As the FT notes this morning, in an article by a couple of their senior political journalists:
The “demonising” of asylum seekers, immigrants and the legal profession by Conservative ministers helped prepare the ground for the far-right riots currently gripping the country, critics including senior politicians have warned.
They added:
They say that years of scapegoating by senior Tory figures helped stoke and normalise anti-immigrant feeling that in part fuelled the violence that has spread across England in the past week.
Amongst the issues that they highlighted was Rishi Sunak's pledge to “Stop the Boats”, which was chanted by rioters last week. They also note former home secretary Suella Braverman describing the flow of asylum seekers to England's coast as an “invasion”.
Language matters. Tory politicians, with their allies at the Mail and Express, ably supported by the BBC with its persistent platforming of the far-right, created the narrative that is now being played out on some streets in England.
Labour is little better. They keep talking about the legitimate concerns of those rioting, but rioters do not have such concerns. Rioting and legitimate concerns are incompatible, as a matter of fact. And given that the concerns of rioters appear to be solely focused upon racist and Islamophobic intimidation and hatred, coupled with the deliberate spreading of fear, to suggest that they have legitimate concerns is to condone them.
What is true is that people do have concerns about poor housing, the lack of availability of opportunity in many parts of the country, low pay and the failure of public services. These are real grievances, but they are not the issues that those rioting are highlighting.
Worse, Labour is quite clearly promising to do nothing about any of these prioper concerns in many communities. With its "We can only do what we can afford" austerity mantra, and its indifference to redistribution, coupled with Wes Streeting's obvious aggressive cluelessness when it comes to the NHS, the one thing we can be sure it will deliver will be the status quo, or worse.
What this means is that the legitimate concerns of millions in society are not being addressed, and as a result, they will become increasingly willing to tolerate the behaviour of those who riot because many will eventually come to the conclusion that this might be the only way to effect change.
The Tories used language to create tension.
Labour appears to not comprehend the meaning of the language they are using.
Neither seems to have any interest in actually solving the problems in this country, which their major corporate donors want to get worse as the prelude for privatisation, as a result of which they think they will benefit from this current unrest.
So, we do not have is action to actually improve lives, which is the one thing that is quite emphatically required.
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People are quite rightly upset with their situation. In a single sentence it’s poor provision of the essentials of life; mainly public services, some private services that ought to be public and some things the private sector does provide but abuses oligopolistic power.
The far right blames immigration for “overloading public services” and suggests rioting as a solution….. but the truth is we just need to fix public services. This truth MUST trump artificial fiscal rules.
They say “never let a crisis go to waste”. Starmer needs to say that these riots must change its priorities and dump election pledges. Or “when the facts change, I change my mind. What would you do?”
Agreed
@ CLIVE PARRY. Very concisely said. The Keynes quote “when the facts change, I change my mind. What would you do?” reminds us how rigidly for over 50 years British politicians have thought. Perhaps Keynes was exceptional and so are MMT economists but flexibility in thinking has to now dominate faced with the global warming threat to the planet.
The American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in 1959:
‘Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighbourhood; in other milieu, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.’
Mills went on to describe the importance of having a ‘sociological imagination’ to make the links between everyday experience and the social structures that frame lives. He was writing for university classes. A few years ago, a colleague, Dina Abbott, and I reframed it as ‘social imagination’ to apply to all individuals within society.
So, IMHO:
1. I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis Richard (and most of the other analyses you have made since I started following you at least two years ago). But, while totally necessary, such excellent analysis alone is not sufficient to bring about the change that you (and I) crave.
2. People do have a major role to play in public action, and popular mobilisation around inequality and related matters is also sorely needed.
3. Alongside popular mobilisation, and necessary for it, is a consciousness of the links between personal experiences and the social milieu which frames them – a social imagination. Once upon a time, for all its flaws, the trade union movement in Britain played a role in establishing such an imagination, not only through industrial action but also through creating educational institutions – for example, the Mechanics Institutes around where I live. Who can play that role today? I am at a loss for an answer. I have driven myself into an unhelpful corner. What I do know is that Labour’s economic and social policies are not going to change for the common good unless excellent analyses are complemented by informed popular pressure.
Agreed.
