On 29 July, a commuter in Kent made a disturbing discovery while peeling off a National Front sticker at Dunton Green train station near Sevenoaks. Carefully concealed, a razor blade had been stuck down so that anyone peeling off the sticker risked cutting their fingers. This tactic was widely used by the National Front in the 1970s, against the Anti-Nazi League. The Dunston Green sticker presumably had been hoarded for half a century till racism was surging again. It is surging now.
The National Front is a relic of the past, and the current upsurge is very different from the era when Martin Webster, a far-right ally of the prominent neo-fascist, John Tyndall, boasted, “We are busy setting up a well-oiled Nazi machine in this country”. The recent return of street violence owes something to the English Defence League (EDL). Though the EDL itself is said to have disbanded, its main legacy contribution has been the rebirth of street rioting as a largely English phenomenon.
The riots following the Southport murders have been almost wholly confined to England, apart from a significant upsurge in Northern Ireland, mainly in Belfast – a city with a separate tradition of destructive brutality. The EDL, with its leader with the fake name Tommy Robinson, had a tradition of street fighting at football matches, and attracts mainly young men, though the rioters have drawn in many middle-class actors.
Locally led protests, drawing on decentralised far right networks
The first lesson from the current riots is that there appears to be no one organisation on the far right which dominates in the model of past groups like the National Front or EDL. As the organisation Hope Not Hate wrote at the start of the rioting: “There is no single organiser. Many have the support of the organised far right but appear locally led … Most of the planned events are more broadly focused, expressive of a wider hostility to multiculturalism, anti-Muslim and anti-migrant prejudice, as well as a visceral streak of populist, anti government sentiment.”
A key issue identified by Hope Not Hate is that “most of these protests are being planned organically, often by local people who are plugged in to decentralized far right networks online”. The “shared slogans, language and iconography owes to the fact that their organisers are often active in overlapping online spaces”.
The second lesson is that the major tactical change in the last 20 years has been the rise of the internet. Even the British National Party (BNP) of two decades ago worked through local leaders, though I recall seeing Nick Griffin and his far-right acolytes in a council election campaign in Stoke on Trent at the time they had nine councillors in the city. Tommy Robinson and the EDL, which did exploit social media, seem to have had no locally organised structure.
Incendiary online influencers
This is the era of the online influencer, not least in the form of Elon Musk. From running incendiary messages from America about the UK’s “civil war” future, he has gone on to use a video of a mainly Muslim group involved in a particular disorder to promote to his followers the conspiracy theory that the prime minister – “Two Tier Keir” as he named him – was supporting harsher punishments for white protestors than minority offenders.
Tommy Robinson’s social media influence over his followers has seen thousands turn out on London marches. During this summer’s riots Robinson was not even in Britain but tapped out his inflammatory messages on a computer while lying on a sun bed in a five-star hotel in a tourist hot spot.
There are particular online networks such as the Telegram website – whose Russian founder has been arrested in France – that are used by protest organisers to communicate where trouble is pending. These should be being tracked, but assessment of what is happening and how to counter this has hardly begun. Meanwhile, social media channels fail to make even a token attempt to regulate their online traffic.
A new and unprecedented scale of attack that must be resisted
The vast majority of riots have been in England and the lack of riots in Scotland and Wales gives a sense that devolution may have had a positive influence. Northern Ireland has seen serious trouble, however, with the worst brutality being in Belfast. Attacks on Muslim businesses have been exceptionally destructive, which may indicate paramilitary involvement.
But even in England, what we are seeing is not a revival of the old far right. Hiding razor blades under stickers is not going to be a widespread activity and the National Front is not undergoing a renaissance. What we face is something new.
The most urgent need is a forum to bring the various anti-far-right organisations together, to examine the key developments and how to respond. After the Anti-Nazi League faded, a variety of small organisations developed. This was not a problem for tackling the BNP 20 years ago, but it is a problem now. While the Anti-Nazi League is even deader than the National Front, a broad and inclusive national forum, and a sharp debate capable of multi-front analysis, is essential.
A summer of crisis not yet over
After the Walthamstow demonstration on 7 August, Jo Cardwell, the chief steward of the biggest anti-fascist mobilisation so far in the crisis, said, “This is a scale of attack which we have not seen before”. As I write, the far right is being countered by mass mobilisation on the streets. But the far right is more numerous on social media. With the murderer of the girls in Southport yet to come to trial, the summer is not yet over.
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