This picture, from 7 August 2024, shows a small group of anti-immigrant ‘protesters’ on the far right, inside the police cordon, and a far larger group of anti-racist demonstrators in the rest of the picture.

Scenes like this happened around the country. And the pictures tell an important part of the story: a tiny minority (estimated at 3%) of the population have been radicalised into believing that all their problems are down to the presence of non-whites in the UK, and a small proportion of these are prepared to use violence to achieve their aims; the rest of the UK population believes that this is dangerously close to fascism.

The good news is that the far-right are now clearly on the back foot. But this problem will not easily disappear. This article explores the question: what is the root cause of these riots and how do we fix it?

Those who have taken part in the riots are guilty of serious crimes, but they are not the root cause of the issue:

• The root cause is deliberate scapegoating by right-wing politicians and media of immigrants, as a distraction from the impact that their policies have had over the last 14 years;
• The people behind the riots were not on the streets: they were comfortably at home, or even abroad, at the time;
• To fix the problem requires a four-pronged approach that tackles all the causes – it will not be easy.

A toxic mix of right-wing policies and scapegoating

Many people in Britain have good cause to feel that the country they once felt worked well is badly broken.

Our rivers used not to flow with sewage, our NHS ranked best in the world, and poverty was gradually falling. Little by little, in most years, most people’s lives were getting better.

But for the last 14 years, things have not been going well for most people. And many of us are angry about it.

Some of us looked for the policy drivers of these changes. And for us, Austerity, Brexit and the appalling mishandling of COVID represent a terrible warning against those policies. We took out our anger in the polling booths. And the party that delivered those policies is now out of power.

But many people do not look at these things. Instead they rely on sources in the media and social media to tell them what is happening.

And to them, the message was clear, simple and endlessly repeated: “the reason your life is getting harder is immigration.” Here for example, is a series of headlines from the Daily Mail. Other right-wing media had similar headlines.

Some politicians have been complicit in propagating this message. Farage and his UKIP/Reform ‘party’ in particular have been relentless in trying to make the word refugee synonymous with illegal immigrant and with criminality. Dominic Grieve, the former Conservative Attorney General commented:

But is it not just fringe parties and legacy media. The Conservative Party has played along with this. In his last paragraph, Grieve was perhaps alluding to his former colleague Suella Braverman, whose inflammatory language was so extreme that we asked whether it should be classed as stochastic terrorism.

And it went right to the top: Rishi Sunak campaigned behind a podium displaying the slogan of the rioters, “stop the boats.” It is hard to claim that Conservative Party election messages did not fan the flames.

And on social media, there was enormous support for the violence – even from those in a position of enormous power and, one would have hoped, responsibility, like Elon Musk. Musk’s response to the riots was not to call for calm and reconciliation but to fan the flames, saying, “civil war is inevitable” and referring to the recently-elected Prime Minister of the UK as #TwoTierKier – echoing the rioters’ claims that the police tackle white, right-wing protesters more actively than left-wing and racial minority protesters.

The rioters are looking at Britain through a lens which has been crafted for them and held in front of their eyes by the far right – a loose network of media barons, right-wing journalists, far-right politicians and political agitators. And the role of hostile actors from outside the UK is not limited to the above: the Russia Report presented strong evidence that Russia had interfered with the Brexit referendum – and Russian bots remain highly active on social media.

Those who laid the groundwork for the riots were not on the streets

The rioters were on the streets. Their faces were captured on CCTV and they are being identified and charged. But the instigators were not with them.

Nigel Farage was not on the streets: he was in Hong Kong. Jonathan Harmsworth, the owner of the Daily Mail was not on the streets, in fact he is domiciled in France. ‘Tommy Robinson’ – the alias used by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon the far-right anti-Muslim agitator – was not in the UK when he tweeted this.

Whereas the rioters themselves are facing sentences of up to 3 years or more, those who acted as the puppet-masters have so far not faced any penalty.

To fix the problem requires a four-pronged approach

The first step is to restore law and order. The streets must be safe – and to feel safe – for all UK citizens and visitors. On this there are grounds for cautious optimism. The government and the police have acted swiftly to contain the rioters. And the scale of the (largely peaceful) counter-demonstrations has created a renewed sense of solidarity.