Maybe all we have in this country is a Single Transferable Party but one that is riven with differences of opinion about how to go about change backwards?
Maybe the Tories are just the gung-ho Neo-liberals in the vein of the sort of recidivist capitalism that led to problems in Russia – ‘big bang’ and all that.
Maybe the Labour party are just gradualists after all?
Not much of a choice is it?
Well said Richard.
We really need to be clear about this; the problem with social media begins with the owners – the owners are the publishers. They have been allowed to develop product that without let or hindrance, has created the circumstances that allowed us to arrive here. Nobody is allowed to interfere with “enrepreneurship”, which covers a multitude of our current sins.
The real guilty parties, however are the politicians and their Press cronies (often operating a revolving door in Downing Street) that for over twenty years have either stoked this disaster, or allowed it to thrive without fighting back.
They are going to blame everybody or anybody else. Do not let them.
Language does matter and “gives it away “. “I want my country back”is another example.
There is ample evidence of other Fascist playbook behaviours. The use of propaganda through use of mass media, the mobilisation of petty criminals and violent criminals. Add alcohol and drugs and the components for disorder are in place.
It will take a consistent change in tone and language from our politicians to reverse the current direction of travel. Meanwhile the possibility of violent reprisals increases.
My impression is that the Labour leadership have cowed its MPs and the majority of the membership into submission, no challenge to the leadership is permitted.
The public want change, money spent on the services that we all rely on.
Spouting the line that we can’t afford it is nonsense.
Proposing to provide a boost for residential housebuilders and the City with impending new PFI’s to stimulate growth is just a continuation of neoliberal trickle down economics.
Perhaps Ms Reeves, whilst in the USA, should be talking to the Democrat officials who drafted the anti inflation stimulus to gain first hand experience of doing something positive?
Otherwise Labour is facing being a one term trick pony.
Indeed Scammer & Co have simply ignored Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act with its huge spend!
@John Fairhall
Oh, it is my earnest wish that Labour will indeed be a “one trick pony” that succumbs to Pasokification next time round, and hopefully before its full term.
Faux-Labour is so clearly unfit to govern – morally and ethically (think Gaza), intellectually (think Reeves, Starmer and the rest of Starmer’s Keystone Kops 4th-raters Cabinet), economically (flat-earther economists the lot of them, still thinking Neoliberal economics provides answers, rather than dead-ends – at best)
But most of all organisationally, as it’s clearly unwilling to encourage genuine independent thinking in the PLP and the Party as a whole, and shunning the idea of “the Courageous State”, as outlined by Richard in his book of that name, cleaving instead to thr Cowardly State that lets “the market” (= the ogre found in every fairy tale, that turns out to be a sham if really challenged)
The most important thing, however, is that this must not happen before a revived and coherent “Left”, = “the People’s Voice,” has made its presence known and respected, and formed a genuine Progressive Alliance, capable of seeing off EVERY element of the Single Transferable Party AND its Fascist Populist alternative.
That’s what the Progressive Majority must be working to create every day from now on. as politics now is not just akin to the 1930’s, with the threat of Fascism and corporate capture of politics, but even more to the turn of the 20th century – 1890 to 1910 – when the working class majority recognised politics under the Lib-Con duopoly was no longer working for them, and set out to remedy that.
Remember, working class can be defined not only in the usual sociological way we’re all familiar with, but also economically: if you have to sell your labour to make a living, you’re working class, wherever you come sociologically
And right now, society and the economy ain’t working for anyone who has to sell their labour to survive – obviously worse for those at the bottom of the heap, but still the case even if you’re a VERY long way up the heap.
And only a new politics can address the problem, with all the old, and would be replacement players, such as Reform, given their political P45’s.
A thought: We used to have far better funded local authorities, but 14 years of the tories have seen central government gather much power to itself. Now, they seem to be able to do little more than meet their statutory requirements. I suggest that by giving them more resources (and more responsibility to meet local needs) there could be significant change quickly. It should be a quick win for the government.
I agree
But I debt Labour will do it
Yes, sadly I have to agree.
But, I wonder if any MPs would have some sympathy with this course of action?
Might it be a possible pressure point for change?
“But I debt Labour will do it.”
Brilliant! We can’t have the doubt left to future generations.
Oops….
