The Ideology Driving Far-Right Riots in the UK

Every Saturday night throughout summer, young people gather in Bristol, England’s historic Castle Park to sit on blankets under the cherry blossom trees, eating ice cream and drinking from cans as reggae, dub and drum ‘n’ bass rattle through tinny speakers. The music competes with the squawks of the city’s seagulls, the roar of traffic leaving the Galleries mall and the strumming of a guitar. Teenagers try out circus skills, while bikes whizz along the river toward the bars and clubs of Old Market.

This weekend, the scene was very different.

Gangs of far-right race rioters stormed the park, passing its commemorative plaque to the city’s anti-fascists who fought in Spain in the 1930s. They were joined by those pulled into the far right via a toxic mix of anti-vaxx, anti-LGBTQ and QAnon conspiracy theories. Punches were thrown at a Black passer-by. Counter-protesters insisted that fascists and racists were not welcome here, before moving south to the river to form a human barrier around a hotel housing migrant people, which the mob attempted to attack.

The scenes in Bristol were repeated across the country. In Rotherham and Tamworth, people who had fled violence and persecution in their own countries hid in hotel rooms as the buildings were set on fire. Asian men were dragged from their cabs to shouts of “kill him,” while Syrian shopkeepers, determined to build a new life away from dictatorship and civil war, watched in despair as their businesses were trashed. By Sunday night, more than 90 people had been arrested, but the violence did not stop, spreading to city after city, to Liverpool and Belfast, Plymouth and London, and beyond.

The inciting incident was ostensibly the tragic killing of three girls, and the stabbing of other women and girls, at a Taylor Swift themed dance class in Southport. British-born teenager Axel Rudakubana has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

The horrific deaths of the three children had nothing to do with the terrorizing of asylum-seeking people and children in hotels, the destruction of Black and Brown people’s businesses, or the attacks on mosques. The street violence that has gripped much of England and Northern Ireland since July 30 instead tells a story of who the modern far right are, how they organize, what they believe, and the coalition of hard-right politicians, commentators and influencers who have empowered this hateful movement to inflict widespread violence against families fleeing fear.

Who is the modern far right?

The early days of the violence were met with suggestions from the new Labour government that the English Defence League (EDL) could be designated as a “proscribed group” – one that is forbidden under UK law due to terrorist connections.

But that suggestion fails to understand two crucial issues. The first, is that the EDL does not really exist. Its co-founder and most famous member, far-right activist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) left in 2013, claiming he had concerns over the “dangers of far-right extremism,” after which the group’s membership dwindled until it ultimately became defunct a few years later.

The second is that the modern far right is no longer made up of organizations with clear hierarchical structures. Instead, it is an international and online-networked movement. It organizes around a shared ideology spread by a core of theorists, leaders and influencers who use their power to put out statements designed to trigger others to commit violence. In this, the influencers commit what is known as “stochastic” or “random violence,” while of course making sure they are not the ones throwing the punches and smashing the glass themselves, and can claim plausible deniability when it comes to incitement.

The movement breaks out into the real world with violent, racist outbursts and attacks. That violence is filmed and live-streamed across its network, with each action used to tell a story that will inspire new followers and, crucially, influence non-members by creating an atmosphere of insecurity and fear.

Following the killings in Southport, an online conspiracy claimed the killer was a Muslim man who had arrived into the UK illegally on a small boat last year. The lie brought together the two tropes driving the modern far right: Islamophobic claims that Muslim men pose a threat to women and girls and manufactured outrage over “fighting age men” arriving in the UK on small boats to live off the taxpayers.

While the false claims about the Southport killings were specific to that incident, the disinformation being shared was built on years of far-right influencers engaged in rhetorical violence against primarily Muslim migrant people. Numerous posts from Robinson’s Telegram channel, for example, discuss how migrant men who “inevitably go on to rape and murder” are “invading” the UK and are “taken in and housed in hotels at taxpayer expense.” He even accuses governments and NGOs of “using little girls to encourage fighting age men to come to the UK who see nothing wrong in diddling kids.”

These messages have gathered pace over the past four years as the former Conservative government ramped up messaging to “stop the boats” and accused migrant people of abusing the system while being “child rapists” and “threats to national security.” In the same time period, growing anti-immigrant rhetoric and a failing policy to house asylum-seeking people in hotels has repeatedly triggered real-life violence and intimidation, mainly outside the hotels housing families.

“Citizen journalists” who made their names as “migrant hunters,” such as Amanda Smith (who uses the social media avatar Yorkshire Rose) and Alan Leggett (Active Patriot), as well as groups including Britain First and Patriotic Alternative, have increasingly targeted hotels, live streaming their “visits” in videos that show activists intimidating residents. Smith wrote how “women and girls are frightened to walk around the area of the (Rotherham) hotel at night,” pushing the message that migrant men are a threat to white women. Even children are positioned as a threat: one Britain First post said that a child in a hotel waving at their cameras was mocking them.

