On riots and replacement

We warned that this is who they are

This week we have seen outbreaks of organised, racist, far-right violence across cities in the UK, starting with a riot in Southport on Tuesday night and escalating over the weekend, with 30 cities and towns being descended on by far-right thuggery over the weekend.

The inciting moment was the horrific killings and stabbings of little girls at a Taylor Swift themed dance class in Southport. The case is now sub-judice, so I won’t be commenting for obvious reasons but the facts are these: a 17-year-old boy named Axel Rudakubana has been charged with murder and attempted murder. The judge lifted reporting restrictions on naming the teenager seeing as he is imminently turning 18.

The names of the three little girls are Bebe King, six; Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven; and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine.

The horror and heartbreak of these killings is almost too much to contemplate. Even writing their names makes my eyes fill up with tears. We must remember their names. Their precious memories.

Social media quickly filled up with disinformation that the killer was a Muslim immigrant who came to the UK on a boat – in fact, he is of Rwandan heritage and born here. The lie took hold, and a far right riot descended on Southport, and then the riots spread across the country.

I’m not here simply to report on what you have already seen reported elsewhere, by people with eye-witness knowledge. I would urge you to follow HOPE not hate to get the details of how these riots unfolded.

Instead, I want to discuss the ways in which the modern far right is organised and what these riots tell us about that organising.

Organisation?

As the violence took hold across the UK, with police officers under attack and Citizen Advice Bureau offices set on fire, there was a lot of suggestion that this was the fault of the English Defence League - Tommy Robinson’s (hereafter I will refer to him by his real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) old group.

However, the EDL does not in any meaningful way exist anymore, with Yaxley-Lennon having parted ways with the group in the mid-2010s.

The modern far right does have its groups: Patriotic Alternative and its multiple regional branches; Britain First. But the days of groups of (mostly) men meeting in pub backrooms following the instructions of a known leader are over. This is a networked movement, organising and existing online, sharing and telegraphing an ideology. Powerful influencers within the network then telegraph the need to gather in person, sharing locations for physical activity such as demos and protests. Take, for example, “Danny Tommo”, Yaxley-Lennon’s right-hand man, putting out a call that “every city has to go up. Get prepared. Be ready … We have to show them we have had enough.”

Those same influencers warn against taking part in actual violence. For example, on Saturday, Yaxley-Lennon put out a video saying that protests should show discipline, and not attack police. They do this because obviously inciting violence is a crime.

But because their ideology is rooted in violence, and because the modern far-right aims to convert Reform and hard right Tory voters to a strategy of tension and resistance to government, and because of a toxic combination of race hate, coke and beer, and male entitlement, violence ensues.

What do I mean by a networked movement? I mean that rather than existing in a shared physical space, they exist in a shared ideological space made up of a central conspiracy theory that is fuelled by disinformation, and wider conspiracist slogans. That ideology is telegraphed across social media channels including Telegram and Discord, meaning that when events like those of this week happen, they have an international reach, with actors in the US, Canada and - yes - Russia, helping to push disinformation and conspiracy that fuel further violence.

The ideology

What is the ideology the modern far right telegraphs through its networked movement?

Central is the belief in the Great Replacement – that is:

• White people in the global north are being replaced by migration from the global south

• Replacement is being aided by feminists repressing the white birth rate through abortion and contraception

• And it’s all organised by shadowy elites (Jewish people)

This is the founding theory of the modern far right, who believe that replacement is white genocide. The response is to reverse replacement, ranging from what US far right figure Richard Spencer called “ethical ethnic cleansing” (no such thing) to a genocidal race war.

This last response explains why we saw, for example, white men shouting “kill them” as they dragged minority ethnic people from their cars. It’s why in Bristol, white men rounded on a black man in Castle Park, throwing punches in an act of violent race hate. The modern far right want to incite a race war that leads to pure ethno-states, through forced deportation and genocide.

If you have any doubts that the Great Replacement conspiracy theory is not behind the far right riots this week, please feel free to take a look at my Twitter mentions.

