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Showing posts with label UK far right. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK far right. Show all posts
Kate Rice ✍ Like most people, my social media feed has recently been awash with news of protesters in Dover, Portsmouth, and other seaside towns, demonstrating against small boat migration and the RNLI’s "helping hand." 

The fallout from these actions hit a boiling point when the Portsmouth Lifeboat Station was forced to temporarily suspend its services due to the intense physical and online abuse directed at its volunteers.

Where I can usually form a coherent opinion on complex public matters, I find myself completely baffled by this. The RNLI has existed since 1824, and since its inception, it has been an entirely indiscriminate humanitarian service. Its founding ethos is to protect those in peril on the sea—full stop. There is no clause stating "protect as long as they look like us" or "protect as long as they hold the right documentation." Its only mandate is to save those who are drowning.

When I was a child visiting the seaside, the RNLI hubs were places of community and pride. Volunteers were always happy to show you the lifeboats and share stories of maritime history. They never spoke of a political agenda because they didn't have one; their sole focus was saving lives. To any normal person, this selflessness is admirable. So why are we now seeing crowds calling themselves "patriots" protesting heroic charity work, threatening good-hearted volunteers, and driving vital rescue operations off-service?

The forced closure of the Portsmouth station creates an undeniable hazard. On an immensely popular stretch of coastline, risks emerge every day for hobby sailors, windsurfers, families, and yes, migrants in small boats. The irony is that during the Portsmouth incident, RNLI volunteers even stepped in to ensure the safety of the protesters who had waded into the water to confront the arriving boat. The charity protects everyone.

This unconditional humanity isn't new. During the Second World War, the RNLI routinely rescued downed German airmen from the sea. They did so without stopping to check documentation, and without pausing to consider that these men were actively at war with their country. They saved them simply because they were human beings facing death in the water. Once safe on solid ground, the proper authorities took over.

This is exactly what happens on the rare occasions they assist small boats in the English Channel. It is not the purpose of a volunteer rescue crew to act as border enforcement or to assess legal status; their only job is to ensure a person doesn’t die when a tragedy is entirely preventable. Channel rescues make up barely more than one per cent of the RNLI's nationwide callouts, yet volunteers are being branded as "traitors" online and targeted at their stations. Demanding that volunteers stand by and watch people suffer or drown is, without question, inhuman.

All human beings possess a fundamental right to life and safety. The human condition must always take precedence over a political or legal status. Protests targeting a lifesaving charity are dangerous reflections of xenophobic rhetoric. The consequences of these actions do not just endanger migrants; they put the volunteers themselves at risk and threaten the legal citizens who rely on those same lifeboats every single day.

When does it end? Will these critics only be satisfied when more small boat crossings end the way it did for two-year-old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian child whose lifeless body washed ashore, becoming a horrifying symbol of global inaction and a heart breaking picture on the cover of our newspapers? We cannot allow political bias and bigoted anger to dictate who lives and who dies when the means to save them are readily available.

The RNLI and its lifesaving mission must be fiercely protected. To those standing on the shores shouting insults at rescue boats, I ask a simple question - will you only be satisfied when the tide brings in nothing but bodies to bury?

⏩Kate Rice is a peace baby.

Hating The RNLI

Barry Gilheany ✍ Writing this in wake of Andy Burnham’s convincing victory in the Makerfield by-election . . . 

. . . which in the opinion of politics observers and of his supporter may well presage his entry into 10 Downing Street, either by acclaim in a coronation or in a Labour Party leadership contest with the incumbent PM Sir Keir Starmer with all the potential for a typically Labour fratricidal struggle that comes with such terrain, I find the subject of this article, namely the involvement of outsourcing companies with the accommodation of asylum seekers. For tackling the extent of and the hollowing out of the British state to the outsourcing sector will have to be high on Burnham’s agenda for change; to rebalance the relationship between the state and the citizen and to roll back, in his words, “the failed forty-year neoliberal experiment.” Doing this will hopefully help to lance the boil of resentment and perceived sense of injustice around the housing of migrants.

For, arguably the biggest driver of anger around immigration and hostility towards, in particular, recently arrived migrant and/or asylum-seeking communities is the effect on local housing stock. Toxic narratives are ten a penny about the alleged provision of full board, lodging, and welfare benefits to young men of “fighting age” from “alien cultures" in hotels and Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs) in areas of deprivation where there acute shortages of affordable housing. 

The last three summers have seen demonstrations about the accommodation of asylum seekers in these sites and also in disused military barracks; some protestors have genuine concerns about the integration of these new arrivistes in their communities and of the sheer ennui of the conditions of their temporary residence. For others, the motivations are xenophobic and racist as is shown by the presence of far-right agitators such as Tommy Robinson other groups further to his right such as Britain First, the white supremacist Homeland Party and the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative. And, unfortunately, riots have been sparked by the convictions of asylum seekers for crimes, such as the murder of a hotel worker by a Sudanese national in Walsall in the West Midlands in October 2024 and the sexual assault of a 14 year-old girl in Epping by an Afghan national resident in the Bell Hotel three in 2025 and by events such as the attempted murder of a Belfast man by a Sudanese national captured in such horrific social media images a fortnight ago, and the Southport killings in August 2024. These disturbances, or pogroms, have of course been exacerbated by bad actors online who through their wilful dissemination of misinformation have sought to pour accelerant on the flames. Because lies and wilful ignorance has so often been the currency of debate over immigration and asylum, it is the aim of this article to shed some factual light on exactly how asylum seekers and migrants are housed. I aim to show the outsourcing of the running of asylum accommodation to private facilities companies such as Serco is a metaphor for the hollowing out of the British state; for the stark reality that, in the words of Anoosh Chakelian in her New Statesman article on the political temperature in the Greater Manchester satellite town of Wigan in the context of the Makerfield by-lection, the state has neither the capacity nor the political capital to build, buy or rent out specific asylum housing itself, and nor do councils. For her, the Home Office has been a “basket case,” that in the words of insiders with knowledge of the issue, “doesn’t know what to do” about the failing accommodation system and “isn’t doing anything about it,” despite all the official clamour about wishing to close the hotels.[1]

In her tour of the Makerfield constituency and especially Wigan its biggest town, Chakelian points to Darlington Street, a long road of redbrick terraces to house the major battalions of industrial England, mill worker, and miners, leading into Wigan town centre, as an archetypal symbol of Britain’s woes. For Darlington Street and its offshoots are believed locally to have Britain’s highest concentration of Serco run and other HMOs (Houses of Multiple Accommodation) Serco is one of the private outsourcing companies with a government contract to rent them out to asylum seekers. Serco leases houses from private landlords and runs them on their behalf. Chakelian reports being told that some landlords receive between £1,000 and £2,000 a month in rent on these properties, depending on number of bedrooms, location, and condition. This money comes from the Home Office, which agreed ten-year contracts to outsource the accommodation of asylum seekers in hotels and houses to Serco and two other firms: Clearsprings and Mears.[2]

