How the right abandoned law and order
The Sunday column on the incendiary power of the “fascisphere”
Once it was the left that made excuses for crime. Its adherents would insist that the “root cause” of inner-city riots was police brutality or poverty – not the violent mentalities of the rioters themselves.
This year, on the 20th anniversary of Islamists murdering 52 people on the London tube and bus system, progressives from the early 2000s were still maintaining in the Guardian that Tony Blair “made extremists of people”. The men who slaughtered innocent civilians weren’t answerable for their actions. Blair’s support for war in Iraq had provoked them.
Not to be outdone, today’s far right, along with supposedly respectable conservatives in Parliament and the Tory press, also deny agency and excuse criminals.
They claim that, if the state is racist, it is racist against white people. The elite cares more for migrants than white Britons. It uses the police to suppress dissent as it operates a “two-tier” justice system.
Readers over 35 should recognise a profound change.
Conservatives used to support the forces of law and order. Now they equivocate. They treat the police and courts as the coercive arm of the liberal elite – just as leftists once viewed them as the coercive arm of the capitalist class.
In its extreme form the right-wing attack on state impartiality leads to Donald Trump purging the FBI and US Justice Department of anyone who might hold his corrupt clique to account.
The UK right has a way to go but it is heading in that direction. To see how far down the road to ruin it has travelled, look at the riots in Epping last week.
They didn’t attract the interest of many journalists, but they certainly attracted the attention of the online right.
Wannabee demagogues and actual rabble rousers moved in. Some like Laurence Fox, actor turned right-wing conspiracist, and Matthew Goodwin, academic turned online loudmouth, already attract attention – indeed, they have done everything short of throwing bricks through your window to make sure that you notice them. But beyond them are dozens of others striving for status, influence and money in the British fascisphere.
Epping to them was both a potential profit centre and a competitive marketplace.
Here is what happened.
The British asylum system collapsed under the Conservatives. Despite the best efforts of the Labour government the backlog of asylum seekers waiting to have their claims resolved remains huge. The government has put some 30,000 in hotels. Their lives are miserable. They can’t work and subsist on £49 ($65) a week.
It is very easy, however, to portray them as scroungers who, far from being miserable, are living lives of luxury, while large swathes of the population can barely afford to book a hotel room.
“They're being put in 4-star hotels, [and given] three meals a day, pocket money, free medical care, dental care, and the chance to work illegally at the same time," cried Nigel Farage. “What sane country says you can access the benefits system as quickly as you can in this country?"
Then there’s Epping itself: a nice town in the countryside east of London. It’s the sort of place members of London’s old white working class would move to if they did well for themselves. Now the Bell Hotel on the High Street is filled with asylum seekers from all over the world waiting to have their claims processed.
The sexual fear of foreign men attacking white girls was then added to the brew. On 17 July, a 41-year-old Ethiopian asylum seeker called Hadush Kebatu appeared in court charged with propositioning a girl while she was eating in the town centre, kissing an adult near a fish and chip shop and telling her she was "pretty" while putting his hand on her leg.
Alien men taking our money, invading our market towns, and threatening our women represent a potent threat. You should not underestimate the ability of politicians and agitators to exploit it – indeed, they already are all over Europe and North America.
Local Conservative MPs – who are supposedly mainstream politicians – demanded the removal of asylum seekers from Epping. The online right took over. Crowds formed outside the Bell Hotel. In total the police made three arrests for violence and criminal damage.
Mainstream Conservative journalists were equally compromised. They blamed the government not the criminals for the violence with all the righteous rage of Trotskyists blaming Israel and the West for Islamists.
“What did they think would happen?” asked the Mail. The “they” in question being the British state not Laurence Fox and others calling for a “hundred years war” against migrants and their liberal enablers.
Alison Pearson of the Telegraph was no different
Meanwhile, on the streets there was dark and paranoid speculation about the police.
Weird conspiracy theories swirled around the fascisphere. “There were “multiple videos showing the police bussing in left-wing agitators to Epping,” according to one influencer. “This sort of thing has long been a tactic of the British state.”
You could see the right’s shift towards lawlessness after the horrible attack by Axel Rudakubana on toddlers and children in Southport. The riots that followed were fuelled by claims that Axel Rudakubana was a Muslim and asylum seeker – and therefore inncoent Muslims and asylum seekers must suffer a collective punishment.
In the violence that followed, 130 police officers were injured. Far from keeping their distance from thuggery, Nigel Farage blamed the alleged slow response of the police for the riots, while Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative party, no less, defended Lucy Connelly, who had been imprisoned by the courts for incitement.
“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care … if that makes me racist, so be it.”
Suppose the courts had jailed an Islamist or white leftist for tweeting:
“Deport the Jews now. Set fire to all their fucking homes for all I care. If that makes me an antisemite, so be it.”
Do you think for a moment Farage, Badenoch and the Tory press would hold them up as free-speech martyrs and victims of two-tier policing?
Once you could count on conservatives to defend the armed services and the police – whatever they did. Go back to the turn of millennium and they would approvingly quote the old line that pampered civilians should always back the troops because “we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm”.
As for the police, they were “the thin blue line”. The men and women who protected lives and property.
No longer. Police officers under attack can no more count on the automatic support of the British right than asylum seekers under attack in a hotel or Muslims in a mosque. British Conservatives are going the same way as Donald Trump’s Republicans, and if they ever return to power, they will want a police and justice system that defends them – and only them.
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Very astutely written essay Nick. Describes the increasingly hatemongering racism of the right - Badenoch & NF are almost indistinguishable bedfellows
Important comparison, elegantly expressed. Just when you think all hope is lost along comes Nick to confirm it.