For the past few nights we have seen violence in the streets of Belfast for the third successive summer. Houses suspected of being HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) housing migrants were torched, sometimes with families still inside. Cars were lit on fire. Streets were blocked and racist gangs violently attacked people of colour across the city. ‘Protests’ were also held in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr and Aberdeen, with Glasgow in particular mimicking the violence of Belfast.
This campaign of violence was called by various far-right groups as a retaliatory action following a knife attack in Belfast. Rioting has, of course, done nothing to actually help or protect the victim of that attack. What it has done is endanger more people, particularly the city’s racial minority communities. All public transport was suspended in the city. On Tuesday night, the fire service was called to 62 incidents across the North of Ireland.
Let us be clear about what these riots are: They are pogroms. Gangs of masked racists have been going door to door searching for “foreigners” to victimise, and destroying the homes of non-white families. They are deplorable and they must be firmly rejected by anyone with principles.
The purpose of these riots is to create an atmosphere within which non-white people are terrified. To create an atmosphere of terror which forces non-white people to hide or to flee their homes.
The purpose of this violence is to create a Hostile Environment. It is an ongoing attempt to expel all racial minority communities from Belfast.
And, importantly, the violence has not ended.
There are ongoing calls to action for continuing this movement throughout the UK. These calls have not come from a vacuum. There is a clear political trajectory that we can trace that leads to the current political moment.
There is, of course, the ongoing demonisation of migrants – that catch all term within which all manner of disparate groups are contained by the general media. There is the legitimisation of this by the political establishment. The Tories have tried to chase a base that has shifted rightwards and gone heavy on the kind of rhetoric used by Reform UK and UKIP before them. Labour, too, has enabled this, chasing the same voters and abandoning the left, with Starmer not only quoting Enoch Powell in a speech but also proudly publishing videos of immigration raids, and enacting ever more punitive measures on pro-Palestine activists. The purpose of this rightward shift, as pertains to immigration, has been clear. It is, to use a phrase coined by then Home Secretary Theresa May, a system which continues to attempt to create a Hostile Environment.
The hostile environment of the political establishment is a clean one, masked in euphemism and disguise. Here, in Belfast, the hostile environment is unmasked, with the violence plain to see.
On Neofascism
Allow me to preface the next section with a slight aside. There is some hesitation when labelling contemporary political movements as ‘fascist’. This hesitation can be good; it can be part of a healthy scepticism that comes when understanding what a term as loaded as ‘fascism’ means. This hesitation can also be blinding.
It is often blinding.
In liberal historiography, fascism died in 1945. It died with Mussolini upside down on petrol station rafters and Hitler alone on the cold concrete floor of a surrounded bunker. This is comforting. This is wrong.
Fascism continued to exist. Hundreds of thousands of Nazis who perpetrated genocide walked free. Fascist regimes continued in Spain, and fascist movements continued to pop up around the world throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries.
What is often pointed to by opponents of labelling contemporary far-right movements as ‘fascist’ is that they lack some of the aspects of the fascism of the first half of the 20th Century. Most notably, they lack the emphasis on a structured and organised militarism. There is no real modern equivalent to the Brownshirts or the Blackshirts, at least in terms of structure. What is also noted is that none but the most fringe of far-right groups actually call themselves fascists openly (although this does change somewhat when offered the anonymity of the internet). But to deny the use of the word ‘fascist’ based on looking for exact replicas is to go hunting for ghosts. Liberals of the modern world do not replicate the liberalism of the 19th Century. Socialists, too, do not replicate the socialism of the 1910s. Why do we expect this of fascists?
One of the most notable scholars of fascism, Robert Paxton, wrote
‘We need not look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their swastikas … Much more likely to exert an influence are extreme Right movements that have learned to moderate their language, abandon classical fascist symbolism, and appear “normal.”
It is by understanding how past fascisms worked, and not by checking the color of shirts … that we may be able to recognise it.’
Perhaps, though, fascism is too loaded a word. Liberals have shown us that political beliefs can morph enough to need the name altering with ‘neoliberalism’. Perhaps, if it would make liberals more comfortable, we could recognise that modern fascism has taken a different shape by calling it ‘neofascism’.
On the Voice of (Neo)Fascism
Why does it appear that these riots are becoming more commonplace? There are several reasons. Much of the mobilising for these riots comes from social media. Over the past decade, online far-right networks have become established and centralised, from Telegram channels to Twitter accounts to Facebook, it is easier than ever now for far-right agitators to reach a vast audience. Social media companies have shown little interest in doing anything substantive to combat the far right on their platforms, and Twitter has become a haven for neofascists since its purchase by Elon Musk.
Musk, himself, is responsible for amplifying this rhetoric too. But to focus on one individual is to downplay the problem. The media at large amplifies divisive stories and allows far-right rhetoric to perpetrate unchallenged. Much is made by the media of the plight of the young white working-class boy in the UK, and it is often taken for granted that this plight is pushing them to the far-right. There are, of course, young white working-class boys drawn to the far-right. But from the consistent media narrative you would think this happens to be the majority of them. It is not. In Wales, a country with quite a lot of boys who would fit that demographic, 26 per cent of males aged 16-29 voted for Reform UK. But nearly 3 quarters of that demographic didn’t. 45 per cent voted for Plaid Cymru, running largely on an anti-Reform platform. If you – and this is perhaps being somewhat generous to Welsh Labour – combine the votes for Plaid, the Greens and Labour into an anti-reform ‘left’ vote, then 62 per cent of ‘young men’ voted that way.