“Now, they seem to be able to do little more than meet their statutory requirements. ”
Local government can’t even do that. It is why so many are at risk of going bust and issuing a S114 notice. For parliament to pass statutory requirements local government must meet whilst refusing to supply adequate funding to do so is the height of cynical, irresponsible policy making
There will be no change of any value unless the Overton Window is allowed to show the full possibility’s of a Human Life Lived from Birth to Death in utter security with the maximum potential.
That does not happen when society and its control nodes poo poo any real agenda setting that puts the rIsing of the poorest below the security of the richest.
Keeping the status quo intact is the primary purpose and the poor divided and fighting between themselves.
We had not one chance but two, with the Corbynite miracle and it took all the force of the mass media, state mandarins and intelligence services aided and abetted by academia too and then also some very suspect postal votes to stop that possibility of change at the highest political levels – because the deepstate threatened a coup ir their gauntlet promised to the US Aipac by Pompeo failed.
Two general election chances put into a bag like unwanted kittens and drowned!
So that we could have this world at war – 2,000 per day now in Ukraine!
Who knows how many tens of thousands, maybe hundred plus in the wholly enclosed inaccessible Gaza. Yemen ongoing, the Sahel in chaos and more unrest and war promised every where that resists the western model of the fake left/right and supposed third way centerism!!
Now this diversion from protest against such actions in OUR name we have encouragement of travelling anti immigration protestors by the state and provision of police protection for them to Riot !
From where do they come? How do they get here?
By a fleet of busses from their garrison town estates. Fuelled by money , booze and white powders – gammon power!
Because here to my neighbourhood is where they are coming today. Our GP surgeries have sent texts yesterday saying they will shut early. Pre school nurseries too! Mosques have been told they will have protestors. An immigration help office is to be targeted.
Why also are the anti immigrants going to Finchley??? When they wish to target Muslims in Walthamstow as a nonsensical protest against immigration based on a tragic mass murder of children in Merseyside for so far undeclared motivations yet with the release of the teenager perps details.
None of this would have NOT happened under a Corbynite government also but but it is the first thing happening under the Starmerite fascist state as it progresses the U.K. down the Nazi history of prewar Germany with draconian new laws on protest and assembly.
And it seems a paramilitary on the streets of Britain because the police can’t be relied upon to impose uncivil actions. Such as the pantomime riots planned by agit prop neofascists crying about being swamped by mass illegal migration. A simple reprise of the dog whistle xenophobia that enabled Brexit
@DunGroanin
I agree with you about the tragic failure to elect a government led by Jeremy Corbyn – a real lost opportunity, as every day Corbyn (contrary to the views of many commentators) proves the evil stupidity of those who opposed and slandered him, by being doubly on the side of right
Right “judgement” = politically, and “right” judgement = ethically and morally, just where his puny attackers fail
For THEY exhibit wrong “judgement” = poor politics, and “wrong” judgement = unethical sociopathy.
Little men and women (think Starmer and Sunak) scrabbling about in the shadow of a political and moral giant!
Some of you will think that vastly overstated; fair enough, but it is my view, on the basis of his character and record, being consistently more often right than wrong on the big issues.
Alas, however, I have to disagree about a Corbyn government, as I believe he would have lasted a fortnight before being toppled in a CIA-managed “A Very British Coup”, & clapped in the UK’s Guantanamo, HMP Belmarsh, & the country run by a “puppet” appointed by the Crown, under martial law, with no reference to Parliament.
He was far too much of a threat to the STP and the 1%.
I think of what happened to Mr Corbyn as a pre-emptive coup, designed to replace him as future PM with the already Atlanticist-aligned Starmer. Pompeo and co had already made it clear that they would never have tolerated a Corbyn-led government.
Unfortunately these organizers of mass riots have long been hidden in plain sight in Northern Ireland both because of the history of counter insurgency violence creation of sectarian gangsters here, still thriving as a result of the British government decision to try to buy them off rather than shut them down, but also because they were re deployed by their Intelligence and BBC media controllers, (especially guilty is BBC NI’s highly paid rabble rouser and shock jock Stephen Nolan), in the run up to the Brexit vote. I am exhausted by years of my impotent raging Cassandra protestations as these thugs from all classes and backgrounds gained political ground aided by a supine or complicit mass media and complicit power brokers. Many of the organizers are militarily veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts. They have many like minded mates across all the services and they share, often very real, grievances against the UK governance. Combined with the wastelands created in the UK by the forty year long ideological exploitative scything of populations by neo liberals and it’s social legacy of suffering and something was always going to give.
