A - I n f o s

a multi-lingual news service by, for, and about anarchists **
News in all languages
Last 30 posts (Homepage) Last two weeks' posts Our archives of old posts

The last 100 posts, according to language
Greek_ 中文 Chinese_ Castellano_ Catalan_ Deutsch_ Nederlands_ English_ Francais_ Italiano_ Polski_ Português_ Russkyi_ Suomi_ Svenska_ Türkurkish_ The.Supplement

The First Few Lines of The Last 10 posts in:
Castellano_ Deutsch_ Nederlands_ English_ Français_ Italiano_ Polski_ Português_ Russkyi_ Suomi_ Svenska_ Türkçe_
First few lines of all posts of last 24 hours

Links to indexes of first few lines of all posts of past 30 days | of 2002 | of 2003 | of 2004 | of 2005 | of 2006 | of 2007 | of 2008 | of 2009 | of 2010 | of 2011 | of 2012 | of 2013 | of 2014 | of 2015 | of 2016 | of 2017 | of 2018 | of 2019 | of 2020 | of 2021 | of 2022 | of 2023 | of 2024

Syndication Of A-Infos - including RDF - How to Syndicate A-Infos
Subscribe to the a-infos newsgroups

(en) France, UCL AL #352 -Spotlight: Fake news and racism in the UK The far right feeds on hate (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Date Thu, 10 Oct 2024 07:56:07 +0300


Racist riots broke out in several cities in England and Northern Ireland from 30 July to 12 August 2024. Rioters targeted mosques, hotels hosting asylum seekers, Muslim-run businesses and refugee shelters, and attacked people because of their skin colour or supposed religion. ---- This violence took place following a knife attack that took the lives of three young girls in Southport on 30 July, in the south of the country. Many rumours then spread about the religion and origin of the alleged attacker: he was a Muslim asylum seeker. These rumours were spread by far-right figures.

According to the police, one of the main instigators of the riots is Tommy Robinson. Banned from Twitter in 2018 and reinstated by Elon Musk after his acquisition of the platform, he is the founder and former leader of the English Defense League, a far-right group inspired by hooliganism. This organization took advantage of the vagueness of the affair by orchestrating an entire hate campaign.

Far-right violence is supported by legal fronts such as Reform UK, a party that was built on promoting Brexit. Anti-immigration, this party presents the same strategy as the RN by denying that it belongs to the far right while seeking to conquer power through legal means. Nigel Farage, its leader, had argued that the wave of violence was due to "massive and uncontrolled immigration".

Reform UK obtained 14% of the vote and 4 seats in the July elections, taking advantage of the collapse of the right. The latter have maintained this situation, the conservatives have not stopped talking in recent years about an "invasion" of migrants while the right-wing press maintains the same anxiety-provoking discourse of the danger of "mass immigration".

The electoral campaign had placed the question of immigration at the center of the debates. The Labour opposition accused the government of being too "lax" on immigration and promised to intensify expulsions. Street and government fascism clearly expressed their union shortly before the riots: during a patriotic rally on July 27, Robinson asked the crowd who had voted for Farage's party and the rioters massively raised their hands. Robinson had gathered 15,000 people that day in Trafalgar Square.

Anti-racist demonstrations took place in many English cities to counter the fascist wave.
LimeSpiked. CC BY 2.0
Electionist racism on the right and the left
The riots are no longer confined to a few far-right groups. The bourgeois press maintains the vagueness and fear by distilling the idea that these attacks are neither directed nor organized by fascists. A majority of the rioters are not identified fascist activists, but young and old people from the surrounding regions and cities.

The reality of the slogans uttered, the people and places targeted demonstrate that these attacks are orchestrated by fascist militias who seek to draw the white working classes into a white supremacist movement through their racist violence. The far right can thus take advantage of the attacks as an opportunity to recruit, radicalize and mass.

The heart of the ideology behind these riots is the idea of borders. The propaganda of the English far right takes up the idea of the great replacement, a conspiracy theory claiming that non-Europeans are settling en masse in European countries in order to replace the population already present[1].

Keir Starmer is nothing other than a zealous servant of capital, ready to betray the working class to appease the interests of the powerful. Under his rule, the Labour Party has abandoned all pretense of the left, becoming a simple cog in the oppressive machine of the bourgeois state.
Chatham House Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
The reconstruction of a mass anti-fascism
While following a policy of mass arrests, Keir Starmer's new government takes the riots from social networks and focuses the problem on fake news, depoliticizing and legitimizing violence against Muslims.

The anti-fascist movement is restructuring and rethinking its modes of action. A week of counter-protests followed the riots at the sites targeted by the attacks. Led by the Stand Up To Racism collective, which brings together anti-fascists and activists, the primary goal of the counter-protests is first to show the strength of the anti-fascist movement in order to counter the visibility of the rioters.

These actions took place in a climate of uncertainty about the expected number of demonstrators, but it was a risk that paid off because no violence took place on the night of August 7, which broke the momentum of the far right. A national day of demonstrations followed on August 10 and several weekends of mobilization on August 15. The aim was to mass again and again and send the fascists back to what they are, "a small hateful minority".

To do this, the movement is reviving a history of victorious anti-fascist struggles, for example Cable Street in 1936 where anti-fascists and residents had pushed back the blackshirts. The movement is not limited to self-defense but also aims for broad visibility and attempts to unite isolated communities.

Love Music, Hate Fascism
The mobilizations have led to the revival of Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR), an organization inspired by Rock against racism (RAR) that fought the National Front in the late 1970s. Initiated in London, LMHR proposes the organization of concerts in the cities where the riots took place. Now, the strategy is to build an anti-racist and anti-Islamophobia movement that is part of the long term, given that far-right violence will not diminish without a united mass mobilization. Large anti-fascist mobilizations have taken place in response to the riots, however in this context they appear as a belated reaction to an explosion of violence that had been brewing for a long time.

The organization of the response took about a week, a time that is both very short for a mobilization of this magnitude and very long given the violence that was perpetrated. In this respect, the need to rely on well-established antifascist committees in local communities is a strategy to invest in. This allows for a rapid response to fascist violence and to foster solidarity between the antifascist movement and members of local communities. Consequently, mass mobilizations are a beginning but are not an end in themselves. They must be thought of as "rallying points for further actions."

Validate
[1]"Argumenter: contre le fantôme du grand remplacement," Alternative libertaire, no. 323, January 2022.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Fake-news-et-racisme-au-Royaume-Uni-L-extreme-droite-se-nourrit-de-la-haine
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en
A-Infos Information Center