THE racist riot in Southport following the murderous knife attack on a children’s dance class speaks both to the unscrupulousness and mobilising reach of Britain’s fascist right.
Locals are still coming to terms with Monday’s horrific killings, which have so far claimed the lives of three little girls, with others still in critical condition. A suspect is in custody, an investigation is ongoing. Nobody interested in justice for the victims would be muddying the waters with false rumours. Police stress that unfounded speculation about the attacker is deeply unhelpful.
Fascists are not interested in justice. One of the few things we do know about the suspect is that he lived in the village of Banks in Lancashire, and that he was born in Cardiff.
Yet far-right rabble-rouser “Tommy Robinson,” again abroad having skipped bail, was promoting nonsense on the X social media site from the off about the attack being linked to immigration. Other lies were quickly spreading across social media: a fake name of the supposed perpetrator; the false claim that he was an asylum-seeker, arrived by boat.
The ensuing violence was planned: local MP Patrick Hurley points out that the rioters, many apparently linked to fascist group Patriotic Alternative, arrived by train. Their contempt for grieving local residents underlined by their demolition of garden walls to get bricks to lob at people, they made immediately to attack the mosque—a window of which was broken—while setting fires and assaulting police.
Several things are clear. One, the prominent public figures who preach to the far right will seize on any tragedy or violent incident to ignite racial conflict.
This does not just go for criminal loudmouths like Tommy Robinson. The entirely wrong speculation by Nigel Farage, now an MP, that clashes in the Harehills area of Leeds earlier this month were linked to the “politics of the [Indian] subcontinent” fall into the same category. Two other Reform UK MPs, Richard Tice and Lee Anderson, spoke out in similarly incendiary fashion in defence of a suspended police officer who stamped on a Muslim man’s head at Manchester airport.
The far right certainly had a parliamentary presence before in the form of numerous Conservative MPs: but a Reform presence in Parliament lets MPs off the admittedly threadbare leash of Establishment Conservatism to pump more poison into the national discourse.
Second, the criminalisation of asylum-seekers—the “stop the boats” narrative depicting refugees as a threat, their incarceration in barracks and prison barges, the now thankfully scrapped Rwanda deportation scheme—has grim consequences.
Vulnerable people who have faced torture, abuse or trafficking for modern slavery, or been bereaved in wars often fuelled by our government, are now fair game to be blamed for unspeakable crimes committed by others.
Third, the most virulent and politically prominent expression of racism today is Islamophobia. These brutes who descended on Southport know nothing about Monday’s attacker, but immediately attacked a mosque in their bid to terrorise Muslim communities.
And fourth, the far right can mobilise, and fast. The numbers attending Tommy Robinson’s London march last Saturday were one warning, but the ability to ship in a riot at short notice in a Merseyside town is alarming, and in certain circumstances could spark serious communal violence. Already more fascist mobilisations are planned.
Labour’s “sandcastle” majority on a record low vote combined with Reform’s surge prompted warnings that unless it delivers on pay and public services, we could see a France-level fascist electoral threat in five years.
Southport is a reminder that fascists don’t wait for elections. The mayhem and terror they spread is their true element. Their efforts to build a social base must be confronted and beaten.
That will not happen without a mass anti-racist movement rooted in a movement for a real alternative to our social and economic crisis—a movement for socialism, built from the workplaces and communities up.