Far Right Riot in Knowsley has been fuelled and enabled by UK Media and Government alike.
You may or may not be aware that last night in Knowsley, a mob made up of the far right gathered at a hotel that houses asylum seekers, their “protest” quickly devolving into an all out riot that resulted in serious violence, and police vehicles being set on fire. You may not be aware because there has been almost radio silence about it from mainstream press.
Visit Channel 4 news right now (February 11th 2023, 2.30pm), and there is nothing on their homepage of latest news about it. Visit BBC News and one story appears four stories down, the headline calling it simply a “clash”. ITV News have the story higher up, but it’s still just a “demonstration.” Sky News are the only major TV-Online News outlet in the country that have this as the top story and who reference the violence that occurred. In Print-Online, The Guardian make you scroll almost the whole homepage for the story, but they at least call a spade a spade, and use the term “far right” in their headline.
Source: The Guardian Online
Source: BBC News
Source: ITV News
Source: Sky News
This lackadaisacal way that fascist behaviour is spoken about is exactly my point. This riot hasn’t come out of nowhere. It has been slowly stoked and encouraged by mainstream press and the government, and it has all gone largely unchallenged.
For years now we have been watching the rise of the far right. Whether that’s the glaringly obvious like a Brexit campaign that was almost entirely fuelled by xenophobic hate and violent nationalism dressed up as patriotism, or a government who refer to people escaping war, famine and political persecution as an “invasion”, or a government who created a “hostile environment policy” to make life as unbearable as possible for immigrants of a certain hue, or a white man travelling to Dover to firebomb a holding facility filled with asylum seekers, or a neo-nazi murdering an MP who he called a race traitor. Or perhaps the less obvious, like the rise in conspiracy theories - a tactic people may not know is used by the far right to create distrust in government and whatever group they deem as “other”, or the way certain people’s existence is up for “debate” because they’re deemed to be abnormal or strange or part of some sort of conspiracy to corrupt the norm.
When Andrew Leak, a 66 year old white man from High Wycombe, travelled to Dover on Sunday October 31st 2022, and bombed a holding facility for Asylum Seekers before killing himself, it took until Saturday November 5th for police to declare it was a terrorist incident. This despite Andrew tweeting at 10.22am on the Sunday that “We will obliterate them Muslim children [they] are now our target. And there [sic] disgusting women will be targeted mothers and sisters Is burn alive.” Even after this, Buckinghamshire Live still were simply referring to him as a “High Wycombe pensioner” in their headlines, not a far-right extremist.
When MP Jo Cox was murdered on June 16th 2016, the perpetrator shouted “death to traitors, freedom for Britain.” He was directly linked to white supremacy, and far right extremism, but it took until June 20th for his crime to be declared terrorism.
Compare these to the Manchester Arena bombing - instantly referred to as a terrorist incident, as well it should have been, as it clearly was. The London Bridge stabbings on November 29th 2019 were also named a terrorist incident on that exact same day, as well it should have been, as it clearly was. When MP David Amess was murdered on October 15th 2021, the same day it was declared a terrorist incident, and the suspect linked to Islamic extremism. And it absolutely was terrorism, it couldn’t more clearly be the case.
None of that is up for debate. Sometimes when we talk about these issues, the people who don’t want to hear the problem like to claim we are trying to sympathise with extremists, or diminish the severity of what they’ve done. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not a case of “stop calling brown people who commit extreme acts extremists”, it’s “start showing that same energy to white people who commit extreme acts.” And we absolutely should be questioning why it is so quick to be labelled terrorism when the perpetrator is brown and prays to a different God, but why it regularly takes nearly a full week for the same thing to be said about a white man who prays to a white God? What that tells people is quite clear: Brown people are inherently violent, we do not need to even wait for an investigation, we know it’s terrorism because they match the description, they are who you must be wary of. White people, even in the face of extreme violence must be given the benefit of the doubt, we will not say a thing until there’s no other way to spin it.
Far right language and ideology has become normal in the UK. We are seeing it almost everyday, and it is regularly unchallenged. In fact when we do challenge it, we are shut down, told we are fear-mongering, told we are the ones stoking division and hate and that we should take a step back. When we draw parallels between what we are seeing today, and the rise of fascism in the past, namely 1930s Germany, it’s treated as though we are being hysterical. But the reality is, if we don’t study and learn from the past, we are simply doomed to repeat it.
Take a look at Britain right now - where we are struggling to afford food, heating, electric. Who is the first group to get blamed? It’s not a poorly managed Government no, it’s immigrants. There’s too many of them and not enough resources so they must be removed, and any others must be stopped from entering. Now please look at points number 7 and 8 on the 25 points of Hitler’s Nazi Party.