The US provides a formative example of how Great Replacement conspiracy and fears of a white genocide demands a war-like response. The violence on 6 January 2021 was part of the modern far right’s shared belief in the coming “storm”, of “day X” or “boogaloo” – that an inciting moment will trigger a race war that will defeat replacement and entrench white male supremacy. This is what they believe.

I said that this was the central conspiracy fuelled by disinformation and other conspiratorial slogans. To come to that latter point: the far-right has effectively weaponised attacks on children as a recruitment tool. Many of the riots featured placards emblazoned with the message “save the children” and “save our children” – a slogan that no longer evokes the int dev charity but which does evoke the QAnon conspiracy.

The QAnon conspiracy played on people’s very real and justified fears of child abuse to groom families into the far right. Similarly, anti-vaxx movements claimed that vaccines et al were attacks on children and harming children – that parents who vaccinated their kids were harming their families.

The far right is aware that the majority of people, even right-wing people, are not that interested in white genocide and a race war. But everyone is distressed by the senseless killings of children. And every parent’s greatest fear is their child being abused and victimised. Child abuse is real, children being murdered happens and is real. The far right has manipulated adults’ very real and justified fear of child abuse, and turned it into a race issue, blaming migrant people for abuse of women and girls as opposed to men.

(interestingly, on Twitter I got sent “evidence” of high rates of migrant crime: the figures of foreign national offenders in the prison system, which ignores how many of those people are in prison for immigration offences, in part because the government has criminalised immigration in a big way. The sender was American.)

Disinformation fuels the “save the children” message. In QAnon, the disinformation was wild claims that elites were trafficking children (which they do! in real life! you don’t need to create a wild conspiracy theory you just need to tackle men’s violence against women and girls!) to harvest adrenochrome. For anti-vaxxers, the disinformation was health-based. And in this latest instance, the disinformation was that migrant men coming over on boats are child-abusers (so many men are child abusers I am sorry to tell you! Including white men who hate migrant people!).

The same tactic was applied before the Knowsley riots: that an Afghan man had sexually harassed a schoolgirl (the first time I was sexually harassed was by white men in a car when I was a schoolgirl in my school uniform!). Already, there has been disinformation pushed online that a man was stabbed during unrest on Friday - creating a further inciting incident to encourage more violence.

The final part of the conspiracist puzzle is that the media is covering up incidents of migrant violence to try and control the population. This fuels a belief that “elites” are trying to control the population and fuel replacement by lying to the public about the “harms” of multiculturalism and immigration.

Strategy

With the conspiracy embedded, and the ideology shared and telegraphed across its network, the strategy is violence designed to create fear and insecurity.

The far right wants to create an atmosphere of fear and unease. It wants people to live in an elevated state of tension, to be afraid of migrant people, of LGBTQ+ people, of the “other”. It wants to create distrust in democracy: the belief that our leaders cannot protect us. Attacking the police is to signal that law and order cannot protect us, that it’s too weak. Attacking charities is to signal that social infrastructure cannot defend us.

Importantly, the violence is claimed as inevitable - a message promoted by mainstream voices which we will come to below. It is positioned as an inevitable response to an attack on “our” population, “our” way of life.

With faith in societal norms shaken, broken, trashed, space is created for authoritarianism. For a strongman to step in, and liberate people from their fears and to stop the violence that no one else is able to protect “us” from.

Mainstream

Unfortunately, we have to look at how mainstream politicians and media outlets have helped to create fertile ground for far-right hate. Language, rhetoric and policy-making has fuelled the rise of the far right in the UK.

From claiming that those who set fire to police vans and attack minority-ethnic taxi drivers as having “legitimate concerns”, to claiming that the judge not naming a minor accused of murder as an establishment “cover up”, and refusing to call far right violence what it so clearly is, there has been a concerted effort this week to normalise hate and violent racism. That normalisation is part of making the violence inevitable.