The statistics tell the story of a very dysfunctional set up. There are 93,653 asylum seekers housed in Home Office asylum accommodation in the UK, around 22 per cent of whom are in hotels, some of which Serco runs. The hotels coast around £170 a night per person, compared with £14 per night on average in an HMO. Since closing the hotels is a priority for the government due to their roles as flashpoints for local discontent, the number of dispersals to houses has quietly risen annually – there are now 68,719 in tens of thousands of houses across the country. But with the number of irregular arrivals, 43,806 in the year ending March 2026, this number will continue to swell. A typical Serco HMO contract offers a seven-year lease with a one-year break [3] clause, and includes “monthly property inspections, council tax and utilities paid,” “no call-out payments to contractors,” no management, legal restriction, or set-up fees, and “day-to-day maintenance and repairs undertaken at no cost to the landlord.” The landlord is responsible for structural repairs and fundamentals such as pipework. No wonder, one landlord with HMOs in Norfolk has described Serco as “the fairy godmother.”[4]

On top of this, some property investors are buying up cheap properties, contracting them with Serco then advertising them to cash buyers as attractive investment opportunities with guaranteed steady rent. Anoosh Chakelian cites one property investor promising as high as 10.5 per cent returns on cheap housing for as little as £148,600. Landlords have also added to the perception of migrants being prioritised for housing by kicking out existing tenants (before the recent prohibition of no-fault evictions) in order to rent to Serco instead. All of this forms part of the picture portrayed by the Wigan MP and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to Anoosh Chakelian while out door knocking for the eventually victorious Andy Burnham, “you’re often on a road where every other house been taken up as an HMO” – for asylum seekers, as well as for other housing schemes for ex-offenders, drug addicts and the homeless. “Because the properties are cheaper, they all target the same areas,” Nandy says, which drives up rents. According to her, her constituents now feel part of “a very transient community,” where they don’t know their neighbours, new people keep arriving, “and a lot of social problems [are] concentrated in one area.”[5].

That one vignette speaks to the progressive degradation of public and community spaces and the resultant seething discontent, cynicism and hopelessness that is so prevalent in affected areas such as Wigan. It speaks volumes of the lack of capacity of the central state and of local authorities to tackle  systematic blockages such as public housing and its necessary accompanying infrastructure. In his review of Sam Freedman’s book Failed State: Why Britain Doesn’t Work and How We Can Fix It, Steve Conley runs the ruler over Freedman’s central claim: that decades of over-centralisation and reckless outsourcing, have hollowed out the state, leaving public services expensive, inefficient, and unaccountable. By centralisation, Freedman explains that because successive governments have stripped local councils of powers and funding, making communities dependent on Whitehall. In what he describes as the “Outsourcing Trap,” Freedman describes how from the 1980s, core municipal services once provided in-house were forced into the market. Refuse collection, cleaning and – most disastrously children’s homes – were handed to private contractors. Today, three quarters of residential care homes are run by private equity firms, charging councils up to £6,000 per child per week while making double digit profits. Vulnerable children are often displaced hundreds of miles from family networks, with damaging consequences.[6]

Freedman sets three competency tests for outsourcing: real competition, measurable outcomes, and the shift of risk to the provider. Where these conditions are absent, as has happened in children’s care, probation, and security to name three of the most blatant examples, outsourcing is doomed with sometimes catastrophic consequences as in the aforementioned trio. Yet the same conglomerates keep winning contracts despite repeated scandals involving Serco, G45, Atos and others.[7] Serco, in particular, is so integral to the British state that Margaret Hodge ,the Labour politician and former Chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee who led an investigation into Serco, has called it “too big to fail", because, “there are too many services that would collapse” if it went bankrupt. This despite the Serious Fraud Office investigation into Serco over a multimillion-pound fraud and false accounting, overcharging to tag criminals who didn’t exist which led to a fine of £19.2m for Serco (and the eventual clearing of bosses for fraud).[8]

This frank admission by Margaret Hodge speaks volumes about the democratic deficit that swirls around outsourcing. Parliament struggles to hold the executive to account while governments chase headlines in the 24-hour news cycle. The result is a state run by media reaction, not coherent planning. The weakening of British institutions by privatisation and short-termism has made it easier for poor leaders (and bad actors like former No 10 Chief of Staff Dominic Cummings) to stick to easy, technocratic fixes (which the likely outgoing PM Starmer has often been berated for) rather than embarking on the necessary structural reform of the UK’s fractured state without which it will continue to be locked into a circle of dependency on private profiteers and weak accountability with possibly terminal effects on democracy.

To return to Makerfield for the last time, Anoosh Chakelian gives a necessary corrective to the “luxury hotels” falsehoods spread by the far right. There were nearly 5,000 complaints against asylum contractors escalated to the Home Office between 2022 and 2025, including payments issues, “property suitability”, food not meting the legal standards, and staff behaviour towards asylum seekers, according to documents she obtained via a Freedom of Information request. Serco featured in 1,816 of the 4,962 complaints escalated, surpassed only by Clearsprings’ 1.975. She cites a former Serco hotel worker at the Metropole Hotel in Blackpool who blew the whistle to the online publication the Lead last year on “terrible conditions” at the hotel, including collapsing ceilings and raw sewage leaks.[9]

Chakelian also comments on the experiences of those at the sharp end of Serco services – asylum seekers, immigration detainees, people wearing GPS ankle tags when on immigration bail. Hana, an Albanian airport worker who was tricked by a gang into slave labour on a cannabis farm in England, says she was made by Serco to feel “like I was the criminal” when detained. Mariam, now a trafficking campaigner, said her own experience of being detained as a trafficking victim (while her victors walked free) has given her “lasting trauma” – feeling haunted when she hears keys jangle, and when she sees a Serco escort van in public.[10]

Thus outsourcing has served as multiple lightening rods for dissatisfaction at the malfunctioning of the British state which when mixed with populist sentiment on immigration has created toxic environments in many parts of the Sceptred Isle. It must be a priority for PM Burnham (or whoever succeeds Keir Starmer) to start rebalancing and transforming the state through the devolution of power and decision making back to communities; a shift in the organisational culture of public services from profit maximisation to citizen stewardship; the rebuilding of in-house capacity to deliver them and the creation of public trust through transparency; long-term planning and hybrid public-private innovations.[11] Otherwise Labour or even British democracy could be drinking in its last chance saloon.

References
  
[1] Anoosh Chakelian - The failed state. How Britain outsourced its politics – and lost control. The New Statesman. 12-18 June 2026 pp.21-27

[2] Ibid, pp.21-22

[3]

[4] P.22

[5] Pp.21-22

[6] Steve Conley. How Britain Outsourced Its Way Into Failure. Academy of Life Planning 19 August 2025

[7] Ibid

[8] Chakelian p.24

[9] Ibid, p.25

[10] Pp.25-26

[11] Conley, op cit

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Immigration, Asylum, Housing And The Outsourcing Of The British State

Barry Gilheany ✍ The images were appalling and should shame any police service worthy of the name. 

