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The roots of this unrest lie in the warping of genuine
working-class grievances
Kenan Malik
Mainstream
politicians have legitimised the far right to rebrand racism as white identity
Sun 11 Aug 2024 08.30 BST
“The British soul is awakening and stirring with rage at
what these people are doing,” the Spectator’s Douglas Murray told former
Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson. The comment might sound like a
response to the recent riots, but was actually recorded last year (the edited
clip of the old interview was uploaded on Anderson’s website last week, but has
since been taken down).
By “these people”, Murray meant immigrants. “I don’t want
them here,” he insisted. “I’m perfectly willing to say that, because it needs
to be said.” The police, Murray argued, had lost control of the streets and “if
the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the
public will have to sort this out themselves, and it’ll be very, very brutal.”
The comments might sound like a prescient warning. They sound also like a
dangerous apology for the violence.
It is worth recalling how the disorder began. In response to
the horrific killings of three young girls in a dance class in Southport, many
leapt to the conclusion that the murderer was a Muslim who had arrived on a
small boat across the Channel. This bigoted speculation became the starting
point for insisting the tragedy arose from “uncontrolled immigration” and from
the refusal of immigrants to integrate.
The first “protest” was outside Southport mosque, windows
smashed and a wall demolished. Even after the alleged killer was allowed to be
named as Axel Rudakubana, born in Cardiff to devoutly Christian migrants from
Rwanda, protesters continued to target mosques, set fire to migrant hostels,
assault black or Asian passersby. And many commentators continued to present it
as the inevitable outpouring of rage against the “liberal elite”.
Many of the critics have treated the working-class people as
if they really were boneheaded and bigoted
Liberal commentators have often been chastised, correctly,
for treating working-class voters who back the wrong politicians or have the
wrong views about immigration as racist or ignorant. In response to the
post-Southport riots, many of the critics have themselves treated working-class
people as if they really were boneheaded and bigoted, conflating racism with
working-class anger.
Working-class grievances in towns such as Sunderland or
Stoke are real, from a lack of housing to an Uberised labour market, from an
inability to find NHS dentists to a broken public transport system. But
attacking mosques and migrant hotels, assaulting people possessing the wrong
colour of skin or professing the wrong god, is straightforward bigotry. Or
rather, it reveals how grievances can become warped within a national
conversation obsessed with blaming social problems on immigrants.
For academic Matthew Goodwin, his description of the alleged
killer of the three girls in Southport was simply “the son of immigrants from
Rwanda”.
Even with the tiny amount of information we have, there are
many ways one could describe Rudakubana. As British. As born in Cardiff. Of
Christian heritage. A child actor. As diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
We will undoubtedly learn much more about him during the course of his trial.
For Goodwin, though, only one aspect of Rudakubana’s being
matters. That he was “the son of immigrants”. “Immigrant” has, for some, become
the one-stop explanation for social tragedies and ills.
To grasp how we’ve arrived here, we need to understand a
complex of intertwining developments. The first, paradoxically, is the growth
of a more liberal society, one in which, unlike half a century ago, Britons are
more comfortable with racial differences, only a tiny percentage believing that
to be British you must be white.
Whether in white or minority communities, identitarianism
has entrenched sectarian movements
It might seem an odd moment to talk of a more liberal
Britain. The context of the current upsurge in racism is, however, distinct
from the bigotry of the 1970s and 80s, to which many have drawn parallels.
Britain was then viscerally racist in a way that it no longer is, despite
recent events.
But liberalisation, too, has to be placed in context. Not
that long ago, Britain was congratulating itself for being more relaxed about
immigration than its European neighbours, and for having avoided the rise of
far-right parties as seen in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, even if
Reform partly fills the gap.
Yet, if Britain has forestalled the rise of a true far-right
party, there has nevertheless developed, as in Europe, a reactionary politics
of identity, spawning hostility to Muslims and minorities. The current disorder
is the product of that kind of hostility expressed not through organisations
such as the Rassemblement National in France or the AfD in Germany but in the
form of a more inchoate lashing out.
Sections of the working class have become open to
identitarian arguments because of the way that much of the left – indeed much
of society – has embraced politics of identity at the same time as deprecating
the politics of class. For many today, the frameworks through which they make
sense of their relationship to the world are less political – “liberal” or
“conservative” – than cultural or ethnic – “Muslim”, “white”, “English”.
As social democratic parties have moved away from their
traditional working-class constituencies, leaving many feeling abandoned and
voiceless, some within those constituencies have turned to the language of
identity to find a social anchor. Being “white working class” often feels as
much about the whiteness as the class location.
The riots
should not be treated simply as a matter of law and order, still less be
exploited, as is happening now
Whether in white or minority communities, identitarianism
has entrenched sectarian movements, pushing people to see those beyond the
boundaries of their identity as threats. It has also allowed the far right to
rebrand racism as white identity, a rebranding given legitimacy by mainstream
conservatives who now casually talk of white Europeans “losing their homelands”
and “committing suicide”, of Britons “surrendering their territory”, bemoaning
cities like London becoming less white.
“We are not allowed to talk of immigration,” the critics
claim. We’ve barely stopped talking about immigration over the past decade.
What they really mean is that we don’t talk about it sufficiently in
identitarian terms. There is much to be discussed about immigration, not just
about numbers but also about integration, cohesion and belonging. To frame that
discussion in the language of identity would be disastrous, hindering the
possibilities of rational debates around any of these issues.
At the same time, the riots should not be treated simply as
a matter of law and order, still less be exploited, as is happening now, to
restrict rights further, extending the province of terror laws, expanding
censorship and normalising the use of facial recognition technology.
The issue of liberties is as important as that of
immigration and identity and of the abandonment of working-class communities.
How we deal with the tangle of all three will have long-term consequences for
British politics and society.
Kenan Malik is an
Observer columnist
This column differs from the version published in the
Observer on Sunday 11 August. The opening paragraphs have been changed to
reflect the fact that Douglas Murray’s interview took place last year, not
after the Southport riots
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