So much for your assertion people don’t leave the UK because of Tax.
“The UK is expected to see an unprecedented net loss of 9,500 millionaires in 2024 — second only to China worldwide, and more than double the 4,200 who left the country last year”
That’s from a recent report from henley and partners..anything to say?
Goodbye?
And, so what?
And, I bet it won’t happen?
They can go whenever they like, but their assets are going nowhere.
What do you expect them to do?
Uproot their highland grouse moors and transport them to Monaco?
Dismantle their Mayfair town houses and move them to the Cayman Islands?
Didn’t think so.
What about their membership at the Groucho Club?
What about little Tarquin’s last term at Eton?
Good riddance if they’re self-centred enough not to want to contribute to the society that produced their wealth. But, as Richard said, I doubt they’ll be going anywhere.
Surprise, surprise – a few minutes searching exposes just what kind of business the Henley mob are. Start with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henley_%26_Partners
Money launderers and tax dodgers for the wealthy. They stink.
I think we can safely ignore what they say
“They say that years of scapegoating by senior Tory figures helped stoke and normalise anti-immigrant feeling that in part fuelled the violence that has spread across England in the past week.”
Of course, this has been going on for years, I would say it started in the 1970s, and is part of the culture wars agenda that those on the right wing of politics have played time and time again ever since. The culture war politicians deny any responsibility, when the extremes of the right, the fascists, take advantage of this.
The root cause is always the failure of the system to 1) recognise its own part in creating the monster, and 2) to deal with the root causes of inequality that the neoliberal system and worship of the free market as the answer to all ills, creates. History has shown its failure and contempt for those that lose out.
So, we end up with the response that we are getting, and politicians feeling that getting tough is the answer. Well, yes, for the hardcore fascists, who basically want to destroy the system, there is a need to get tough, but the answer to stopping them (or making them insignificant) is addressing the root causes. Neoliberalism is a breeding ground for resentment and hate, and if the only response is to fight fire with fire while ignoring the root cause, it will keep on happening.
ACTION TO IMPROVE LIVES: – the shutting down of X
Are you going to stop using X now Professor Murphy? Ask your followers to follow you on another platform.
Musk needs to have his odious lying voice platform removed. That action alone would improve lives immeasurably.
No, I won’t be changing
I think the message more important than the medium
You may disagree, but if we leave spaces to the far right and declare that we have been defeated, what good does that do?
The real lack of integration is between the wealthy 10% and their near 50% slice of the cake and the poorest 50% who have less than 10%. The establishment of course likes to keep it this way and so uses divide and rule to set those with most in common against each other.
Class is still very much the issue.
See the first post this morning
Update on the Scaremongering.
Was out with thousands of locals seeing if anyone stupid enough to threaten us or our properties.
You should be able to see pictures of the turnout of locals on the web. Beautiful. It meant that even the riled up youth were unable to get into a froth.
Majority reflected demographic. Many non Asian non Afro English. Some Palestinian flags, good to see. All beautiful and calm, carnival atmosphere at sunset. Me in flip flops and shorts.
The fascists? Unless they were hiding and crawled away – didn’t have a chance. Didn’t see any groups or individuals protesting.
There were some odd ones wandering around for couple days.
Doing a recce I suppose.
We are not ready to be a fascist nation and this particular example proves it. Their passage of more extreme policing laws is going to be a lot more challenged now.
Great Knight Dope dalek gets his first FAIL in already – his warmongering is now only going to be massively opposed. No matter how many false flag terrorist attacks they will launch.
After last night that is what I expect as their usual playbook. Because they have No Reverse Gear and only ratchet up the provocations.
I wholly expect the rock against racism and stop the wars mass movements to resurrect for the rest of this summer – its fun to protest against injustice, make a carnival of it and show the BIG LOVE weapon in response to violence, fear and state fascism.
We are not distracted from the zionazi Holocaust upon the Palestinians.
From the River to the Sea