Stabbing victim Henry Nowak from Southampton, and a student at the local university, lies prostrate on the ground in the last moments of his life desperately pleading that he has been stabbed and on five occasions the listener can hear the horrifying iconic words “I cannot breathe.” Instead of administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or placing Henry in the recovery position in readiness for the arrival of an ambulance, the body cam footage of Hampshire police officers shows them putting handcuffs on the dying 18-year-old and dismissing his entreaties about his stab wounds with the words “I don’t believe you, mate”. 

The reason why the last words that Henry Nowak hears on this earth are him being read his rights is that his assailant, a 22-year-old Sikh male Vikram Digwa who had stabbed him with a ceremonial sword, had falsely accused him of a racial assault. Exactly why these Hampshire police officers decided to believe his lies and prioritise this phantom crime and relegate the obvious distress of his victim will be the subject of an IOPC (Independent Office for Police Complaints) inquiry. There are many, including the local Sikh community, who believe that it should also be the subject of a public inquiry. 

Last week, Digwa was convicted of Henry’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 22 years. On the steps of the courthouse where the legal proceedings were played out, the Nowak family made a dignified appeal for no retaliation for their son’s murder; a plea which was ignored and violated in the most despicable way by rioting in Southampton whipped up by the notorious far right thug figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson and by the call by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for a response of “cold rage”. Not to be outdone, Rupert Lowe MP, leader of Restore UK a far-right breakaway from Reform, called for the execution of Digwa. Pouring flame on the fires from across the Atlantic was the attribution by Vice President JD Vance of the murder to Britain’s “civilisational decline” caused by mass immigration. The barrel of cess was reached (if that is possible) by US Defence Secretary Pete Hesgeth at the D-Day commemoration ceremonies at Normandy who sacrilegiously compared the “invasion” of Western Europe by migrants to that of the Nazis.

Since the allegation of the existence of two tier policing in Britain whereby ethnic minorities and Muslims are perceived to receive preferential treatment in the justice system than white people is at the centre of the rage around the murder of Henry Nowak and of other epochs of civil disorder such as the wave of anti-migrant riots after the Southport killings in the summer of 2024, it is necessary to examine the institutional culture that has provided the rationale for the articulation of such grievances. 

At the outset, I must state that while two-tier narratives are ultimately easily disprovable, there have undoubtedly been examples of where misplaced concerns about legitimising racism has had catastrophic consequences. One example concerns the homicides of three people including a student couple, Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley Kumar, and Ian Coates in Nottingham on 13 June 2023 by paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane. The public inquiry into the killings found that racial sensitivities about the overrepresentation of black males in institutionalised mental health care led to a reluctance to section Calocane who had consistently refused to comply with his medication and care supervision regime. Dr Jonathan Gibson – who saw Calocane four months before the killings – testified that he had been repeatedly told that psychiatry was “institutionally racist” … and stated that “I did not believe that it had no bearing on VC’s care.”[1] In the words of Emma Webber, Barnaby’s mother, the outcome was a “catastrophic collapse of responsibility” and an “undoubted miscarriage of justice”[2] The other is the continuing scar left by the legacy of the grooming gang scandals whereby local authority agencies and politicians displayed repeated unwillingness to call out and tackle the systematic (and racialised) sexual abuse of white working class girls and young women by gangs of South Asian predators in Northern towns and cities.

To return to the case of Henry Nowak, possible explanations for the apparently disastrous decision making by the police on the night of his murder in December 2025 on his way back from a night out at his campus have been located in the hitherto little-known Police Anti-Racism Commitment which was produced as part of the police race action plan. It is a commitment document summarising what police chiefs will do to end racial bias. The part that has given rise to controversy states: “It does mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being colour blind’ (racial equality).” According to one person familiar with police thinking, the phrasing means that in their interactions with a member of the public, they should take into account the historical experience of their particular group with policing and the context. So, in the current climate of antisemitic attacks, a Jew may want reassurance that hate will be considered as a motive for a claim of criminal damage. Or a black person may need reassurance that a stop and search is not racially motivated but a legitimate action. 

The policy came out of the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and was supposed to guide the recording and investigation of hate crimes. Whether it was meant to be operational policy looks highly doubtful, with Neil Basu, Britain’s former head of counterterrorism and formerly Britain’s most senior minority ethnic officer, asserting that while police are supposed to treat claims of a racial motivation seriously that does not mean that any claim of alleged hate crime has to be accepted unconditionally. He has said:

When a victim says something you take it seriously, but that is different to believing it. The policy is supposed to stop police officers ignoring victims without investigating.[3]

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has clarified that the document is not formal policy or training for officers. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said that she believes the phrasing is “clumsy.” The policing minister Sarah Jones has said: 

I don’t think it forms the basis of any training or any police activity. We think the language is wrong, it gives the wrong impression. But I don’t think it affects how our training is done.[4].

For many on the right, the murder of Henry Nowak was the outcome of the breakdown of the basis of policing caused by the influence of wokeness, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies and, most totemic of all, the Black Lives Movement post-the murder of George Floyd in the USA in 2020. While rejecting such lines of argument, Kenan Malik does trace out the history and the outworkings of imported Americanised diversity training in policing which has led to the “two tier” narratives. He explains how in the 1980s, in response to the inner-city riots of the time and the widespread anger at racist policing, the state co-opted antiracist activists into the system by providing funding and resources. Goals for equality (a word that became anachronistic at the high-water mark of Thatcherism and beyond) became redefined as a drive for (the rather more anodyne goal) diversity. “Racism awareness training” became established corporate lingo; something which as long ago as 1985, the radical antiracist Ambalavaner Sivanadan described as “catharsis for guilt-stricken whites” and a “degradation” of the antiracist struggle.[5] Such epithets would be equally applicable today to concepts such as “white fragility”.

With the decline of independent, grass roots antiracist movements, “antiracism” became associated with bureaucratised, Americanised forms of diversity training of which for Malik “The Police Anti-Racism Commitment” document is the Gold Standard with its showcasing of performative, corporate guilt-tripping phrases such as “it is not enough for us to not be racist.” and the transformation of the meaning of equality from signifying the right to be treated the same to denoting the right to be treated differently. The decay of antiracism into virtue signalling, box ticking bureaucracy warped the struggle for equality and instilled a reluctance to act over such derelictions of public duty by authorities such as the grooming gangs scandal, the Nottingham and Southport tragedies because of misplaced racial and cultural sensitivities.[6]

But the most toxic legacy of bureaucratised “anti-racism has been to reinforce identitarian politics on both left and right and to allow racism to be rebranded in the language of white identity[7] or ethnonationalist English identity. Or in the victim narrative of alt-Right politicians like Nigel Farage that “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities."[8] No matter that on every available metric on law enforcement, black people are systematically disadvantaged... even adjusting the use of force to account for disparities in the number of arrests, black people were still 1.7 times more likely to have force used against them last year; a figure which probably understates the true disparity, since only 70% of use-of-force reports led to an arrest.. Black people remained more likely than any other ethnic group to be subjected to almost any form of force, from handcuffing to bites from police dogs, from firearms to Tasers, when compared with population or arrest figures. Police officers were also 3.8 times more likely to stop and search a black person than a white person in the year up to March 2025.[9] In the Hampshire Constabulary area, black people were four times as likely as white people to be stop and searched.

