It goes without saying that those responsible for attacking Muslim-owned businesses on Donegall Road in Belfast over the weekend were Islamophobes - it was specifically Muslim-owned businesses which were set alight, their wares destroyed and their windows smashed, in the famously multi-cultural Botanic area of the city. As café owner Mohammed Idris told the BBC, he and his business had been set upon by an armed mob screaming, “Where is Mohammed?”. His crime, supposedly of such proportions that it merited the punishment of the destruction of his livelihood, was that of bearing an obviously Islamic name. Par extension, it is also crystal-clear that the black man mercilessly punched and kicked by rioters in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens last Saturday was the victim of a racist attack. His crime? Most likely that of sharing his skin colour with the suspect in the Southport stabbings, Axel Rudakubana. Most egregious of all, however, may be the petrol bomb attack launched upon a Holiday Inn Express in Tamworth, a hotel housing asylum seekers. Here, xenophobia was whipped up into a violent frenzy with a good dose of latent conspiracism, with the underlying sentiment of the rioters-at-fault being mistrust of the System – of the ‘Deep State’, the Home Office, the courts, and the judicial and political elite at large – and its natural counterpart, the conviction that they, the Common People, somehow possessed the requisite knowledge to deem the asylum applications at hand invalid, and therefore the right to violently effect justice with immediate effect.
In writing all of this, I find myself in agreement with certain left-wing social media outlets on Instagram which I have typically been quite unfavourably disposed to, such as @ukfactcheckpolitics, whose entire analysis of Reform’s success boils down to the conclusion that the only reasons to vote Reform are general stupidity and hatred of brown people – but this should hardly be surprising, given how blindingly obvious the violence and prejudice of the past week’s rioters has been. Priti Patel herself has stated quite unambiguously that “There’s a clear difference between effectively blocking streets or roads being closed to burning down libraries, hotels, food banks and attacking places of worship. What we have seen is thuggery, violence, racism.” And so Rustam Wahab of @ukfactcheckpolitics concurs: “I pray we get rid of the racists, xenophobes and Islamophobes in this country and instead promote love, equality, fairness, compassion”.
However, I would strongly caution against the rhetoric being peddled by other left-wing media outlets, such as @hatezine, namely that the rioters are ‘fascists’ – for it is simply not demonstrable that most of the rioters – or at least a ‘critical mass’ thereof – have any unified political views beyond a dislike of foreigners, and especially Muslim foreigners. Granted, it is tempting to detect an indication of incipient fascism in the Tamworth hotel attack, for there appeared the seeming desire to bypass the established bureaucratic procedures of the liberal democratic British state and refer the enactment of justice directly to the ‘People’ – that is, the white indigenes of the British lands, possibly bound into magical consensus through a mystical blood bond of one sort or another. Yet, it would be quite wrong to declare those responsible for the systematic harassment of the British Jewish community (smashing Jewish gravestones, breaking synagogue windows and tearing kippahs off young boys’ heads), supposedly in response to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, to be fascist, even though such actions are of the precise complexion of those serially engaged in by the Nazi Sturmabteilung throughout the 1930s. This is due to the lack of an ideological commitment to fascism more broadly underpinning such actions, as is also the case with the current rioters, to whom one cannot automatically assign sympathy to such positions as Mussolini’s declaration that war alone “brings up to their highest tension all human energies”, or Hitler’s similar statement that “the struggle for one’s daily bread results in the defeat of all that is weak, sickly, or less determined”, simply because they enjoy violent crime.
