Who still remembers the riots which swept through English towns in August? At the time Keir Starmer described them as far right thuggery. Law and order was quickly restored. No more was said and Westminster confined them to the past. And then two weeks ago on 29 October, Axel Rudakunaba, accused of the murder of the three small girls in Southport on 29 July which precipitated the riots, was charged with possessing terrorist material and producing ricin.
In contrast to today’s political amnesia, the Conservative Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw ordered an inquiry under Lord Scarman into the 1981 Brixton riots. The rioters were mostly young and black, and had been subjected to intolerable levels of police racism.
Scarman’s report was published seven months later in November. It detailed the extensive use of stop and search, arbitrary roadblocks and mass detentions by the police, concluding that the riots had been the spontaneous outburst of built-up resentment. David Lane, then chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality called the Scarman report an “historic document”.
In 2011, a riot in Tottenham, North London, following the shooting of Mark Duggan by police, quickly spread across the cities of England. The average age of the rioters prosecuted was sixteen. It was a multi-ethnic, adolescent revolt. David Cameron’s coalition government launched no inquiry into its causes. But there was concern among the educated middle classes. In partnership with the London School of Economics’ Social Policy Department, the Guardian set up its own social research project. A sample of 270 rioters were interviewed in depth and “community conversations” were held in local neighbourhoods affected by the rioting. In 2013 it published “Reading the Riots”, which was described as a “landmark study” into a lost generation of young people.
In contrast to the Brixton and Tottenham riots, the August riots this year generated very little curiosity into their causes and those who took part. The anti-fascist organisation Hope not Hate defined them as “the worst wave of far-right violence in the UK post-war”. The rioters were cast as either racist or misguided dupes, mobilised by shadowy far-right networks. The narrative was repeated across the media, NGOs and by the liberal commentariat.
This hasty decision to write off the riots as nothing more than far-right thuggery will hobble our ability to understand their true nature. Just like Brixton and Tottenham, the August riots sounded an alarm. This time it was not the discontent of an abused ethnic minority, but the discontent of a white working-class majority. The rioting was a revolt against change. And it took the form of a violent and deeply hostile reaction to migrants, Islamist extremists, and to the Muslim population more generally.
The Government rightly condemned the racism and mob violence. But it ought to have asked what Thomas Carlyle called in his 1839 essay “Chartism”, “the condition of England” question. “What is the condition of the working classes in their houses and in their hearts?” This was, Carlyle wrote with stunning prescience to 2024, “the question that Parliament was not asking”.
The white majority working class are treated as strangers in their own land: failed by school; alienated from the institutions that manage their lives; their labour no longer required for mills, mines or factories. They must compete with migrants, among whom are some of the most resilient, capable and enterprising of their native countries.
Competition is not simply about access to public services or to jobs. The white majority working class who feel themselves forgotten believe migrants are lavished with the largesse of the state and in direct competition with them for a place in their national home. Their anger is compounded by a cultural and governing elite who despise them, and who share a progressive ideology that values immigration.
The immigration question is all about who belongs and the obligations of citizenship. It is about how to live with cultural divergence. And it is about class injustice – the working class are most exposed to the downsides of influxes of newcomers. Successive governments have ignored these critical questions of incommensurable difference, social integration, and economic justice.
Ugly and imbued with racism, the August riots were nonetheless a revolt against a social order that is seen as a threat to people’s idea of home, to a basic understanding of their social existence and their emotional attachment to it. To dismiss the riots as nothing more than “far right thuggery” is a political failing.
The August riots have deep roots in the dispossession of the majority white working class of provincial England. Expect national populism amongst the petit bourgeois to flourish. And as Labour and the Tories struggle to get 30 per cent of the vote, consider the prospect of Reform out-polling them both. Tommy Robinson (now in prison for contempt of court) and his brand of pro-Christian, anti-Muslim, working-class politics will continue to build support in the housing estates of England. And do not dismiss their appeal to minority ethnic groups.
Labour, like the Conservative Party, lacks a diagnosis of the national malaise and so does not know how to resolve it. It is easier to simply forget the riots. It has taken Kemi Badenoch, newly elected leader of the Conservative Party and a first-generation immigrant, to point out in an interview with Tom McTague at UnHerd, that citizenship is not simply about a passport, nor about what you look like, but about being rooted in a place. England is our home, she agreed. “We’ve got nowhere else. It is not a dormitory. It is not a hotel for people who are just passing through.”
Most of the settled population as well migrants understand this. The problem lies with those who inhabit the liberal progressive world of the British state, the cultural and political classes who run the country, who don’t know how to speak about a common home, nor what its loss means, nor how to bridge the chasm that separates them from large sections of the working class. Admitting this to ourselves would be a good start to Labour’s promise of national renewal.
[See also: Trump’s war on the “deep state”]
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