Trevor Fisher draws some lessons from the far right summer riots
On 29th July a commuter in Kent made a disturbing discovery while peeling off a National Front sticker at Dunton Green train station near Sevenoaks. Carefully concealed, a razor blade had been stuck down so that peeling off the sticker risked cutting their fingers (Daily Express). This tactic was widely used by the Front in the 1970s, against the Anti Nazi League. The Dunston Green sticker presumably had been hoarded for half a century till racism was surging again. It is surging now.
The National Front is a relic of the past, and the current upsurge is very different from the era when John Tyndale boasted “We are building a well oiled Nazi machine”. The return of street violence owes something to the English Defence League, though the EDL itself is said to have disbanded, despite there being a website running under its name. However, the main contribution of the EDL is likely to have been the rebirth of street rioting as a largely English phenomenon. The riots following the Southport Murders have been almost wholly confined to England, apart from a significant upsurge in Northern Ireland, mainly in Belfast: a city with a separate tradition of destructive brutality. The EDL and its leader with the fake name Tommy Robinson had a tradition of street fighting at football marches, and attracts mainly young men, though the rioters have drawn in many middle class actors.
The first lesson from the current riots is that there appears to be no one organization on the far right which dominates in the model of past groups like the National Front or EDL. Hope Not Hate wrote at the start of the rioting “there is no single organizer. Many have the support of the organized far right but appear locally led…. Most of the planned events are more broadly focused, expressive of a wider hostility to multiculturalism, anti-Muslim and anti migrant prejudice, as well as a visceral streak of populist, anti government sentiment”. A key issue is as HNH identified “most of these protests are being planned organically, often by local people, who are plugged in to decentralized far right networks on line”. The “shared slogans, language and iconography owes to the fact that their organizers are often active in overlapping online spaces”.
The second lesson is that the major tactical change in the last twenty years has been the rise of the internet. Even the British National Party of two decades ago worked through local leaders, though I recall seeing Nick Griffin (BNP leader) and thugs in a council election campaign in Stoke on Trent at the time they had nine councilors in the city. Tommy Robinson and the EDL, which did exploit social media, seems to have had no locally organized structure. EDL may have closed down, but Robinson can and has got thousands out on London marches using social media. During this summer’s riots Robinson (fake name) was not even in Britain, but tapped away his messages on a computer lying on a sun bed in a five star hotel in a tourist hot spot.
This is the era of the online influencer, with Elon Musk running incendiary messages about Civil War futures from America. Yet Elon Musk is not a lone activist, because his messages are identical with stuff coming out of the softer elements of the alt right, notably GB News. I would not call GB News extremist, but it is part of the wider problem of misinformation and recycling slogans which Musk has been doing. This month Musk was using the slogan Two Tier Keir from the start of his ranting.
Supporting those on the British right who believe the police are soft on Muslim activists.
It was notable that within an hour of an incident in a pub in Birmingham, in which Muslim men attacked people coming out of the pub in the belief they were hard right, Musk had commented on this and was on the front page of the Birmingham Mail using what must be inside knowledge.
So there are networks which exist and clearly need to be tracked. The Telegram website, which may have Putin connections is used by the organizers to communicate where trouble is pending. Assessment of what is happening and how to counter has hardly begun, and social media fails to have even a token attempt to regulate.
It is also obvious that there are cultural differences which are reflecting wider patterns. The vast majority of riots have been in England and the lack of riots in Scotland and Wales gives a sense that devolution may be a positive influence. Northern Ireland has seen serious trouble, with the worst brutality being in Belfast. Attacks on Muslim businesses have been exceptionally destructive, which may indicate paramilitary involvement.
What we are seeing is not a revival of the old far right. Hiding razor blades under stickers is not going to be a widespread activity and the National Front is not undergoing a renaissance. What we face is something new and influencers are using the internet to great effect. The most urgent need is a forum to bring the various organizations together to examine the key developments and how to respond. After the Anti Nazi League faded, a variety of small organizations developed. This was not a problem for tackling the BNP twenty years ago, but is a problem now. While the Anti Nazi League is even deader than the National Front, a broad and inclusive national forum is now essential to focus a multi-front analysis and debate.
After the Walthamstow demonstration on 7th August, Jo Cardwell, the chief steward of the biggest anti fascist mobilization so far in the crisis, said “this is a scale of attack which we have not seen before”. The anti-fascist demonstration in central London on 10th August mobilized thousands to peacefully protest with little sign of the far right. Perhaps in the 1970s the scale of attack was comparable, but not since. As I write, the far right is being countered by mass mobilisation on the streets. But the far right is more numerous on social media. With the murderer of the girls in Southport yet to come to trial, the summer is not yet over.