But as has been seen repeatedly in Western democracies in the last decade from Brexit and first election of Trump in 2016 through the electoral successes of far right parties and the second election of Trump in 2024; it has been the rocket fuel of almost primordial emotion propelled by the algorithms of social media and the shadow world of plutocrats with very deep pockets that has been the greatest resource of the identitarian right. Migration and the second-tier narratives will remain mobilising forces for it powered as they are by tsunamis of misinformation with the concomitant menace of social disorder and identity-based hatred. To counteract such pernicious narratives, a democratic left that is not suffused with identity pathologies needs to rework a universalist politics of solidarity for our divided and anatomised times. But it is a politics that must not sacrifice public trust in democratic institutions on the altar of corporate guilt.

References  

[1] Gaby Hinsliff, Now is the time for hard truths, not culture -war posturing. The Guardian: Opinion 5 June 2026 p.3

[2] BBC East Midlands News 8 June 2026

[3] The Guardian 4 June 2026 p.6

[4] Ibid

[5] Kenan Malik, In weaponising Henry Nowak’s death, the right has come full circle on identity politics. The Observer 7 June 2026 p.28

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] The Guardian 6 June 2026, p13

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Tiers Of Justice And Rage 🪶The Fall Out From The Murder Of Henry Nowak

Barry Gilheany ✍😔 Writing about the proliferation of far right loudmouths like the white US supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and the UK anti-Islam, anti-immigration figure Tommy Robinson on social media who seem to outbid each other to say the most outrageous and offensive things, the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland writes that they are competing in an attention economy.[1] 

For the past few years, writers and reformers have issued siren warnings about how platforms like X/Twitter have become a toxic sludge of hate speech and disinformation giving a bully pulpit to extreme voices such Advance UK, a political party that now includes Tommy Robinson and that vows to ban indefinite leave to remain, ban the foreign -born from becoming British citizens and encourage all settled migrants to leave. That its candidate polled less than the Monster Raving Looney Party candidate in last week’s Gorton and Denton by-election and that it is competing with other micro outfits like Reclaim UK and Restore UK to leech support away from, in the words of Elon Musk, the “weak sauce” of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK does not detract from its contribution to the, as the late E.L. Doctorow put it, the steady “enshittification” of the internet. But it is the role of the attention economy in facilitating surveillance capitalism and its colonisation of humanity’s cognitive and deliberative capacities and one very real human casualty of it – the death by suicide of 14-year-old Molly Russell that is the overarching concern of this article.

In 1971, the economist Herbert Simon, when pondering the problem of information overload, opined that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. Since his primary interest was in organisations, Simon saw this as a problem to be solved. In the 1990s, the moguls of Silicon Valley seized upon this opportunity. For if attention had become the scarce commodity in a newly networked economy, if it was possible to capture it, sell access to it to advertisers and monitor what it revealed, the world could be your oyster. It was the beginning of what the writer Michael Goldhaber called the “attention economy.” First out of the traps was Google with its user friendly, all things to all people search engine – the Universal Library of Things. It monitored what the users searched for and used the resulting data to improve the search engine. However this did not satisfy the company’s venture capital investors who demanded a business model. The Google bros then realised that they could use their monitoring data as raw material for a machine learning algorithm that provided outputted information about users whom advertisers might be interested in.[2]

Thus was born what the Harvard academic Shoshana Zuboff has labelled “surveillance capitalism.” In its Manifesto for Attention Liberation, The Friends of Attention describes how both surveillance capitalism and the attention economy have created a business model for us. Over the past three decades, the explosive growth of the internet and the global proliferation of data devices have meshed with a series of shortsighted political decisions: along the way, the entrepreneurial savviness of the Tech Bros has produced, in effect, an ostensibly “free” digital universe – whose hidden operating cost is the depletion and pollution of the minds and sense of its users.[3]

For attention activists, the business model of the “attention economy” is a globe-spanning industrial farm that extracts money from a billion vegetative humans suspended in an infinite web, eyes glazed. In this dystopia, humanity devotes almost the entirety of its waking hours in digital spaces substantially financed by extractive profit models that systematically tap human beings for the monetary value of our eyeballs. This twelve-trillion-dollar operation motors a global-scale, computationally intensive, and commercially lucrative system for the sourcing, aggregation, and nonstop auction-market of human attention. The fundamental immorality of analysing this business model in cost-benefit terms is that our dehumanisation cannot be quantified. In the words of Burnett et al, this is not a conversation about trade-offs. It is a conversation about coercion, theft, and the instrumentalization of human life.[4]

The global behemoth that is the attention economy is comprised of the world’s largest five companies who are all technology providers (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet or Google, and Amazon) and who are each valued at more than two trillion.  Four of the five have billions of customers who use their products more or less continuously, and whose data-commodification constitutes a central business operation. The fifth makes the chips that power the processing and manipulation of that data by means of algorithmic AI. The Big Tech empire exploits the invisible iron cage ubiquity of its digital platforms to garner information about us – our clicks and keystrokes, our blinks and grimaces, our typos, and our personality types – and then input these data into giant predictive technologies. In turn our profiles, preferences, foibles, and projected future personalities are sold off to the highest bidder.[5]

The harms of this new economy are conceptualised by the Attention Liberation Movement as “human fracking.” For just as petroleum fracking is wreaking irreversible damage to our external environment (our woods and fields, our water and sky), while the human frackers are inflicting possibly permanent damage to our interior environment (our minds and hearts, our thinking and deliberative abilities, and our ability to be and to suit with ourselves and the people we love.[6]

The advent of the app ChatGPT in November 2022 which rapidly became the fastest-growing app in the world has raised for some commentators the prospect of the demise of the attention economy. For why not type that search which one would have automatically inputted into Google into ChatGPT instead. Surely the innovation of chatbots and LLMs (large language models) would sound the death knell of the attention economy. This conundrum is addressed by the Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, in the Harvard Data Science Review where they develop their thesis on the “intention economy” a prospect which they view as a “lucrative yet troubling new marketplace for digital signals of intent,” from buying cinema tickets to voting for political candidates. This model is one of a marketplace for behavioural and psychological data that signals human intent and operates through natural language interfaces powered by LLMs. In the view of John Naughton, this differs from the attention economy in that it trades on users’ limited attention spans through advertising whereas the difference in the beast that is the intention economy trades on signals that predict, shape and game human intention before actions occur and so facilitates much deeper psychological manipulation through personalised AI interactions. This MO enables “conversation” with chatbots in free and unguarded ways heightening the risk of signposting to dangerous forums such as pro-anorexia and suicide websites. The plausibility and false authenticity is powered by the ability of LLMs to infer private attributes from conversations (while, incidentally, bypassing the cookie restrictions which so aggravate the advertisers and hucksters of the supposedly ancient attention economy).[7]

