Tommy Robinson’s Britain

The UK Boils Over

Bargain basement Oswald Mosley: Tommy Robinson.

By Josh White

Weymouth is a lovely seaside town to visit in the summer. I’ve been coming here with my family for years.

So it was a shock to find a crowd of anti-immigrant protesters walking down the esplanade on a Sunday evening.

Old ladies were waving miniature Union flags like they were at King Charles’s coronation. Thankfully, an old woman carried a placard reassuringly denying she was ‘far-right’.

One old man who looked like a veteran wore an army beret and a navy jacket. He held up a sign affirming that Britain is a Christian country.

Others carried Dorset County flags as if this were a regional matter.

I was keeping an eye out for the stereotypical skinhead. The only bald man I saw was following coppers up the road, yelling at them about “Islamists” and the need to “protect our kids”.

The crowd made its way down the esplanade to the statue of Mad King George, where the counter-demonstration was held.

Police formed a line between the two groups, eventually becoming a ring surrounding about 200 anti-racist protesters.

More people arrived on buses to join the anti-migrant march. Its ranks grew to around 400 people.

Some members of the crowd began throwing beer bottles at police and the counter-demo. People were chanting one man’s name: “Tommy Robinson!”

Robinson, reportedly staying at a £400 a night luxury hotel in Cyprus, endorsed the Weymouth action online.

He galvanised thousands of people to march through central London last Saturday, just a couple of days before the riots began.

This was before Robinson fled the country via the Eurostar, avoiding a contempt of court case.

The Robinson fan club was already mobilised before the horrifying murders in Southport last week. They were riled up for action.

But these riots were not even the first to take off under the Labour government, which took power on 5 July.

The Leeds neighbourhood of Harehills erupted into rioting on the 18th of July after police took some Roma children into care.

Now, a week into the unrest, the police have arrested at least 420 people across the country so far.

This number will undoubtedly go much higher before this outbreak of unrest is over.

It has been a long time coming.

Stopping Johnny Foreigner

Weymouth was a target because of Bibby Stockholm, the prison barge for asylum seekers, floating just off of Portland Harbour.

Fortunately, the crowd of flag-waving, angry drunks didn’t trash the town.

Other places have not been so lucky. Middlesbrough and Rotherham have seen major disorder, with mosques and hotels targeted.

Hotels housing asylum seekers have been attacked in Rotherham and Tamworth – including with petrol bombs.

Of course, Rotherham was a target because of the racial tensions over a terrible history of grooming gangs and sexual abuse ignored by the police.

Many of these towns have histories of difficult race relations, and now the far-right is back on the streets.

But before all the broken glass is cleaned up, we should question why this is happening. Every riot has deeper origins than the surface-level destruction.

The spark for this wave of unrest was the murder of three girls in Southport.

The suspect was eventually named as Axel Rudakubana.

The news that his family are Rwandan, making him almost certainly Christian, was out.

It didn’t matter that he wasn’t a Syrian refugee or an Islamist on the MI5 terrorism watchlist. This was the original false claim circulated online by far-right influencers.

But Rudakubana is still foreign by the standard of white racists who don’t think black British people are British.

The fact that Rudakubana was born in Cardiff and grew up in England doesn’t matter to the rioters.

The Southport stabbings have ignited a firestorm in tinderbox communities where all problems are blamed on foreigners, and Islam is seen as an existential foe.

Right-wing opposition to immigration has been building for many years.

Asylum seekers have become synonymous with benefits in the tabloids. In contrast, the spectacle of small boats arriving at the white cliffs of Dover has become the accepted image of immigration.

Many people now believe that the thousands of people who arrived in boats this year are hundreds of thousands of Muslim men.

It’s not new, though. We’ve forgotten the firebombing of a Dover migrant centre just two years ago.

This new wave of violence shows there are more people out there who would like to destroy the hotels housing migrants and kill everyone inside.

Rightists defending the riots say these actions are protests about legitimate issues.

One BBC reporter even described the far-right mob in Bolton as a “pro-British march”.

There’s also been the usual use of ‘both sides’ to frame racist rioters throwing bricks at police officers with non-violent anti-racist campaigners.

Alex Thomson at Channel 4 News has made this mistake, but others are taking this line to excuse the far right.

Meanwhile, many journalists like Paul Mason and Otto English are pointing the finger at the Kremlin and blaming Russian disinformation.

However, there was already a lot of anti-migrant fervour in the country to draw upon.

At the same time, the English Defence League (EDL) is making headlines for the first time in years.

The fascist party has helped organise actions and mobilise people from different areas to reach places like Southport.

What all of this obscures is the conditions from which the riots emerged.

Outside agitators are a frequent scapegoat for riots. It’s trotted out almost every time a riot or protest descends into chaos.

Underlying grievances, such as a lack of good jobs, housing, and access to infrastructure, play a key role in this.

Austerity and the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated these grievances.

It’s also not just about economic grievances. Middle-class commuter towns like Aldershot have had unrest, too, with nationalists targeting a hotel believed to be housing migrants.

Stopping Johnny Foreigner is an old bourgeois tradition.

Ghosts of Riots Past

I remember the 2011 riots well. The spark was the police shooting of Mark Duggan, followed by protests outside Tottenham police station. These protests boiled over into open fury against the police.

What followed was a wave of violence and looting sweeping the land.

Back then, the story was reversed. The tabloids mobilised against Mark Duggan. Misleading claims about the incident and speculation about the dead man were allowed to cloud the public’s perception of the incident.

People called for a harsh police response, mass arrests and long sentences. One liberal at my university called for tanks to be deployed against the mob. Water cannons and rubber bullets weren’t enough.

Many of the same newspapers and journalists who were so irate about the 2011 riots are now talking as if these ‘protests’ represent legitimate concerns. This fails to account for any political distinctions.

Somehow, white racist anger is more legitimate than black anger at police. The sight of white youths led historian David Starkey to suggest they’ve “become black”.

What followed the 2011 riots was a hardening of public attitudes to crime, immigration and multiculturalism. Arguably, the riots helped provide some arguments for Brexit.

It’s less clear what will come out of the 2024 riots.

The Labour government is pivoting to a heavy police response, but it will probably try to buy off anti-migrant sentiment in the country rather than change it.

Keir Starmer has carefully avoided naming and shaming any loudmouths responsible for whipping up these riots.

Labour has accepted Brexit and racist border policies, yet the far-right narrative is Starmer will open the borders to millions.

According to supporters of the Enough is Enough campaign, the fundamental problem is the UK’s non-white population.

Mass immigration and multiculturalism are just one level, but the real problem is racial for them.

They want mass deportation. They want the death penalty for paedophiles, rapists, murderers. They want to return to an imaginary past.

They want a white Britain where no one with a brown face can feel safe.

We’re only just a month into the Starmer era, the first Labour government the UK has had in fourteen years.

This time last week, the UK seemed like a peaceful country. But this was just how things looked on the surface.

We’ve found out what lies beneath, and it’s not pretty.

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Photograph courtesy of Shayan Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn/Wikimedia. Published under a Creative Commons license.