For Berel Lang, such exaltation of conflict as the spontaneous process by which the naturally strong vanquish the naturally weak lies at the heart of fascism, manifesting itself in numerous archetypal fascist policies identified by other scholars, such as irredentism and imperialism (Ian Kershaw), the abandonment of duty of care to those unable to work productively (Jason Stanley), and the rejection of pacifism (Umberto Eco). Thus, one finds in the 25-Point-Programme of the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, as first made perpetually binding in 1920, both the demand for “land and soil (colonies) for the sustenance of our people and the settlement of our population surplus” (point 3) and the enshrining of “the duty to work productively, mentally or physically” (point 10): in Mussolini and Gentile’s The Doctrine of Fascism, a denigration of the “harmful postulate of peace” and “all the international leagues and societies”. Also fundamental for Lang is the priority of the state over the individual, finding expression in point 23 of the 25-Point-Programme, which seeks to forbid all “publications which are counter to the general good” and demands “the legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life and the closure of organizations opposing the above demands.” In effect, fascism demands of its adherents that they hand themselves over, body and soul, to a higher order, a higher reality, a higher law, and despite the presence of the occasional swastika tattoo amongst the rioters’ ranks, there is little evidence to suggest that they are in any way sufficiently ideologically organised so as to be sweepingly deemed ‘fascists’.
Indeed, as Jacob Davey of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue points out, despite the presence of certain “known figureheads” at the ongoing riots, including “some avowed neo-Nazis”, the mass impetus behind the current unrest lies in the hands of “loose online networks” organising “concerned local citizens and football hooligans” on a small-scale, neighbourhood basis. Many of these networks appear to have originated from the now-defunct English Defence League, itself a famously ideologically vacuous movement focused singly on “get[ting] “Islamic extremists ‘off the streets’” with a generally “politically unsophisticated” membership profile – as a “grassroots single-issue movement”, rather than a political party proper, it possessed neither the desire to impose a wider ideological party-line upon its members, nor the wherewithal to do so, having lacked a formal membership structure, preferring instead to metastasize more spontaneously on Facebook. As such, deeming all of the current rioters ‘fascists’ appears untenable, seeing as they seem uninterested in making a concerted push to enact a comprehensive overhaul of the British political system. What pressure they are placing upon the authorities, both the police against whom they are directly facing off and, at a greater remove, Westminster itself, appears intended purely to effect harsher immigration rules, most likely a full moratorium on all movement into the UK – provided the rioters even possess the conscious intention of influencing future policy-making beyond the direct removal of supposed racial undesirables from their immediate vicinity. There may be fascists present in the rioters’ ranks, but the riots are not themselves incidents of fascist mobilisation. Otherwise, one may as well go ahead and call all anti-Romani thugs in the Balkans, who routinely target whole families or communities, fascists. However, no serious commentator or scholar seems to have done so, although it is evident that Balkan fascists are often involved in such cases of violent antiziganism. One is reminded of the primary school mantra that a rhombus is a parallelogram, but a parallelogram is not a rhombus.
However, with the generally rudimentary nature of the rioters’ political consciousnesses in mind, one might feel a certain anxiety that they would be uniquely predisposed, amongst the UK citizenry, to lend their vote to a fascist party, for the obvious reason that if the said fascist party were to demand the compulsory repatriation of those not of English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish descent, one imagines that those engaged in unprovoked attacks on law-abiding Muslim shopkeepers, or industrious Filipina nurses, would quickly prick their ears up. This is one of the first policy points on the German Heimat party’s current electoral manifesto, and bears striking similarities to a policy found in the final BNP manifesto, as issued in 2019, of “offer[ing] generous grants to those of foreign descent who are resident here and who wish to leave permanently” – with, however, the caveat that where Heimat is pushing for compulsory repatriation, the BNP were only calling for voluntary repatriation.
This small difference is scant comfort. Had the BNP actually come into power, it would inevitably have been emboldened to pursue ever more extreme policies, almost certainly culminating in forced repatriation. After all, the wholesale extermination of European Jewry was not on the Nazi party programme in the early 1930s. Under John Tyndall, its founder, the BNP was in open favour of banning all political parties, giving the Prime Minister full executive powers, and even introducing a national eugenic programme – thereby transforming the UK into not only a fascist country, but a National Socialist one. Luckily, however, the BNP has been defunct since 2019, and appears unlikely to make a reappearance on the national political stage anytime soon, effacing any possibility of latent fascist sympathies amongst members of the UK population being awakened and channelled.