Regardless of any such academic or structural differentials within the new information economy, the human casualties of the aforementioned models and the deleterious effects on public life are stark. Be it the harvesting of the data of unsuspecting Facebook users by the rogue research company Cambridge Analytica in order to facilitate the victory of Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum in the UK; the flooding of the zone by shit (in Steve Bannon’s words) generated by the bot factories in St Petersburg to cause maximum disruption of US Presidential election and to bolster Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine and the coarsening of public discourse by the rage machine that is Twitter; social media networks appear to have lost their emancipatory lure and potential since the heady days of the Arab Spring. The foremost critic of the erosion of democracy is Shoshana Zuboff who in her 2019 seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power documents the conditions of online surveillance we all live under, the covert harvesting of private data that enables targeted advertising and allows for our emotional manipulation. This week will see on both cinematic and television screen the fruits of her collaboration with the British film maker film-maker Marc Silver the documentary Molly vs the Machines which was due to be shown at the Glasgow film festival on 1 March, having its simultaneous UK premiere, before being broadcast on Channel 4 on 5 March.[8]

The shift in the global economic paradigm that Zuboff so meticulously and coruscatingly documents in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is heartbreakingly humanised the destructive effects of Big Tech’s business model on the most interpersonal level. Molly was recorded and monitored for most of her adolescence, particularly after she downloaded Instagram and Pininterest. These apps function by tracking their “users” (drugs and social media – those are the only times they become “users” [“customers,” anybody?] and supplying them with the content that will keep them using. Though clearly struggling and negotiating with the ordinary pressures and unhappiness of adolescence, the algorithms Molly encountered online were tailored by an inhumane mechanism, supplying her content that reflected her unhappiness until it became unbearable.[9]

The coroner at Molly’s inquest ruled that she died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.” The most poignant and powerful testimony in the film comes from Molly’s schoolfriends who concur with the coroner’s verdict. They saw they were shocked to learn after her death how she had been persistently measuring her stomach and looking at so much negative self-imagery. Guiltily, most of them confess they still look at Instagram on their own phones. For Zuboff, they are all victims of the tech monopolies’ strategy: “Where the algorithm senses high levels of engagement, it gives that material pride of place,” she says. “It will amplify it and it will send it out, as happened to Molly in the last months of her young life. She received hundreds of grotesque messages and images depicting suicide and self-harm.” Thus Molly Russell has yet another example of how, in Zuboff’s trenchant words, of how society has sent its precious young “like canaries in the coalmine” into a “death march with the all-seeing algorithm.”[10]

So the short span of Molly’s life parallels the trajectory of the development of the social media platforms, as they first learned to harvest and monetise our private information, then to predict our habits and eventually to shape them. Her story is the haunting backdrop to, and shadow of the “breakthrough idea that human behaviour should be treated as a commodity” [11]the genealogy of which Zuboff has so diligently and starkly chronicled.

The addictive nature of much social media output and their role in fuelling not just the global Triple P virus of Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth but their assault on privacy and the developmental health of young people has led to a growing national and international clamour for the prohibition of access to social media to young people under the age of sixteen. Just such a ban has been instituted in Australia. Similar restrictions are coming down the track in France and Spain, and at least 15 European governments are looking at comparative measures. Last month, Keir Starmer gave full backing to establishing a consultation for a British minimum age for social media age. 

For Shoshana Zuboff, the iniquity of Big Tech’s attacks on privacy and the democracy of the public square is a moral crusade of our time, comparable to the abolition of slavery and child labour. For her the abolition of the business model behind the MO of the sites that Big Tech runs is essential rather than a mere prohibition for children. A social media ban for children is opposed by Ian Russell, father of Molly, who now chairs the Molly Rose Foundation and has, through grief, become an advocate to the accountability of social media platforms. 

The toxic effects on the developing minds and brains of children and young people of bad actors on social media are undeniable. But should the baby of the totality of digital media be thrown out with the bathwater of the effluent of the sites like the algorithm ones that drove a 14-year-old girl with all her life and potential in front of her to her death? How would such a ban be practically enforced? Human nature being what it is, prohibition always creates the allure of the forbidden fruit for those predisposed to testing boundaries. Is there universal consensus as to the inherent dangers to health of social media sites as there is in relation to tobacco and certain controlled drugs? While child protection must always be an overriding public duty and societal value, can some latitude be afforded to children’s natural curiosity and desire for experimentation? Debate around an under 16 ban still leaves unaddressed the wider harms of the monetised and behaviour altering model of the digital information economy whether in its attention or intention formats. The reclamation of our futures from the empire builders of Silicon Valley has to be an animating cause, even crusade, for our times.
 
References

[1] Jonathan Freedland. Here are the powerful men making racists feel great again. Guardian Journal. 14 February 2026 pp.1-2

[2] John Naughton, Big tach profited from our attention – now AI wants to monetise intentions. The Observer - Science & Tech 22 February 2026 p.19

[3] D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, eds. (2026). The Friends of Attention Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. London: Particular Books p.25

[4] Ibid, pp.25-26

[5] Ibid, p.26

[6] Ibid, pp.33-35

[7] Naughton, op cit.

[8] Abolition is the correct response to a moral catastrophe. The Observer - Interview 22 February 2026 pp.17-18

[9] Nicholas Harris. The cost of an online childhood. New Statesman -Television 27 February – 5 March 2026 pp. 60-61

[10] Observer - Interview, p.18

[11] Ibid 

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

It’s The Attention Economy, Stupid 🪶 The World Of Information Dystopia And Its Human Casualties

Maryam Namazie ✊ My action against the far-Right protest in London.


Maryam Namazie is a political activist, campaigner and blogger

National Flags Divide, Our Future Is Shared

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ On Saturday 13th September a crowd reportedly in excess of 100,000 marched in London at the invitation of far-right political activist, Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon. 

The protest was against immigration into Britain by people who perhaps without thinking things out logically for themselves believe they have genuine grievances regarding the amount of people entering Britain. Many of those demonstrating may well have been of racial or ethnic minority origins themselves and perhaps not yet having worked out where such exclusion policies as those preached by Robinson can, and have, lead. 

Robinson is a hate filled far-right activist and he organised this rally to protest against immigration. He is tapping into people’s fears, fuelled by the media, both social and regular, in much the same way as did Hitler in the 1920s and early 30s in Germany. Speaking via video link US neo-Nazi Elon Musk -  remember him doing the Nazi salute on stage after his then mate, Donald Trump, had been elected President of the USA? Musk appeared on stage with Trump, himself a far-right theorist, giving a Nazi salute and then set about waving a chain saw around demonstrating how he was going to cut thousands of public sector jobs in the US. Musk urged people on the demonstration to use “violence” to combat immigration his views were echoed strongly by Robinson. It was almost as if the use of violence was legitimised by Musk, the world’s second wealthiest man, given his position in the US establishment.

Robinson encouraged the crowd to act in “revolution” against immigration and particularly Islamic people. For some reason Britain still believes it has a special relationship with the USA even when a member of that country’s elite encourages people to use “violence” against British policemen. Great relationship I must say! Could anybody imagine back in 1984/1985 – hypothetically speaking – when the coal miners were out on strike in Britain, in a cause far more legitimate than these fascist gangs, if a member of the then Soviet Union government urged miners to take up arms against police? Imagine if members of the Politburo went on the global airwaves telling workers on strike in Britain to use “violence” against the police. It would have at best caused a diplomatic row yet in the USA this far-right nutter can say what the fuck he likes in support of far-right violence against the police and the government do next to nothing! Musk was giving a hate speech in support of Robinson who himself must now feel emboldened, and why wouldn’t he, after the muti-billionaires intervention. By such criteria it must be asked; if Hitler had not invaded Poland would Britain have had a special relationship with the Third Reich? Or perhaps clandestinely elements in British business did!

