The rise of street politics

The riots in towns and cities across the UK over the past few days have seen mosques besieged, black people attacked, police officers assaulted and vehicles and properties set on fire. The trigger for these riots was the violent murder of three young girls and stabbing of several other children and adults in Southport on Monday, but the cause is a combination of anti-immigration grievance, identity politics, far right agitation and false claims on social media. Throw in familiar summer boredom and a taste for trouble amongst a certain segment of angry young men, and the toxic cocktail is complete.

Some of this is not political. There is no ideology in burning a library or smashing up a travel agents. It’s not a coincidence that this outburst has taken place in the gap between the end of the Euros and the start of the football season. Something has to fill those empty weekend afternoons.

But there is a deeper shift going on that has so far has gone unacknowledged, which is that street politics are having a ‘moment’ in Britain right now, and this is the far right’s turn to flex its muscles. The past nine months have seen unprecedented pro-Palestinian marches up and down Britain, the largest of which have attracted hundreds of thousands of people. There has been endless debate over the nature of these protests, many of which have featured, from a minority of marchers, antisemitic placards, support for Hamas, calls for Intifada, and so on - with little effort by the organisers to remove them.

I’ve written in the past that the problem with these anti-Israel marches is found in the hateful ideas they propagate and normalise, rather than in the behaviour of the protestors themselves, who are mostly well-behaved and not violent (you only have to look at this week’s riots to see the difference). Whether police and prosecutors could do more to deal with the antisemitism and support for terrorism on display is a fair question: they would argue that they already arrest plenty of people. Nonetheless, a compelling narrative has spread that these pro-Palestine marches represent an Islamist assertion of strength: “mobs rife with anti-Jewish racists and terrorist sympathisers” who have seized control of the streets from a supine and cowardly police.

During the same period, the authorities seem powerless to prevent Just Stop Oil from their disruptive direct action stunts, including blocking major roads, despite imposing heavy prison sentences on some of their leading activists; while Palestine Action’s destruction of property they claim is linked to Israel gets ever more brazen.

This is the broader context to the riots this week. They are, in part, an expression of the nativist, anti-immigrant right asserting itself in reaction to what they see as months of Muslim and far left protestors acting with impunity. There is an element of territorialism, of a literal contest for control of the streets, in what is happening. This isn’t the whole explanation, or even a major one, but it’s there, in the background.

This is not to say that the pro-Palestine movement is somehow to blame for far right violence - it would be quite wrong to draw that conclusion. Nor are they exactly analogous to each other. Rather, it is that populist and radical movements, whatever their background and specific cause, share the idea that mainstream politics is out of touch, Parliament cannot or will not address people’s genuine concerns, and street politics is where the action is. And they feed off each other’s energy to generate their own activism.

Commentators trying to argue that these riots are neither racist nor far right may as well whistle in the wind. People intuitively know what a far right, racist mob looks like, and gangs of angry white men lobbing bricks at the police, looting shops, setting fire to an asylum seeker hotel and beating up lone black people leave little room for doubt.

From what little we know about the horrific stabbings in Southport, they do not appear to have anything to do with Islamist extremism at all, and the choice of protestors on Tuesday to target the local mosque was entirely a product of their own pre-existing prejudices.

What is striking is how easily an anti-Muslim discourse broadened into a more general anti-immigrant politics. Once it was established that the suspect, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, is not a Muslim, the focus switched to the fact that he is the child of immigrants from Rwanda, as if being a British-born child of immigrant parents somehow explains his alleged crime. The implication is, first, that immigrants bring a specific danger to society that otherwise would not exist - as if child murder wouldn’t happen were it not for immigrants; and second, that people’s behaviour is determined by their inherent racial and ethnic characteristics, regardless of whether they are born in this country or not. It’s racism at its most fundamental. As Shashank Joshi, the defence editor of The Economist, put it: “For these people we will never be truly British.”

There is an important and entirely valid debate to be had over immigration, but the smart and sensible response from people who want much tighter controls would be to condemn this violence as strongly as possible. The fact that many haven’t is the same dynamic as the leaders of the pro-Palestinian movement who refuse to acknowledge or condemn the antisemitism and extremism within that world. The determination to either deny or excuse things that are obvious to everyone is so short-sighted and ultimately self-damaging and yet happens repeatedly, on left and right.

Needless to say, and to answer the age-old question, this isn’t good for the Jews. Street politics is, by its nature, confrontational and divisive. The primary focus of this far right movement may be immigration and the Muslim community, but you are never too far away from open neo-Nazism. Tommy Robinson, who has done more than most to stoke this violence, waves his Israeli flag when it suits him, but he has a long record of associating with antisemites and has himself indulged in antisemitic conspiracism. And the Great Replacement Theory, so common on the far right, ultimately blames Jews for immigration anyway.

British Jews ought to know what this feels like, because we have an eerily similar episode in our own history. Back in 1947, coincidentally also in the first weekend of August, a set of brutal, shocking killings (in this case, of two British soldiers in Palestine) dominated the front pages, and mobs of angry men, egged on by well-known fascist agitators, decided to take retribution for the killings by attacking Jewish communities around Britain. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Manchester, Glasgow, London, Hull, Warrington and elsewhere, shop windows were smashed, people beaten up and a synagogue was burnt. I expect it did not look and feel dissimilar to the violence we have seen this week.

That may feel like ancient history now, but the wave of antisemitism since October 7 has left many British Jews wondering how safe this country is for them, and whether it is still the same Britain they thought they knew. I imagine something similar is likely to be happening in Black and Asian communities right now. It’s an historic and contemporary parallel - and a basis for empathy - that we ought to acknowledge.