7. We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood. If it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens (non-citizens) must be expelled from the Reich.
8. Any further immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who have entered Germany since August 2, 1914, shall be compelled to leave the Reich immediately.
Sound familiar? How about the way Islam is spoken about in the UK? Tolerated but only if they assimilate, and if they don’t then they’re “one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future.” (That is a direct quote from former head of the Charity Commission, and current Commissioner for Public Appointments, William Shawcross.). Let’s look at point 24.
24. We demand freedom for all religious faiths in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or offend the moral and ethical sense of the Germanic race.
The party as such represents the point of view of a positive Christianity without binding itself to any one particular confession. It fights against the Jewish materialist spirit within and without.
In 2019, the UK saw the highest number of far-right terror attacks and plots in Europe. There were also more far-right attacks or plots than Islamist attacks or plots. And yet even the most open minded of us when hearing the word terrorist are more likely to envision the latter than the former. Because we are not learning from the past at all, we are just sitting here apathetic whilst it repeats, refusing to acknowledge what is glaringly obvious.
The UK has a far-right problem. Right now the Government are pushing through a bill that would make it perfectly legal for employers to sack employees that strike, thus removing the ability for workers to withhold their labour in protest of unsafe and unsustainable working environments, and offering employers more scope to overwork and underpay employees without consequence. They are also pushing through a bill that makes direct action - which is essentially disruptive protest designed to draw attention to serious and time sensitive issues like we’ve seen from climate protestors - a criminal offence. They also plan to further remove limitations on stop and search, further putting at risk Black and brown citizens of profiling, and further entrenching racism in the criminal justice system. Dominic Raab’s Bill of Rights - which would essentially replace our protections under the Human Rights Act - had been shelved, however it’s back on the cards now he’s back in the cabinet. The Bill is misleadingly named, as the reality is it would reduce people’s rights. An inquiry in January 2023 said the Government should absolutely not go ahead with it as it “weakens rights protections, it undermines the universality of rights, it shows disregard for our international legal obligations, it creates legal uncertainty and hinders effective enforcement”, whilst the Director of Liberty Human Rights said “The Rights Removal Bill allows the Government to decide whose rights are more important than others’ and identifies people who will have fewer rights. It strips rights away from people challenging deportation, and their relatives – paving the way for the Government to ramp up its toxic hostile environment and remove the rights of non-British citizens.”
Let’s take a look at points number 4 and 5.
4. Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.
5. Those who are not citizens must live in Germany as foreigners and must be subject to the law of aliens.
Because that is why they showed up at Knowsley. Angry working class people who are struggling more than they can ever remember, who have been told for years by press, government, and social media that the asylum seekers in that hotel are the reason they’re struggling. That’s the message they’re getting over and over, and they want someone to blame, and they want something to change, so they show up with weapons and terrorise people who have done nothing to them. And the truth isn’t easy to find, the truth that it’s the people in power, the ones who look like them, and were born where they were born, who speak the language they do and pray the way they do, those are the ones who have created a society that widens the divide between rich and poor. It’s their policies of austerity, and greed, and internal political chess that has lead us to where we are. And so that narrative or blame the brown people becomes normal.
But this isn’t normal. It’s been normalised, but it isn’t normal. Children as young as 13 being arrested because they were at a violent riot, where people came armed with hammers and missiles, filled with so much hate against people they know nothing about other than they were born somewhere else, is not normal. 19 out of 20 children aged under 18 who were arrested for terrorism offences in 2022 being linked to an extreme right-wing ideology is not normal. Terror experts only 3 days ago stated that right wing extremism is a bigger threat to children in the UK than islamist extremism, something that has barely been reported on.
And when you look at the UK in global context and realise that in the USA they are removing the right of bodily autonomy from women, and they’re burning and banning books that are deemed dangerous - read as, books by Black Authors, books by LGBTQ+ authors, books by Muslim authors etc, and are actively and openly rejecting democracy. In Sweden recently the Qu’ran was burned by a far-right politician. In Italy they last year elected the most far-right government since Mussolini. We have to start seeing much stronger challenges to this dangerous rhetoric. We need stronger opposition from The Opposition to the casual use of far-right language, ideology, and policy by the current Conservative Party. We need journalists who aren’t scared to speak up and be a voice of truth in amongst the noise, instead of aiding and abetting in the slide into far-right extremism and the normalisation of it. When the struggles of the working class are blamed on a group who make up 0.6% of the population, that needs to be challenged with truth, instead of spread as a fact. Otherwise what has happened in Knowsley may well be just the start of a really frightening chapter in our history books.