On the demonstration itself flags could be seen in a most unholy alliance! There was the union flag (Union Jack) with the Irish Tricolour beneath and the Cross of Saint George below the two propping them up, suggesting all three flags are part of the same allied bloc! To those of us who have even a primitive understanding of history nothing could be further from the truth! The last time something of this nature came to pass was when residents of Coolock, Dublin, paraded the tricolour in Belfast with six county loyalists. These were the same Belfast loyalist gangs, or one strand of loyalism, who wish to see, if they could, the tricolour eradicated from Irish shores. The Coolock residents were in fact subordinating themselves and the tricolour to the ‘Union Jack’ and loyalism. 

I seriously doubt those flying these flags could even begin to see the contradictions and historical enigmas. According to the media, news outlets, most people on this fascist march were not of a racist or far-right mind, something I would question deeply. It is my view based on experience from the past that the majority on this or any similar marches are of a racist and/or fascist leaning political persuasion. It may be true a minority on the march were there due to albeit misguided genuine concerns. But this would have been a minority and not the majority news bulletins optimistically would have us believe. Once the name Tommy Robinson appears there should be no doubt in people’s minds as the true nature of the march.

This was a big march and one of the largest showings of strength by the fascist right of which Robinson is a leading member. The question all anti-fascists should be asking is; how do we stop them? Back in the 1970s the fascist National Front were stopped by the huge anti-Nazi League and, when the SWP wound it up, anti-fascist action (AFA) continued the fight with huge success. It is my view for what it is worth this is only the beginning of the fascist surge. As most people today may not be aware of the history detailing the rise during the nineteen-twenties and thirties of fascism and Nazism in Europe. The Second World War has been over eighty years and most veterans who fought against Hitler and Mussolini, including those members of the British Army who liberated the Nazi camp, Bergen Belsen, will now be long dead. The battle of Caple Street, 1936, was a successful resistance to the British Union of Fascists led by Oswal Moseley and the time may be approaching when such action by socialists, communists, trade unionists, and anti-fascists in general may once again be necessary. In the Twenty-Six Counties we are also witnessing the rise of the far-right. 

Our own bunch of neo-Nazis are under the foolish belief that the big boys in London are not pulling the strings. This is an assumption not to be taken for granted. Remember what ‘Reform UK’ stands for? It represents Britain, the United Kingdom, being reformed and at very least holding on to the Six Counties. Irish unification under Farage is a non-starter and Tommy Robinson may for now consider himself ‘Fuhrer’ Robinson but as time passes the much more respectable looking and sounding Nigel Farage will do doubt take command of the situation. I cannot see him and his Reform UK party allowing such a readymade army of petit-bourgeois street activists supported by an army of working-class ‘concerned citizens’ pass!

 
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Fascist Bands March In London

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭  Historically in Britain the far-right tend to make electoral gains when a moderately left-wing Labour Government are in office (due to applying parliamentary socialist policies in a sea of capitalism, like oil and water, they don’t mix). 

During the mid-nineteen-seventies Harold Wilson, succeeded by Jim Callaghan in 1976, tried to enforce such moderate socialist policies and was forced to retract them, satisfying nobody, least of all the trade unions, leading to the rise of the fascist National Front (NF) on the streets. 

Today we are witnessing the rise both electorally and on the streets of the ‘Reform UK’ party and they appear to be winning in both theatres. ‘Reform UK’ are led by a very convincing Nigel Farage who, unlike his predecessors, does not come out, at least publicly, with language which could be equated with fascism. He does not use derogatory terms to describe ‘immigrants’ and people of different skin colour as those in the NF, and later the British National Party (BNP), did. In fact ‘Reform UK’ has among their ranks people of Asian origin who hold high office in their organisation at least as long as it serves the purpose of the party to be seen in such a multi-cultural light. Once this façade has served its purpose could this all change?

Farage has been clever and opportunist in taking advantage of Keir Starmer’s adoption of right-wing policies by stealing traditional labour socialistic clothing. Knowing the electorate have little if any idea of political ideology Farage can steal, without notice, traditional Labour Party policies such as nationalisation of certain industries like the Scunthorpe Steel Works and, on the surface, defending the Welfare State. A traditional Labour policy which comes to mind is the ’Reform UK’ support for the nationalisation of the water service providers and energy, Gas and Electric services. Farage is very vocal in his policies of nationalisation of these industries, and for a second confusion between an oration spoke by Farage in 2025 and Clement Attlee back in 1945 could be forgiven. The difference is when Attlee spoke of nationalising British industries he also aimed towards the ‘pluralist’ system of industrial relations involving regular talks between the trade unions and management with the understanding that ‘class conflict’ was probably inevitable but not insurmountable. The object was to minimise such conflicts certainly in the newly nationalised industries. This system of industrial relations was torn up by the far-right, in parliamentary terms, British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher who herself, I believe, privately held certain fascist views and who hated all aspects of the post-war political consensus in Britain including the ‘pluralist’ system of industrial relations.

Nigel Farage’s version of nationalisation is highly unlikely to include trade union participation in influencing decisions in these industries and certainly not an acceptance of ‘class conflict being inevitable but not insurmountable’. The existence of trade unions, certainly as we know them, under a ‘Reform UK’ Government would be questionable. Farage wants what he terms a “sensible” relationship with the unions to “prevent the need for strikes” and this very ambiguous description of policies could mean a multitude of things, perhaps having Reform people at the helm of union leadership? 

Adolf Hitler during his election campaigns pretended to court the working-class and once in power one of the first moves he made was to close down the trade unions, placing armed SA (Sturmabteilung) men outside their offices and making strikes illegal, punishable by a long spell in a concentration camp. He replaced the ‘free trade unions’ with the Nazi controlled ‘labour front’ which ‘dissuaded’ workers from taking traditional industrial action! In 1936 Oswald Mosley founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) visited Hitler in Germany. He married Dianna Mitford at the home of Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler as Guest of Honour. Mosley sought an alliance with Mussolini and Hitler and openly voiced support for the Nazis' anti-Semitism. Does Farage share some of Oswald Mosley’s political objectives? This is a question people should at least ponder before giving him and his party the vote!

It is all a façade by ‘Reform UK’ to entice Labour voters away from the Labour Party and Keir Starmer is playing right into their hands. Starmer’s abandonment of traditional Labour Party values has left a vacuum for Farage to temporarily occupy. The reality is ‘Reform UK’ do not wish to be a friend of the Welfare State and particularly the National Health Service (NHS) which, according to Labour, ‘Reform UK’ would “scrap the NHS” should they ever be in a position to do so. What is left of the British Labour Party’s left-wing should be rallying the government to turn course and begin re-enacting policies expected from a Labour Government. The problem Labour MPs face here is this; any of them who push in a left-wing direction, Starmer has the whip removed from them. Effectively this expels such MPs from the party with Rachel Maskel, MP for York, becoming the latest victim of Starmer’s right-wing approach. It is not only the Labour Party whose voters Farage is gunning for, the Conservatives are an equally open target for him to aim at. Nigel Farage, a former Tory Thatcherite, is finding it easy to entice the right-wing of the Conservative voters.