When it was revealed that the individual charged with the Southport murders was a British-born teenager, the far-right narrative shifted to maintain its Islamophobic focus. Robinson and others shared disinformation about Muslim men stabbing people in Stoke-on-Trent, giving a new inciting reason for the riots, despite Staffordshire Police confirming there have been no such stabbings. Footage of the so-called “Muslim Defence League” portrayed British towns as under attack.

The claim that white Britain is under attack by Muslim men is then used to incite the far-right’s ultimate goal: a genocidal civil war.

The ideology

The networked nature of the modern far right means that rather than coalescing around a physical leader, they instead organize around a shared ideology and aim: the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which can be defeated via a race war.

The theory baselessly claims that white people in the Global North are being “replaced” by migrant people from the Global South, aided by feminists repressing the birth rate via abortion and contraception. All of this is supposedly being orchestrated by “cultural Marxists,” a catch-all term that includes liberal elites, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, LGBTQ+ people and Jewish people.

This so-called replacement is commonly referred to as a “white genocide.” To defeat this so-called genocide, the far right wants to incite a civil war – sometimes referred to as Day X or boogaloo – that would result in pure ethno-states. It’s for this reason that the owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, warned that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK, in the wake of the riots. While it is far from inevitable, it is the desired outcome of the global far right, who are looking for an inciting incident to trigger Day X.

When white men in England are dragging Asian men out of cars with shouts of “kill them,” and when white gangs are setting fire to hotels housing families from various countries across the Global South, they are rehearsing the actions they would take during the thing they fantasize about: genocide. When white men attack mosques, they are rehearsing a cultural genocide.

The central replacement/white genocide theory is supplemented by secondary conspiracies designed to provoke anxieties that children are in danger and that parental authority is being usurped by outside, hostile “others”.

Those attending the riots had signs written with “save the children” and “save our children.” The same slogans also appear at anti-vaxx protests and anti-drag queen protests. While seemingly a benign slogan – who doesn’t want to save children? – the message now evokes the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory claiming liberal elites are trafficking and torturing children in Satanic rituals in order to harvest “adrenochrome.”

The demand to “save the children” feeds directly into the overarching Great Replacement conspiracy theory. A hostile “other,” the message reads, is coming to take your children away. Children are the frontline against replacement. To prevent white genocide, men are told that it is their duty to defend their family – and to defend whiteness – through violence.

Strategy

The desired outcome of this violence is to create insecurity, fear and anxiety in the general population, which in turn leads to a collapse in faith in democracy and society.

That this is happening now, less than a month into a Labour government, is important to note. Labour has already cancelled the Rwanda scheme and implemented a statutory instrument to start processing asylum claims that were in a backlog as a result of rule changes in the Illegal Migration Act. Though the party, which has a long history of courting anti-immigrant support, is also acting “tough” on immigration, with raids on businesses and deportation flights to Vietnam and Timor-Leste, Labour is the traditional enemy of the far right. It is associated with progressive values, multiculturalism and “woke.” For the far right to achieve its aims, it has to destroy the electorate’s trust in the Labour Party, in government – and in democracy.

In many ways, the far right is grooming the general public to believe the violence and disorder of the past week – and any future violence – is an inevitable consequence of political failings around immigration. Worse, it is a result of the failure of democracy.

That’s why, following prime minister Keir Starmer’s intervention on Sunday night, where he condemned “far right thuggery,” social media filled up with messages that he was a “traitor to his country,” a “Soros puppet” (an antisemitic trope) running a “radical government.”

Former actor and failed politician Laurence Fox called Starmer a “traitor,” writing that he is on the “side” of “immigrant barbarians” who rape “British girls.” He finished the tweet with the threat of violence: “Fine. Then it’s war.” His tweet echoes Musk’s “civil war is inevitable.”

Following the Southport riot, Reform UK MP Nigel Farage put out a video where he claimed the violence was a reaction to “fear, discomfort, to unease. … 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.”

In his video, Farage hints to the far-right trope of Western decline – an offshoot of the Great Replacement theory. He argues that the government is failing to protect its people. More importantly, he suggests that if the government fails to get “a clue,” it will get worse. The violence, fear and disorder will increase. And then what happens? What happens when violence leads to people no longer trusting the state?

This is part of the modern far right’s strategy: if the state cannot protect us from inevitable violence, it says, the far-right strongman can. Sowing fear, anxiety and distrust in societal norms allows for the far right to achieve its ultimate aim: to replace democracy with a strong man, authoritarian leader who can rule on a war footing.

This is the lesson of the 1930s. It’s one we cannot afford to forget in the 2020s.