the highest bidder. And racists bid the highest in this country.
UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer exuberant about Labour’s landslide, on 5 July. Courtesy: Keir Starmer social media.
Starmer’s clique came into government on the back of extraordinary duplicity, with the support of the liberal mainstream media, likely looking for the first opportunity to slip out of the sham and pretend they were not at all involved. The liberal commentariat for years encouraged people to “vote for the lesser evil.” They soon forgot that they chose evil, started defending evil, while self-describing as “sensible moderates.” Paid to mis-represent the world and how power shapes it, they threw their support behind the right wing of the Labour Party when it sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn’s party leadership. They pretended not to see the difference between people supporting Westminster’s most notable anti-apartheid campaigner and a far-right bloke who is eager to murder in order to assert preferred racial hierarchies. So, Jeremy Corbyn was routinely compared to a Nazi prison guard; the BBC broadcast General Sir Nicholas Houghton in full uniform saying the Army would be ‘worried’ about a Corbyn win, and no one raised an eyebrow; the BBC’s premier news programme, Newsnight, depicted Corbyn as Lord Voldemort, and army squaddies did target practice on an image of Corbyn.
If Brexit and its obsession with coming swarms of foreigners took the country halfway to where it is now, the political assassination of Jeremy Corbyn completed the journey. The signals were loud, public and unmistakable: the British voter had had enough of the foreigner, and the land’s rulers would not tolerate a redistributive agenda. A senior Labour figure allied to Starmer felt obliged to scream racist and sexist language at the first Black female MP, Diane Abbott, intent on breaking her.
Starmer’s Labour government is ill-suited for the task not because it lacks ability but because the party leadership earned its place by distortion and disinformation. They had to be really ugly to thwart Corbynism and the threat it posed to capital; if naked racism and sexism were required, that was fine. Eventually, they found the perfect weapon to decapitate Corbyn: antisemitism.
Here, they really shone as political ghouls. For their efforts they have been rewarded with a thundering parliamentary majority despite fewer people voting for them than did for the supposedly unpopular Corbyn-led Labour.
After the Equality & Human Rights Commission’s report over the Labour Party’s antisemitism row, when Corbyn failed to apologise for saying claims of rampant antisemitism levelled at the party under his leadership were exaggerated, Starmer and his mob leapt at the opportunity to start kicking Corbyn out of the party. It is worth remembering that in the purge that followed, Starmer’s Labour expelled left-leaning Jewish party members at such a blistering rate, that it became statistically more likely to be kicked out if you were Jewish.
Starmer claimed to be cleansing the party of the scourge of antisemitism. All the clever political editors, conduits of the antisemitism outrage, displayed a wonderful collective incuriosity about the satirical nature of what was unfolding. When the party was done processing a backlog of 10,000 antisemitism cases inherited from Corbyn and 183 party members were rightly expelled, the media again excelled with their disinterest.
187 individuals is, of course, 0.03% of peak membership during the Corbyn years. Way before Corbyn was party leader, the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s own political party surveys going back years had estimated antisemitism in the party to be at about 23 – 32% of the membership – an estimate still lower, it should be noted, than the figures for the Conservative Party. In fact, the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s survey had shown antisemitism going down under Corbyn. But since the antisemitism row was hardly a search for the truth, hard facts did not count.
The political and media figures behind the duplicity over ‘rampant antisemitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party have never had to account for anything. The media has responded to Al Jazeera’s shocking documentary, Labour Files, with mind-boggling silence. Everything they told us was true about Corbyn turned out to be the opposite. That is not a story the establishment is interested in. It’s also not a story that Starmer’s political outriders are interested in, and they most certainly will not want to be reminded about the Forde Report, commissioned by Starmer but now buried, its recommendations ignored because it gave the wrong answer.
Martin Forde KC found a racism hierarchy where he was expected to launder the antisemitism row. Look, a black barrister has said it: the Corbyn gang were irredeemable racists. The BBC unsuccessfully pressured Forde to change the report before publishing it to make it look more favourable. When the report finally came out in July 2022, the media ignored it entirely. The blackout perplexed Forde: by March 2023, he had not heard anything from the Labour Party. Neither had a single media outlet spoken to him.
Only when Forde spoke to Al Jazeera about the report, did he hear from the Labour Party: a legal threat saying he was “acting against the party’s interest.”
And this is why the Labour government will struggle to address the riots: it cannot tackle Islamophobia and racism in the country when it resolutely refuses to face up to the same poison within its own party.
The late David Graeber did not foresee Labour’s Islamophobia problem, but did predict that Starmer was going to lose the progressive left and fail to win over the right vote. This is already evident from the last general election. He also noted that when fascists start marching on the streets and the police vanish, as they often do in that hour, the people that Starmer’s Labour was eager to call antisemites will be the lot having running battles against the fascists.
As with Brexit, which was driven by Etonians and billionaires styling themselves as the resistance, we saw the riots being fanned by the same figures: Tories on various levels and even Elon Musk. As for Starmer’s lot, they are at home cutting deals with the establishment, avoiding the hard work of developing an intellectual framework against the beasts.
At this moment, luck favours the devil.
Brian Chikwava is a London based Zimbabwean writer.
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