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(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
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(de) Italy, UCADI #189 - September 2024 (ca, en, it, pt, tr)[maschinelle Übersetzung]
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