This week, GB News – which lest we forget counts former Tory MPs/hedge fund millionaires among its presenters and is bankrolled by another hedge fund manager – asked “are the left elite to blame for the violence in Southport”. This is such an awful example of how far-right ideology has gone mainstream: that shadowy liberal elites are to blame for any and all societal issues, that ordinary people and communities are under attack by the left, and that violence is the reasonable response to such an attack.

Polls such as this, as well as politicians and influential voices have helped to legitimise the actions of the far right. Another example: Farage saying the far right is a reaction to “fear, discomfort, to unease … I don’t support street violence, I don’t support thuggery … but I am worried, not just about the events in Southport, but about societal decline that is happening in our country … this Prime Minister does not have a clue … we need to start getting tough … Because what you’ve seen on the streets of Hartlepool, of London, of Southport, is nothing to what could happen over the next few weeks. Let’s have proper law and order. But Mr Starmer, just to blame a few far right thugs, to say that’s the root of our problems, doesn’t work.”

There’s so much to break down in this short clip. The mention of “decline” is a key tenet of far right ideology - that the west is in “decline” and that decline is being fuelled by migration and progress (feminism, LGBTQ+ rights etc). That the street violence is about “fear, discomfort and unease” – that it is an inevitable outcome of democracy failing, of law and order failing, of politics failing. As I outlined above, this is part of the modern far right’s strategy: if the government cannot protect us from inevitable violence, the far right strongman can. And of course, the threat: the threat that if we don’t cave in to the demands of Farage and his followers, worse is to come.

But the problems started before this week. On the riots, people held up signs demanding we “stop the boats” and demanded we “get our country back”. These are the slogans of the mainstream – a mainstream that has happily allowed racist and anti-migrant hate to build and build, in order to deflect from their own failings.

The populist right in this country has spent the last decade or more flirting with the far right, pandering to its hateful ideology through scapegoating migrant people and blaming migrant people for everything from the housing crisis to traffic jams. Rather than fix the multiple issues that the UK faces, it has spent millions of pounds on ludicrous and ineffective anti-migrant policies, that were doomed to fail. Those failures have led to people who hold anti-migrant views to claim their views are not listened to, their concerns are not taken seriously. This in turn is weaponised by far right movements to say the government has betrayed you, it has not listened to you, it has failed you. Which loops you back to the above strategy point.

The ways in which the populist right – the “elite” in the UK, such as hard right Tories and Reform MPs – have courted the “mob”, i.e. the grassroots far right, has led to this moment, and those MPs and media outlets that have pushed this ideology need to take responsibility for their role in this.

I remember starkly the day I realised that Hannah Arendt’s theory of the alliance of the elite and the mob had come to the UK. It was in September 2019, when Parliament was unlawfully prorogued by Boris Johnson and far right protesters on Whitehall were chanting the then-PM’s name.

That was five years ago. And here we are.

One last thing. None of the events of the past few days have had anything to do with the deaths of three little girls. Whatever the far right tells you, they don’t care about men’s violence against women and girls. If they did, they would not commit these acts of violence against communities where women and girls live.

Their names are all that should matter. I hate how this week has become about more violent men, and not about their little lives.

Bebe King

Elsie Dot Stancombe

Alice Dasilva Aguiar.

We remember you. Keep shining. Keep dancing.

Obligatory book plug

There is a lot more in my book about the alliance of the elite and the mob, and how far right conspiracy operates. Buy it here.

What I’m loving

I’ve finally got into podcasts. So rather than a “read” I want to recommend two podcasts by Tortoise.

Master, the allegations against Neil Gaiman by Paul Caruana Galizia and Rachel Johnson

Who trolled Amber? by Alexi Mostros and Xavier Greenwood

What I’m reading

Where they lie by Claire Coughlan

Come and get it by Kiley Reid

which led me to re-read Such a fun age

And I have just started War & Peace & War by Andrew North, and The Helsinki Affair by Anna Pitoniak.

What I’m watching

I watched The Shining after 30 years of being too scared to watch it having seen a clip in the film Twister in 1994. And The Seventh Seal.

That’s it for now. Stay safe. Fight the far right. No paseran.