Trump supporters before entering the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Image credit: Flickr/Brett Davis (CC BY-NC 2.0)
On July 29, a tragic stabbing in Southport, England, which left three young girls dead, sparked shock and dismay across the United Kingdom. While Southport residents held a vigil the following evening to mourn the deaths of six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar, conspiracy theories about the alleged identity of the attacker were already circulating on right-wing internet channels.
Members of the Southport community claim their grief was “hijacked” by far-right forces, who immediately cobbled together a false story that the attacker was a Syrian Muslim asylum seeker who had recently arrived in the country. Outrage and uproar ensued among a small but mobilised group of so-called “anti-immigration” protesters in Southport who met on July 30 to attack a local mosque. Hoping to stem the violence, a judge took the unusual approach of revealing that the attacker was in fact a 17-year-old British citizen born in Cardiff, Wales, to Christian parents who had moved to the UK from Rwanda.
This revelation did not end the unrest.
Although the British and American media have labelled the perpetrators of these riots as “pro-British protesters”, their actions so far have been more akin to domestic terrorism: they have thrown bricks through mosque windows, shouted anti-Islam slogans, set cars on fire, attacked both local residents and police officers, and attempted to destroy asylum seekers’ accommodation. A video circulating online shows a modern-day lynch mob randomly attacking a black man in the street in broad daylight. Right-wing internet groups have compiled a list of over 30 “target” locations linked to the British immigration system, and many rioters even attempted to set fire to a local hotel housing asylum seekers.
After several days, Keir Starmer, the new British Prime Minister, spoke out in favor of dismissing the rioters as “right-wing thugs” and deploying a special police force to keep the peace. The “protests” have also diminished in size, as anti-racist groups, churches and entire communities have mobilized early to the protest sites and have often prevented riots from occurring in the first place. However, since the state did not react forcefully, the rioters had planned another 40 actions for August 10. To date, no evidence has emerged that the original attacker had any links to Islam or the British immigration system.
Several British politicians and media outlets have attempted to shift the blame to social media companies, arguing that such unrest is merely a “negative externality of social media.” Starmer took to the podium again on Friday, August 9, to call for a closer examination of the country’s social media platforms and their role in spreading misinformation and hateful content. While it is a valid and fair criticism that social media managers put the profit made from inflammatory content above public safety – as demonstrated by the X algorithm recommending the false identity of the attacker to its users – a growing far-right sentiment in Western society is primarily to blame for this chaos.
When Starmer’s victory in the 2024 election returned parliamentary power to Labour, many liberal news outlets celebrated his victory as a triumph over fascism, as the Conservative Party lost almost 20 percent of its 2019 vote share. What many polls and pundits fail to mention, however, is that Reform UK, the far-right British nationalist party, saw its vote increase by 12.3 percent over the same period and now holds 14.3 percent of the total vote.
Parallels to right-wing extremist violence
This shift to the right mirrors the political landscape in the United States. In many ways, Reform UK’s growing influence reflects the same shift in conservative voters that saw formerly “moderate” Republicans rally around Donald Trump and his overt racism. But the racist views of these rioters – like those in Southport, like those who breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and like those in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 – are not widespread. They are simply loud. And the proliferation of such racist ideas is in part due to the failure of mainstream liberal commentators, organizations and media to recognize this distinction.
Take Kamala Harris, for example: As the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris proudly supported President Joe Biden’s southern border policy during the campaign, which was a blatant continuation of the far-right policies Trump originally implemented. Today, she is the leading face of the same party that is campaigning on the “no more children in cages” slogan at the border in the 2020 election to position itself morally against Trump. Yet the administration she leads has merely continued that policy, now referring to the cages as “migrant facilities for children.” At a recent campaign event in Atlanta, Harris even tried to outdo Trump on the immigration issue from the right, claiming, “Donald Trump has talked big about the border. But he’s not following through on his words.”
The failure of liberal or so-called “progressive” parties to seriously address far-right violence has only normalized it. The rioters arrested and charged in Southport reacted in the same way as those arrested at the Capitol on January 6: genuine confusion. The rioters’ lack of civility – they filmed themselves committing crimes, destroyed property with their faces uncovered, etc. – suggests that they are somewhat comfortable with their racist statements. People who attacked police officers as “traitors” on January 6 were called “very fine people” by Trump for engaging in the same behavior in Charlottesville a few years earlier. Usually, they can get away with this kind of violence unless there is a sensational situation. Far-right violence is perfectly acceptable among the US ruling class.
In contrast, Harris wasted no second in calling a July 24 protest in Washington, DC against Netanyahu’s visit to Congress “despicable” and “anti-Semitic.” Israel’s genocide in Gaza is recognized worldwide as one of the most horrific, brutal and deliberate humanitarian crises in world history, yet the Democratic Party figurehead has had harsher words for protesters than for genocidal perpetrators. Meanwhile, a wave of anti-Arab violence is sweeping the United States as a direct result of the Biden-Harris administration’s policy of unconditional support for Israel.
The same dynamic has played out with regard to mass migration in the US and the UK. Politicians and the media place moral responsibility and condemnation on the millions of migrants who are leaving their countries out of economic desperation, but there is no condemnation of the politicians and corporate hawks who created this desperation in the first place.
This moral contradiction reveals the nature of politics under capitalism: liberal, even “progressive” parties will always capitulate to the wishes and dictates of the right because they cannot offer real solutions. A real, progressive solution would get to the heart of the problem: stopping the imperialism abroad that creates the conditions for migration. At the same time, investing in communities at home and ensuring that everyone’s needs are met through a socialist system could resolve the tensions that lead to racist violence based on the false assumption that resources are scarce. The US and the UK are two of the richest countries in the world, and both have more than enough resources to adequately absorb an influx of economic migrants.
Yet when real solutions are replaced by hateful or empty rhetoric, it shows that the ruling classes in both the US and the UK are loyal to profit above all else. Under the logic of capitalism, rich politicians and their corporate lobbyists have shown time and again that they are happy to tolerate race riots, burning mosques, desperate migrants and a whole host of other societal problems as long as their profits remain undisturbed. When liberal or left-wing parties refuse to take a combative stance in favour of a real solution, they are essentially saying: “There is no way forward other than fascism.”
The real problem: capitalism and imperialism
The rise of right-wing extremist violence, particularly against migrants, will undoubtedly continue to grow in countries like the US and the UK until a mass movement develops that is able to fight back against the real cause of their distress: capitalism and imperialism. The ruling class’s refusal to confront climate change, poverty, racism, imperialism and many other societal ills underscores the fact that they put their personal wealth above the social order. But there are real solutions to these problems.
We may commend Starmer for his relatively tough words towards the Southport rioters – albeit in contrast to other politicians in the US and the UK – but people in Britain know that these are empty words until he takes an iron fist against the far right. The majority of the British population has made it clear through counter-protests that they do not stand for the hatred of the far right. And by sheer numbers, these counter-protesters have been able to end racist unrest before it even began, with minimal or no violence.
All of this shows that both ruling class parties, liberal and conservative, will allow a downward spiral into fascism as long as it keeps their profits intact, and that it is the duty of ordinary working people to build a movement that shows a different way forward.