One aspect of fascist ideology which is pivotal and that is turning the country into a business on a maximise profits basis. One point Farage and ‘Reform UK’ often argue is there are not enough ‘business minded people in government’. One of their Asian leading members, Zia Yusuf, from Reform UK's ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, said; “not one of the Labour Cabinet has had a job of any significance in private business”, suggesting only business people should be in Cabinet! Perhaps, in their eyes, only business people should get the vote?! This form of corporatism is central to fascist thinking though Farage is careful to avoid the word ‘corporatism’. During the Nazi years in Germany the government consisted of such business giants as Krupps Armaments directors, Siemens board members, I.G Farben and many others alongside leading officers of the SS. Hitler turned Nazi Germany into a huge profit-making machine using slave labour who were worked to death usually in the armaments industries and the huge theft of Jewish property, especially Art. Like all businesses, opposition like trade unions are not wanted and, in the case of fascism, must go! If you are a trade unionist and thinking of voting ‘Reform UK’ think very, very, very hard.

The idea of business people holding office was reinforced by ‘Reform UK’ MP for Runcorn and Helsby, Sarah Pochin, who supports the idea of business people running the country. The party won the by-election in May overturning Labours 14,700 majority in Runcorn and Helsby which should sound the alarm bells for Starmer. Another aim of ‘Reform UK’ is to reform the prison system stating; “we should involve the army in opening new prisons”. The Runcorn and Helsby MP continued; “old MoD property should be used as prisons with soldiers as guards”. Such set ups would be more like the early Concentration Camps in the Third Reich than the prisons of a liberal democracy! When in 2016 the far-right candidate, Donald Trump, was elected as President of the United States Nigel Farage was the first politician to board an airplane to the US to congratulate him. In 2020 Trump was voted out of office to be replaced by Joe Biden something which Trump refused to accept. The former President orchestrated an attempted coup using his fledgling private army, the ‘Proud Boys,’ to overturn the election result. This attempted coup by Trump was not too far removed from Hitlers failed Putsch of 1923 in Munich! The similarities between Mosley’s visit to Hitler and Farage’s trip to congratulate Trump are plain to see. Perhaps Farage shares some of Mosley’s ideological aims?

A typical fascist tactic is to whip up racial hatred on the streets then retreat to the safety of the elected chambers and condemn such violence they themselves have largely orchestrated. Such an incident occurred in Essex on Thursday 17th July after an asylum seeker was arrested and charged with sexual assault. He was taken into police custody and at this point a ‘Reform UK’ councillor reportedly addressed a crowd inciting racial hatred in their innuendos hiding behind the lines of ‘common sense’ sounding arguments. These innuendos were easily dissected by ‘Reform UKs’ own agents within the crowd to then transmit to the less intelligent thugs who made up the numbers. Such a twin track strategy of preaching law and order in the chambers and orchestrating violence on the streets was used by both Mussolini and Hitler with devastating results. Are ‘Reform UK’ trying to emulate such strategies of nineteen twenties and thirties Italy and Germany?

‘Reform UK’ have had many successes in local elections as well as the last British General Election. According to YouGov “Reform would win most seats in a general election” if that election in Britian were to happen now. Fortunately such an election is not due until 2029, though Keir Starmer is doing his best to make a mess of things despite his huge majority which could force a national poll earlier! ‘Reform UK’ have four MPs, Lee Anderson, Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, and Sarah Pochin, and two - Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock - who were elected and are now under suspension. Not a great deal it could be argued but the frightening point is the last local elections in May they won council seats from both Labour and the Conservatives with Sarah Pochin winning Runcorn and Helsby in a by-election overturning Labour's relatively large 14,700 majority. Nigel Farage described the 1st May elections as a “great day” for his party. What perhaps the British electorate should ask themselves is this. If the ‘Reform UK’ party were to be elected to government, would the electorate after five years have the opportunity to vote them out? A very, very relevant question given the nature of their policies.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Are The British Electorate Blindly Marching Towards Fascism?

Maryam Namazie ✊ We, the undersigned, stand in utter condemnation of the murderous violence against girls in Southport and mourn the lives lost and harmed by violence against women and girls in all its forms.

We are further alarmed by and we condemn the instrumentalisation of that violence by racists and fascists on the streets and in the corridors of power. Over the weekend racists set fire to hotels housing vulnerable migrants and since then, there have been reports on plans to attack other hotels and immigration advice centres over the next few days.

These racist riots follow a pattern honed by white supremacists who have weaponised violence against women to whip up hatred against racially minoritised communities. These supremacist tactics are creating a palpable sense of fear, particularly among Black, minoritised and migrant women and children with the least state protections. We cannot stay silent as we watch with alarm and horror the terrifying racist violence sweeping across the country. We are witnessing violent xenophobic, racist, anti-migrant and anti-Muslim attacks reminiscent of the National Front’s attacks on African, Caribbean, and Asian communities in the 1970s and 1980s.

These supremacist tactics have been exacerbated and reinforced by the actions of successive governments, politicians and media professionals pandering to far-right, anti-migrant sentiment while simultaneously failing to challenge institutionally racist practices in the fabric of the state’s machinery. The mainstreaming of right wing demands and a failure to systematically counter violence and discrimination towards racially minoritised communities has resulted in some of the most regressive immigration policies that fall short of internationally recognised human rights standards for migrants and refugees. It is imperative that this new Labour government puts forward a positive narrative that rehumanises and values asylum seekers and migration instead of using these events to step up draconian immigration policies.

Black women’s groups like Southall Black Sisters were forged in a politics of resistance to both racist and patriarchal violence on the streets, in our homes and communities, and by the state. We resist now as we did then. We call on government to hold accountable all those sowing hatred and division. We call on government to step up protections for all minoritised communities in the UK.

Here to stay, here to fight! Our tradition is struggle, not submission!

Signed:

Southall Black Sisters
FiLiA
Labour Women’s Declaration
nia
Aurora New Dawn
Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital
Brighton Sisters Salon
Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain
One Law for All

Maryam Namazie is an Iranian-born activist and Spokesperson of the
Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and One Law for All.

Statement On The Far-Right Riots Following The Southport Attack

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand One Hundred And Ninety Seven

Barry Gilheany ✍ In a reflection on the race riots which rocked the United States in the 1960s, Martin Luther King saw them as “a voice of the unheard”. 

Much of the same could be said of other iterations of this phenomenon from the riots in Brixton, Toxteth and other inner city areas in England in 1981 to the recent student riots in Bangladesh which has resulted in the downfall of its authoritarian President.

Down the centuries, riots have so often been the cri de couer or cry from the belly of desperate, marginalised and even starving people of a particular socio-demographic segment. They articulated, however crudely, the voices of those ignored or not heard in the corridors of power.

