England in pieces

Keir Starmer has imposed order after the riots. But now he must lead a national renewal.

Photo by Gary Calton

Order has returned to the streets of England but the mood in the country is uneasy, and this feels more like a temporary respite from chaos than something settled. The King, perhaps more in hope than expectation, has called for the nation to unite around “shared values of mutual respect and understanding”. That may be wishful thinking. He must know, or at least sense, that the harrowing ethno-sectarian violence and racist attacks of recent weeks on mosques and hotels sheltering asylum seekers in provincial towns have revealed something dark and shocking: an England atomised, an England in pieces. Le Figaro, the leading centre-right newspaper in France, provocatively described the riots as an act of “civil war”. Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X/Twitter, and its chief troll, said much the same in a post directed at Keir Starmer.

England is not locked in civil war and nor is it as riven and culturally divided as France, Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands, European countries where nationalist populist movements are rising fast. But the riots, occurring in some of the most deprived areas of the country, towns where people believe they are without political representation, have revealed intractable class, social and geographic divisions.

Periodic outbreaks of mob violence are part of the long history of these islands – consider the gin riots, or the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, or the Mosley riots of the 1930s, or the riots of 1981 in Brixton, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool that I observed from afar with rapt fascination while at school during the early Thatcher years. Something about the mood in the country feels new and different this time, however, as far-right thugs organising via instant messaging apps clash with the self-styled Muslim Defence League in the racially segregated former mill towns of the post-industrial north-west and in the Midlands. We are experiencing the sectarianisation of mainland Britain, prefigured in Northern Ireland, where there have also been anti-migrant protests in August.

Starmer was compelled to use the full force of the Hobbesian state to quash anarchy and reimpose public order. He acted swiftly and decisively to contain agitators and neo-fascists who had been inflamed by misinformation circulating freely on Telegram, X/Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and Signal. In the days following the horrific murder of three girls and the wounding of many others in a knife attack by a 17-year-old assassin on a children’s dance class in a quiet residential street in Southport on 29 July, we witnessed frightening outbreaks of public disorder across the country, from the south-west to the north-east.

Within hours of the girls’ murder being reported, the hashtag “#EnoughIsEnough” was trending. The killer had been falsely identified by agents of chaos on social media as a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived illegally on a small boat; for some far-right agitators a tipping point had been reached. It was time to take to the streets. Videos and other posts by Tommy Robinson, the former frontman of the now-defunct far-right English Defence League, and whose X/Twitter account was reactivated last year on Musk’s authority, were viewed on average 54.3 million times a day from 30 July to 9 August, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. Social media, Starmer said, was “not a law-free zone”. He has pledged to challenge the unregulated power of the tech platforms in the weeks ahead. Good luck with that, one might say.

As many as 1,000 people have been arrested so far and almost 550 charged as the rioters, racist thugs and online provocateurs are jailed in an overwhelming and necessary demonstration of state power. There can be no liberty without security and order imposed through what Hobbes called the “common power” of the sovereign or state: Leviathan. As a former director of public prosecutions, Starmer knows how to use the law to punish offenders and enforce order. “You will regret your actions,” he told them. “We warned of the consequences and we will deliver those consequences,” said Stephen Parkinson, the current director of public prosecutions. “It’s not about exacting revenge, it’s about delivering justice.”

[See also: How to fix a nation]

The Prime Minister acted in the belief that more riots were to follow on the evening of Wednesday 7 August. In the event, they never happened and were superseded instead by widespread anti-racist counter-protests. The moment of maximum danger had passed but the hatred and division in deep England had been revealed for all to see. Turn away in fear and loathing if you wish, but worse will follow if people’s smouldering resentment about mass migration and porous borders – as well as run-down high streets, broken community services, sub-standard housing and long-standing economic neglect – are not systematically addressed.

It is clear, too, that the British model of policing by consent, which presupposed shared cultural norms, is breaking down. We have on one side complaints from Nigel Farage and the right about arbitrary or selective law enforcement, so-called two-tier policing, and from the other side a complete lack of trust in the police, especially among some minority ethnic communities.

Starmer’s response to the riots was unequivocal. He is not a fluent and nimble communicator. But he is determinedly serious and, under extreme pressure at the peak of the riots, he showed he was a calm and decisive administrator. His Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, by contrast, allowed herself to be interviewed about the riots on ITV’s Good Morning Britain by her husband, Ed Balls, a former Labour MP and occasional presenter of the programme. This was a moment as farcical as when Roland Rudd, a PR tycoon and prominent anti-Brexit campaigner, argued for a second referendum on BBC’s Today programme while attending the annual Davos jamboree.

David Lammy, the new Foreign Secretary, spoke to me recently of the need to accept “the world as it is”, not as the left or liberals wish it to be. The same applies to this country. A new cold-eyed realism is required about the condition of England. We are told repeatedly by those who seldom leave the smarter parts of the capital that Britain is the best place in Europe to be an immigrant: the most integrated, the most welcoming of migrants, a country where a British Hindu Indian can become prime minister without scarcely a murmur of public dissent, and Bukayo Saka, a London-born Arsenal player of Nigerian heritage, is one of our most adored England footballers. Britishness is a civic identity, non-racial, inclusive and plural, and all the better for it. Being modern and English (or Welsh and Scottish) and British has nothing to do with ethnicity, skin colour, religion or blood-and-soil nationalism. The best part of what it means to be modern and British, therefore, is to be comfortable with having multiple or hyphenated identities. So far so good.

