There aren’t many positive takeaways from current far-right tantrums, but possibly a few lessons

The ongoing wave of far right attacks is a timely reminder that despite some excellent efforts by anti-fascists in recent years to disrupt the “organised” far-right at source before it gains momentum, the overall groundswell of bootboys waiting for a good chance to swing fists is no less potent than ever. And clearly we’ve collectively failed to prepare for that despite ample warning signs. 

A justifiable degree of panic and disgust has greeted the scale of events, and the use of children’s deaths to fuel assaults on random mosques and refugee holding centres. But this is to a great extent a beefed-up version of the same crap they’ve been pulling since the early 2010s, as bored football hooligans mass up to replace match day rumbles with having a go at cops, “muslamic ray guns” or anything Tommy Robinson has taken a dislike to.

Historically, the combination of holiday getaways, the new football season, and cops getting their act together, tends to burn the phenomenon out. With a Labour government to fixate on and less money in their pockets, however, there seems enough impetus for the far right mobilisation to continue. Whether these outings will be as well-attended by the end of the month, with heavy rain and footie to watch, is unclear. 

On the other side, it’s fair to say there have been diverse priorities and pressures in recent years, leading to a blindness that this was on the cards with a need to plan accordingly. Direct action anti-fascists have been warning for a while now that we don’t have the organised networks and connections on the ground to counter a full-on street fascist revival, and recent events have highlighted this. Outside of a few bright spots where the fascists were strongly opposed by locals, we’ve been outnumbered. The crowds gathered by the usual NGOs and Trot fronts to wave placards are wildly outgunned, leading to a near-total reliance on police dogs and batons for their safety. Which, to state the obvious, is not something to be relied on.

While a number of red gyms do exist, the left as a whole has failed to get a grip on the fighting capacity of the far right, which repeatedly emerged even under the placatory influence of a Tory government (eg. in 2010, 2016 and 2020). Instead, the left has opted for a confused rush from fallen electoral saviours, to culture warring, retreats into community social work (constructive, but limited in scope), and internal beefing. 

What should be crystal clear from the last week is that every day we spend on circle-jerks is a day we’re failing to get to grips with a threat that wants to quite literally put boot to neck. 

Media response

In the press, meanwhile, the public reaction from both the right and liberals, including in government, has been telling regarding both the roots of this racist wave and the likely problems being generated for left activism. The right-wing press has, predictably, been lapping up photos of mobs fighting cops, and loudly denouncing the violence from far-right extremists, without for even one second reflecting on its own role. The Times, indeed, went the other way and blamed social liberals for ignoring “reasonable questions” — odd, given the previous government was avowedly anti-liberal, the most vociferously anti-migrant in living memory, and a source of constant pandering to exactly the sentiments which have been voiced during the looting of Greggs. 

The Daily Mail was busily pointing the finger at social media, warning that far-right influencers were fanning the flames. This from a paper which has done more to whip up hatred against migrants than probably any other media source, including endless misleading pieces painting “asylum seeker hotels” as being some sort of resort option rather than the miserable experience migrants themselves report. 

Notably, a report in The Times on the morning of writing suggests elements of the far-right are planning to attack lawyers — a direct callback to a door the Mail opened in 2016 when it declared judges it disliked “Enemies Of The People” and of course, to the crusade against “lefty lawyers” the they enthusiastically encouraged during Patel and Braverman’s tenures at the Home Office. Taking responsibility for what you say is apparently just for the plebs.

They are not wrong in noting an influence from social media, but this falls as much into the camp of diffuse organisational methods as it does into propaganda, and tells a partial story that is entirely self serving. The framing the press is going with seemingly aims to hit out at a market competitor first and foremost, calling for tighter regulation of free speech on social platforms. But while a crackdown might sound tempting to anyone who’s been deluged by far-right content to generate engagement, it’s no solution, and exactly the sort of double-edged sword we should strive to avoid.