In another reading, the timely death of the BNP shows that even Britain’s racists have little appetite for fascism, for the BNP would surely have merrily continued its existence had its ideals actually attracted enough sympathisers and supporters. Clearly, violent prejudice does not automatically fascism make, possibly because fascism is felt to be demanding and intrusive in an age where existential ennui can be sated with all manner of instantly accessible digital entertainment, all paid for by the generosity of the welfare state. Where, then, might the current rioters make their political nests? Given that they voted at all at the recent General Election, it seems reasonable to assume that such political unsophisticates would have likely delivered their votes to whichever party was offering the hardest line on immigration, fascist or not. At the last GE, that was Reform, who promised to “Freeze Non-Essential Immigration”, “Stop the Boats with our 4 Point Plan”, “Secure Detention for all Illegal Migrants” and effect “Immediate Deportation for Foreign Criminals” in their 2024 election manifesto (or “Contract”, in Reform’s own parlance). It is telling that Reform’s election manifesto was woefully short, coming to around 28 pages, or a word count of around 6.5k. By comparison, the Tory manifesto came to 80 pages and 27k, whilst Labour’s numbered 136 pages and 26.5k. In other words, the Reform manifesto went into very little detail on its major policy points, preferring simply to hammer a few main points home, and at the head of it all was Core Pledge No.1, “All non-essential immigration frozen”, and Manifesto Section 1, titled “Uncontrolled Immigration has Pushed Britain to Breaking Point”.
It is tempting to see a parallelism between the simplicity (say, even, the deliberate anti-intellectualism) of Reform’s political vision, tantamount to ‘Make Britain Great Again’, and the strange blankness of the rioters’ energy, breaking out in a violent haze of uncontrolled, unmediated contempt for the supposed Other – action over thought, commitment over consideration. Of course, Farage has also been tainted with the Fascist brush by left-wing Polstagram, despite, once again, never having offered anything approaching fascism to the British electorate, and certainly not in Reform’s thinly-padded 2024 manifesto. One may certainly criticise him on account of his having voiced instigative suspicions of a police cover-up concerning the identity of the suspect in the initial Southport stabbings, but to extrapolate an allegiance to fascism from such an action is frankly bizarre. In the final analysis, the Instagram left’s understanding of fascism, clearly serially attached to people who do not advocate politically for anything even approaching historical manifestations of fascism, seems rather rogue. It is, in any case, not a Marxist understanding, even if many active as part of the Instagram left might consider themselves as such. The purely racist character of the current rioting discounts its being analysed as fascist according to either Georgi Dimitrov’s definition of fascism as “the power of finance capital itself” or Leon Trotsky’s description of fascism’s goal being “to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties”. The digital left, it appears, seems, instead, to equate fascism with a commitment to anything it deems reactionary or unprogressive, in a gleeful dumbing-down of the Marxist conception of fascism as being “the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital” – reduce Dimitrov and Clara Zetkin’s analysis down to the single word “reactionary”, and you have fascism repackaged for 21st-century attention spans and the age of the Instagram Story. This is certainly the impression gained by looking over the page @ukisnotinnocent, which explains “How the Media and Politicans [sic] Have Incited Fascism” by showing a selection of choice quotes from Tory and Labour ministers declaring the necessity of reducing immigration numbers and voicing a general dislike of illegal immigration. Knowing full well that fascism is essentially a dirty word in the British political consciousness, being tainted by association with The Incarnation of Pure Evil, Adolf Hitler, The Worst Man to Ever Exist, the digital left is thus able to present itself and its own desired policies as possessing full moral authority, with all those disagreeing immediately relegated to absolute moral depravity.
I do not oppose the Instagram leftist’s freedom to advocate for open borders, even if I would disagree heartily with such immigration policy. But I do take issue with their lazy reduction of any stance conflicting with their own to so-called ‘fascism’. Leaving aside the obvious issue with assigning total moral depravity to all non-leftists, language matters, and the more we impoverish our political vocabulary, the less equipped we all are in the long run to articulate the kind of future we would wish for ourselves and the generations to come - in effect, the impoverishment of political vocabulary destroys our capacity for political thinking itself.
Full citations may be solicited from the author at zz429@cam.ac.uk
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