But a plural society needs more than plural politics and plural identities and to celebrate diversity and inclusion. It needs more than a gift for assimilating immigrants; it needs a sense of shared purpose and common endeavour, a commitment to the common good. That is absent.

A nation is more than an imagined community: it has a history that cannot be wished away. It has a material reality, cultural inheritance, established customs and forms of life, collective memories, institutional wisdom, an enduring connection between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. The Prime Minister, his chief strategist Morgan McSweeney and his speechwriter Alan Lockey understand this, which is why in his victory speech outside 10 Downing Street on 5 July Starmer spoke of wanting to lead the country on “a rediscovery of who we are”. The implication being that we as a people and as a nation do not know who we are. They accept privately, however, that they will need more than technocratic competence and an arid, managerial cult of “delivery” to create the sense of national cohesion they seek. For now, the Prime Minister remains a storyteller in search of a convincing story.

I wrote at the time of Starmer’s victory speech that he sounded less like an exultant winner than an exhausted survivor speaking at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, harrowed by what had gone before, the chaos that had been, and warning of the need for patience and reconciliation. His tone was sombre, deliberately unheroic. It was as if he had a sense not just of what had been but of what was to come, the struggles ahead. But so soon?

Is populism Labour’s enemy, as Starmer and his closest advisers say – or merely a convenient, catch-all term to describe mutinous forces that the governing elites do not fully understand and cannot control? As John Gray writes in The New Leviathans, populism “has no clear meaning” but is “used by liberals to refer to political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies”.

Successive governments in Britain have attempted to depoliticise the issue of mass migration but have succeeded in only galvanising anti-immigrant sentiment because of their dishonesty (in 2010 David Cameron said he would reduce annual net migration to less than 100,000, which he knew would be impossible because of the EU’s freedom of movement), their false promises about taking back control after Brexit, and because austerity economics hollowed out the state and impoverished the public realm. The result: people lost confidence in democracy. Trust in British politics and elected politicians is at an all-time low, according to a National Centre for Social Research report published in June. Labour won a Commons majority of 174 on less than 34 per cent of the vote; Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s non-party party, won more than four million votes but only five seats. Forty per cent of those eligible to vote in the election chose not to. That is quite some democratic deficit under the first-past-the-post system.

Keir Starmer cannot be blamed for any of this but at least he understands what is at stake. Speaking at the New Statesman’s summer reception on 22 July, he warned: “You only have to look across the Channel at Europe and you see nationalism and populism in all its form and all its strengths. And do not think for a minute that that could never happen here. It could – and it might – if we fail in our project of delivering change.”

That was not quite right as it turned out: the forces of “nationalism and populism” were already at large in the country. “Something is going on,” Farage said to me when I interviewed and travelled with him in Essex during the election campaign. He blamed “societal decline” for what he considered to be the sense of mass disaffection in the country while claiming to have done more “than anyone else to defeat the far right”. Farage knows how to go as far as he needs to in his positioning and rhetoric but no further. But the far right is not defeated, as we saw during the riots. Its networks and belligerents are active on social media, and mobilising.

Christophe Guilluy, the French author and social geographer, spoke to the New Statesman in 2019 about how France “has been smashed into tiny, atomised pieces – there is no class solidarity only ‘issues’ and ‘identity politics’… The problem is, though, that even if there is no such thing as society as an abstract entity, there are still people – you can call them the working class, immigrants, the poor or whatever – and they are real and their suffering is real… You can’t just wish away a whole group of people and their way of life, a whole class.”

Through the power of the state, order has been restored after the riots but as the new Labour government embarks on the long process of social repair it feels as if the time is out of joint. David Lammy, author of Tribes, a memoir about transcending social and cultural division, says far-right rioters have “forgotten about what it means to be English” and should reintegrate “back into Britishness”. But what does it mean to be English, or even to integrate back into Britishness, when the Prime Minister himself says he wants to lead the country on a rediscovery of who we are? Does anyone know who we are now – or even care? Perhaps we are comfortable with the state of the nation – until riots break out, revealing an urban nightmare of division and hatred, a high-summer descent into what Saul Bellow called the moronic inferno. Britain has lost respect for the police, Yvette Cooper said on 12 August. “I am not prepared to tolerate the brazen abuse and contempt which a minority have felt able to show towards our men and women in uniform, or the disrespect for law and order that has been allowed to grow in recent years.”

This, then, is a moment of what Martin Amis called moral tightening. The Hobbesian question of order will be addressed. The police will be respected. The thugs and agitators will be charged. Labour’s post-liberal communitarianism will become more authoritarian. But then what?

If Keir Starmer is serious about national renewal (and he is), he will have to hit the far right hard but also find ways to include those who feel excluded and abandoned by Westminster in a new national story. These are not the far right but the people of peripheral England for whom democratic politics is not working, who don’t vote for Labour or any other party: the neglected, the ignored, the impoverished, the reviled, the mutinous. What do you do about these people and their anger, suffering and despair? As Guilluy says, you can’t simply wish away a whole class.

Jason Cowley’s book “Who Are We Now?” was published in 2022 by Picador