The fact is Tommy Robinson has already been kicked off major social media, Twitter/X being the only notable exception. So has Andrew Tate. They got around it by encouraging a small army of acolytes with too much time on their hands to continually open new accounts and upload instantly provocative content, shared around by their networks, exploiting automated systems with modified language to avoid keyword catchers. How do you “ban” the cup of coffee emoji when it’s used to denigrate women? Or the acronym DEI when it’s a standard word used by companies and State services? When their groups were booted off they moved to places like Telegram and simply carried on organising, with the additional strength of decentralisation. 

Manifestly, pressuring social media to kick out individual scumbags or police content more heavily does not work against a sufficiently large and motivated cohort. 

For us, on the other hand, opening that door could be disastrous. When State-led censorship is expanded it is never only against the right, and the logic being followed in shutting down content we avowedly disagree with can just as easily be used against us. What’s to stop Freedom facing repression for its position on non-violent direct action under Starmerism, or indeed any future government that comes to power with repressive laws already laid on like an all-you-can-eat buffet? 

The last time Facebook went on the warpath getting rid of far right activists, under pressure from the US political scene, it also kicked out a wide swathe of US anarchist groups including major outlets such as It’s Going Down, CrimethInc. and Unicorn Riot. Its algorithm meanwhile comprehensively destroyed engagement with “political news” posts, leading to the meme-ification and “everything implied” setup for comment threads which the far-right uses today. In the long run it probably did us more damage than them.

The left does not operate in a forgiving environment where an entire media class is pushing roughly what we think anyway. Our support base is not a cultish mass of people obsessively exploiting every angle regardless of accuracy or ethics. What we have is a weak toehold critiquing the powers that be while appealing to people’s better natures, a position which has been steadily eroded both by the last years of culture warring and by our own inability to articulate a solid, inspirational strategy for working class struggle. Giving the State the power to repress them mostly ends in it repressing us, at a time when we don’t have the strength in depth to handle it. 

The far-right on the warpath is indeed a scary thing, but prodding a lion to deal with the threat of a hyena is unwise. 

Starmerism, confirmed

It’s not really a surprise to see the new government’s response to all this has been a full-on embrace of both the surveillance State and lock-em-up fist waving. This has, after all, been Starmer’s attitude even within Labour itself, and as an enthusiastic flag-waving former Director of Public Prosecutions he’s primed to behave like a Tory Home Secretary whenever disorder occurs. 

But it does give us a troubling confirmation that the next few years will see no let-up of the squeeze against leftists’ ability to organise. Following the defining of socialism and anti-fascism as “extremist” under the Prevent scheme and a clear push to cast that idea in Westminster’s ideological concrete, Starmer’s proposed response to the riots is an extension of the Patel-Braverman era.

The acceleration of rolling out facial recognition cameras has been widely critiqued, including in the pages of Freedom, for its assault on the privacy and freedoms of the public. Excusing this invasion of personal liberty by a notoriously right-wing State institution as a supposed protection against riots is both disgraceful and nonsensical (as though such a technology would catch the masked-up organised element, or deter raw detonations of public fury). But it’s entirely logical for an institutional rightist of Starmer’s ilk — he judges himself and his loved ones as beneficiaries, rather than victims, of such lost liberties.

Equally ethically-impoverished are his assurances that a new central police intelligence unit is to be established, as though the government doesn’t already spend £3.7 billion annually on MI5 alone and maintain a huge, barely-mentioned national intelligence database — which, it seems, completely failed to pay any attention to the open organising of fascist meet and yeets. So it seems that on top of the Tories’ wanton disregard for basic human dignity when they decided future spycops shouldn’t have to go through the stress of consequences for their actions, we now have all the conditions for a blank cheque tribute act.

Add to that the almost certain announcement in the near future of a rejuvenated mega-prisons project in response to the “revelation” (totally unsurprising for anyone who’s been paying attention) that there’s not enough places to put gaggles of rioters, and it’s looking pretty bleak.

All of which points to a pretty steep hill to climb for the foreseeable. We have a revitalised street fascist presence, a government happily on board with repression of anyone deemed insufficiently “centrist”, and a liberal set so panicked by the former that it’ll run towards the latter with open arms. 

Time to get active, folks, there’s a lot needs doing.

~ Rob Ray

Top photo: Far right faces opponents in Lancaster. Photo: Isabelle Helaine