But, even on the (not necessarily correct) assumption that the worst of the riots are already behind us, a psychological scar remains. As Sadiq Khan explained,

“I’m somebody who grew up in the 1970s and 80s and experienced the National Front and the BNP and I thought that’s behind us. Like a lot of people of my generation, I felt triggered by the events of the last couple of weeks …  It’s difficult to explain the ripples when you’ve been targeted because of your religion or colour of your skin and you can’t change either of those things. And whether you’re seeing physical acts of violence taking place in the north-west or the north-east, you feel it in London.”

The second step is to tackle the puppet-masters. This is a far more difficult challenge, as any attempt to rein in the bad actors will be met with arguments about dictatorship, freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.

Freedom of the press is indeed a vital component of a functioning democracy: courageous and professional journalists need to be free to speak truth to power. But that is the opposite of  what we have in the UK.

Our current media make the powerful free to disinform the population – and when courageous journalists do attempt to speak truth to power, they can be silenced. The SLAPPs against Carole Cadwalladr were chilling to many investigative journalists. And the mysterious disappearance from the airwaves of Sangita Myska and the suspension of Gary Lineker show that UK journalists risk their careers if they do attempt to speak truth to power.

When, under Johnson’s premiership, Ken Clarke warned us that Johnson was taking us dangerously close to elected dictatorship, and the Council elections showed that he was losing popular support, our media, rather than taking the opportunity to speak truth to power and highlighting the risks of a continued Johnson regime, chose to support him. This was how the UK press chose to report the results.

Where you might have expected headlines talking of a collapse in support, calls for Johnson to step down and speculation about his successor, most of the right-wing press chose either to declare the results a success, to attack the opposition leader for a supposed breach of the law for which he has already been investigated and acquitted, or to ignore the results altogether.

This is not normal: the international media adopted a very different tone. The New York Times reported “Boris Johnson and his party Suffer Setbacks in Local Voting in Britain.” The French newspaper, Le Monde, said “Premier revers électoral pour les conservateurs britanniques après le « partygate » (First electoral setback for the conservatives since Partygate).” And Bloomberg said “Boris Johnson Blamed as Tories Lose Seats in U.K. Council Elections.” The UK press was a clear outlier.

We do not have a free press in the sense of a fourth estate making a valuable contribution to democracy; we have the opposite. But any attempt to rectify the situation will be met with a media onslaught unlike any we have seen so far.

The third step is to tackle the problems facing Britain’s most deprived and, to a lesser extent, the rest of us: falling living standards, failing public services, lack of regulation, environmental degradation, etc. This is a huge challenge but, as we have written before, it can be tackled.

And the final step is de-radicalisation. This may be the most difficult of all. As the Scientific American put it, “Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them.” This is the so-called ‘backfire’ effect.

But perhaps we can learn from Finland. CNN reports on a 2014 initiative by the Finnish government to protect its population against manipulation by the “Russian troll army.” As they report,

“Finland has faced down Kremlin-backed propaganda campaigns ever since it declared independence from Russia 101 years ago. But in 2014, after Moscow annexed Crimea and backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, it became obvious that the battlefield had shifted: information warfare was moving online.

Jussi Toivanen, the chief communications specialist for the prime minister’s office, said it is difficult to pinpoint the exact number of misinformation operations to have targeted the country in recent years, but most play on issues like immigration, the European Union, or whether Finland should become a full member of NATO (Russia is not a fan).

As the trolling ramped up in 2015, President Sauli Niinisto called on every Finn to take responsibility for the fight against false information. A year later, Finland brought in American experts to advise officials on how to recognize fake news, understand why it goes viral and develop strategies to fight it. The education system was also reformed to emphasize critical thinking.”

Finland has recently been assessed as being the most resilient country to fake news.

Conclusion

The General Election result was a huge blow to the far-right, but as we warned recently, they may have lost the battle, but they have no intention of losing the war.

For Labour to prevent the far-right from winning in the long run, they will need to:

• Abandon the small target strategy that was so successful in getting them elected – the radical steps discussed above need to be done while the mandate is fresh;
• Carry out constitutional repair and tackle the rewiring of Britain’s institutions;
• Think creatively about how to reduce leakage and boost growth;
• Ensure that there are no blunders on voters’ top two issues: the cost-of-living crisis and the NHS.

The five actions set out in Chapter 15 of the book 99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It and briefly summarised in this article set out a framework for rebuilding the UK’s governance and social contract.

Failure would mean disaster, not just for Labour, but for the UK. Success, on the other hand, means a happier, healthier, more prosperous, more united and more environmentally-friendly Britain.

If you think more people – and especially more progressive politicians – need to be acting on these issues, please share widely using the buttons below.

And please take a look at the 99% Organisation and join us.