But the popular narrative would lead you to believe something different: that young boys, disenfranchised and misunderstood are drawn to the far-right predominantly. This constructs a narrative where disenfranchised people are drawn to the far-right, rather than what we know is the reality. What has been the reality all along. Reform UK are a party of the upper class. They are dominated by the bourgeois and the petit bourgeois. Their policies reflect this, their leadership reflects this, their backing by global fossil fuel tycoons reflects this.
This is not to say that there are no working-class people drawn to Reform. That, too, would be naïve. In Wales, 31 per cent of social renters and 24 per cent of private renters voted Reform this year. 37 per cent of people with an income under £25,000 did – Reform winning the largest vote of that group. But it is not a runaway victory as it is often portrayed.
What Reform UK has managed to do is to build a class coalition. Those who participated in the racist riots in Belfast and in Glasgow may not share a class background, but they are united by their racism. Let me be clear: Reform UK is not a working-class movement. It is a bourgeois movement with a presence amongst the working-class. They serve ruling class interests, not working-class interests. But they have managed, through wedge issues, to construct a movement where the primary motivating force is one against the ‘threat’ of migrants.
This wedge issue is used by the far-right much like other wedge issues; attacks on trans people; attacks on equality legislation; attacks on councils; attacks on a nebulously defined ‘wokeness’. These wedge issues offer visible ‘threats’ which have effectively mobilised people to the right.
On Two-Tier Policing
The most modern of these mobilising passions is the accusation of ‘two-tier policing’ – a claim that has been repeated by Nigel Farage in the House of Commons. This construction of a phantasmic reality where the police are simultaneously working against white people and part of a large conspiracy, while also being hampered by ‘wokeness’ and ‘DEI initiatives’ (imported American terminology) allows the far-right to position themselves as both actively fighting against a corrupt state and fighting for the real essence of their nation.
Regarding the police, there is one important thing to note: There is two-tier policing in the UK.
Last year workers in the UK worked unpaid overtime worth £28 billion. You will not see the police chasing the CEOs of these companies down the street and putting them in headlocks. At best they’ll get a fine through the post. Most likely, the only thing they’ll get is away with it.
There is also two-tier policing in the way that young Black people are policed, with police officers frequently getting away with committing abuses and killing young Black boys. It is absurd to suggest there is a two-tier policing system against white men when names like Christopher Alder, Mouayed Bashir and Mohammed Hassan still ring in the ears of those with memories. When the joking texts sent between Met officers about the murderer of Sarah Everard burn in the minds of every woman who has to interact with a police officer.
On the future
Neofascism exists because of the ongoing crises facing the world. It grows because those with the power and influence to exploit these crises in their own favour do so. It thrives because those who pretend to be against it legitimise it through accepting their points and giving us watered down far-right political policy. When you see Reform UK saying, ‘Of course street violence is wrong, but…’ understand that what they’re really saying is ‘Vote for us and we can and will enact this violence on non-white communities legally, with the mechanisms of the state.’
The government and the media’s framing of migrants and asylum seekers as ‘illegal’ further legitimises the far-right. It enables the violence that has been committed by adhering to the far-right’s narrative that seeking asylum is inherently ‘illegal’ which has always been a lie. This legitimisation emboldens people to enact violence, allowing them to view themselves not as racists attacking minorities but as a gang of vigilantes enacting a law that doesn’t exist.
The future is uncertain. But as the fires turn to embers and the embers turn to ash, we must remember that this moment is not over.
We must remember that people are able to feel injustice is being done to them every single day. It is that feeling of injustice that the far-right exploits. The injustices that the far-right point to are false targets. The far-right point to injustices while forming lynch mobs and creating injustices through their own actions. There is no need for us on the left to legitimise those who are participating in race riots. There is an active need for us to call out those injustices committed by the lynch mobs.
People are insecure and afraid. People can feel the rising cost of housing suffocating them, the rising cost of living starving them. They can feel the very real everyday pressures of capitalism.
It is our job, on the left, to identify these injustices and communicate them. Not to legitimise the far-right by accepting battlegrounds of their choosing, but to pick our own battlegrounds and create movements which build real working-class power with policies that benefit the working-class. We must not allow the far-right to dictate the arguments we make, but to make our own arguments: a fair and just system of housing, an economic system structured around the needs of the workers and the workers’ necessity to the economy and a system of government which serves not those who own, but those who are. A system built on the principles of solidarity. A system by, and for, the ordinary people.
Times are dangerous. Doubly so if you are not deemed to have the right coloured skin or the right accent. It is necessary now for all antifascists to work together to protect our communities. These communities include the towns and streets in which we live and extend to the communities of all marginalised people around the world – the colonised, global proletariat. It is vital that those of us on the left; communists; socialists; anarchists; antifascists of any persuasion fight to keep one another safe. To keep our communities safe. To keep the most marginalised members of our communities safe.
Build communities with those around you and protect your communities. Join, or establish, antifascist networks. Report far-right agitation to those networks and ensure that, in the future, if the far-right mobilise to your county, to your town, to your street, that they are outnumbered.
In the choice between socialism or barbarism, it would appear barbarism has arrived.
The truth is that barbarism has always been there. It has worn a mask here in the West for some time. In the rest of the world, it has not done the same. The mask of civility has slipped here, and now the violence that was once seen to us on TV screens, the violence of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians, the violence of US and British bombs falling on Baghdad, has arrived.
The choice has always been socialism or barbarism. Barbarism has taken off its mask.
It is time to fight back.