Au contraire, what can be said about the waves of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim riots that have erupted in a swathe of towns and cities in the North and Midlands of England and in Belfast as well in the week of the unspeakable knife murders of three primary school girls in Southport and the lies and disinformation spread online about the identity of the killer (that he was a Muslim migrant on the terror watch list of the security services), is that they are the voices of the heard. For we have all heard arguably since 2005 and most intensely since the Brexit referendum in 2016; a hit parade of dog whistles and fog horns around immigration. From the subliminal “are you thinking what we are thinking”; to the “hostile environment”; to “breaking point” and to the moral panics about “small boats” and “invasion” of our shores by single young men of “military age”, the rioting mobs, in an inversion of the return of the repressed, have reflected back to a succession of Conservative governments, right wing think tanks and The Daily Mail and Telegraph all of these siren calls around migration. The attacks and attempted burnings of refugee centres and mosques by feral far right mobs represent the putting into practice the logic of nativist, (mostly English) nationalist discursive systems constructed by the above ruling hegemons.

Journalists and opinion makers such as Sarah Vine of the Daily Fail and Isobel Oakeshott (she of “porky pie” fame and partner of Reform MP and deposed party leader Richard “Dicky Lice” Tice) may righteously deplore the actions of mobs who in other contexts they would decry as feckless, workless underclasses who should be prevented from having progeny but they cannot distance themselves from the embodiment of these classes – Steven Yaxley Lennon aka Tommy Robinson, his Luton Town football hooligan moniker. He and his acolytes rave about the threats of Muslim migration and for years he has been a moving avatar of the far right UK and internationally. It is fair to say that Steven, courtesy of Elon Musk who magnanimously reinstated his account, has been the prime instigator of the violence with his gazetteer on his X/Twitter account of meet and greet venues for his gullible fusiliers. But this self-styled British “patriot” is sufficiently aware of his Northern Irish nationalist heritage to acquire an Irish passport to enable hassle free entry to Cyprus for his Aya Napa bolthole. He didn’t tell his pal Johnny Adair of his possession of that document. Sufficiently aware also to employ “Kevin Fulton”, Real IRA/MI5 intel asset as a security enforcer.

So it is preposterous for the media organs of Middle England to retreat to its law and order comfort zone about the convulsions post-Southport without reflecting on their part in creating the conditions for them. The slogans and catch cries of the far right around immigration; the narrative of “Illegal” migrants enjoying hotel experience at tax payer’s expense while homeless veterans languish on our streets; the “lock up your daughters” scaremongering about hordes of military age, single men crossing the Channel on small boats are the suppurating outcomes of the toxins injected into mainstream politics by past Home Secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, past Cabinet Minister and current Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick and arguably the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. The riots are the consequences being played out on our streets of the tone of the Brexit referendum debate and the subsequent transformation of the Conservative and Unionist Party into the English Nationalist Party through its takeover by the ultra-Brexiteer European Research Group and the emergence of Popular and National Conservative factions which in sapping the Tories’ renowned will to power threatens to make it an extinction event.

But rather than continuing to focus on the brawn of Tommy the Coke Head, a arguably more sinister figure lurks as the brains behind the Alt-Right (cognitively a more difficult for far right refuseniks to refute) – Nigel Farage, the recently elected (at the eighth time of asking) MP for Clacton, MEP from 1999 to 2019, current leader of Reform UK and its past iterations, UKIP and the Brexit Party. Along with Boris Johnson who came so late to the party, Farage almost single handedly took the UK out of the EU through acting as a right wing populist nationalist bogey figure for the Tories. For every decision taken by the former Tory PM David Cameron right up to the fateful decision to hold a binary referendum on EU membership was taken to shoot the Eurosceptic (or Euroseptic) fox which were John Major’s “bastards” on the inside and Farage on the outside. He only succeeded in letting the fox into the chicken coop; it was other demons that came home to roost.

Rather than doing what he was mandated by his constituents to do; attend the House of Commons debate called to discuss the riots, he posted a video message questioning whether the full truth of the Southport massacre had been withheld by the police. It is worth picking apart this aspersion as an example of the rhetorical device so used by unscrupulous populists and conspiracist. First of all, there is the outrageous spectacle of an elected representative impugning the integrity of a police investigation in its early stages. He would be fully aware of police procedures in such cases but choose to sow doubt in the minds of the public in order to make short-term political capital out of unfounded public mistrust of the authorities. He then rows back by claiming that he was following the lead of the notorious male influencer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate. Through this faux apology, he unconvincingly tries to convey the impression of a gullible fool; a character trait that the Pied Piper of Brexit will never share with his followers. The proof of that pudding lies in previous consummation of his friendships with Tate in his peon towards toxic masculinity.

This rhetorical device of casting doubt on and creating suspicion of established authorities, be they public health officials like Anthony Fauci or of the Commission on 9/11 is a key tool of conspiracists. Under the libertarian guise of questioning official narratives and received expertise, by not completely denying the efficacy of vaccines, for example, but asking for more evidence even when it is incontrovertible, they cynically exploit the fears and historical memories of communities' experiences of medical interventions. Similarly by making specious connections between coincidences such as change of insurance policies by businesses in the World Trade Centre prior to the events of 9/11, the 9/11 Truther movement embellishes its odious narrative. The “staged actor” lie accounts around the White Knights and the UN investigation into the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime similarly use extraneous occurrences to spread their poison.

So Farage, as a cunning and articulate version of Trump UK, is a more sophisticated and therefore more dangerous face of far right mobilisation than the knuckleheads who follow Yaxley-Lennon (I will not degrade the name of that great late 70s New Wave singer Tom Robinson by using that moniker). All the evidence points to this grifter milking the people of Clacton for all his worth. He represents a constituency with record levels of social deprivation, physical and mental ill health, low levels of skills and educational attainment. It is also a constituency which is 97% White British ethnicity and which voted 70% for Leave in the EU referendum. Yet despite this demographic and paucity of migrants, anti-immigration feeling and barely disguised racism is widespread due to the “White Flight” from the East End of London. Just yesterday, there was an inferno in the Jaywick ward of Clacton, the most deprived in England, which destroyed three houses and damaged seven others. Needless to say, Fagash was conspicuously absent in plain sight. Look forward to more sightings of the Pied Piper of Brexit.

So the riots were not a demand for a greater share of the national cake; or expressions of embattled minorities like BME, LGTBTA + or protests about the environmental degradation of our planet (certain types of that type of non-violent protest can land you a five year jail sentence). They were not the cries of the genuinely unheard. Instead they were manifestations of the herd instinct of crowds whipped up by the on repeat falsehoods of “invasions”, “small boats” and “they don’t integrate” and de luxe accommodation for free money seeking migrants propounded in a dominant media and political ecosphere by those who seek the cover of plausible deniability. 

One thing is sure, the grifters and demagogues who fuel this factory of discontent will not suffer the loss of liberty, employment prospects and reputations that will befall the targets of these predatory or paedophile types.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

Herd Instinct ❂ Reflections On The Far Right Riots In The UK

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