ACFM - ACFM Microdose: The Joy Of Fascism

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

A month after racist riots engulfed the country, the ACFM crew ask what fascism – and antifascism – look like in Britain today. Do the riots and counter-protests mark a return to “street politics”? Why didn’t the Labour party align itself with opponents of the pogroms? And how popular are extreme rightwing views among Britain’s frustrated […]

This is Acid Man Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as always with my friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And Kim Milburn. Hello. And today we are going to be offering some response, reflection and analysis on what was probably the big political event of the summer in the UK, which was the proto-fascist pogroms, we might call them, and the response to them that took place a few weeks ago on the streets of various towns and cities of Britain. And we thought it was appropriate for us to make some response to this, partly because we have done an episode on fascism. very recently, and also done one on humility in which we got into themes around humiliation, which we think is also quite relevant to thinking about this topic. So, before we get any further,

maybe we should talk about, for the benefit of anyone who might not know, exactly what it is that happened that we will be talking about, and maybe a little bit about how each of us experienced it. So, Keir, do you want to talk us through what actually took place? Yeah, we should probably start with the mass stabbings in Southport that happened on the 29th of July this year almost a month ago now from when we're recording this in which a young 17-year-old looks like having a psychotic episode broke into a sort of Taylor Swift themed dance class for young girls and killed three children and attacked 10 other people later from with children and two adults, a really horrific, horrendous attack.

But what followed that was a series of rumours primarily spread on the internet, which claimed that the attacker was, firstly, a Muslim, and second, an asylum seeker who just arrived on the boat, these small boats is this really big thing in UK politics. It's basically, I would call it a moral panic, which has been engineered by the press, The BBC. The BBC has a small boat correspondent, some absolute asshole who stands on beaches of binoculars and makes daily reports of what he thinks are sightings of small boats full of

asylum seekers, a classic moral panic which has been developed. And so this, these rumours spread and then on the 30th of July there was, in Southport there was, you know, a coming together of the community as an act of commemoration, which got hijacked by far. right demonstrators who called a protest outside a mosque in Southport with this idea, you know, something which turned out not to be true at all, this person wasn't a Muslim, the attacker wasn't a Muslim, wasn't an immigrant. Although there's parents from Rwanda, from a Christian background, etc. hadn't come across in a small, but all of that was just fiction, etc.

Then at this protest, I'm doing inverted commas outside the mosque, several hundred people attacked the mosque, smashed up its windows, tried to get inside, perhaps to burn it down, they attacked the police really, really quite strongly, etc. And there was a big, big riot. And then over the next few days, there were riots and or protests in lots of cities around England, actually, England and Northern Island. One of the worst incidences was in Rotherham, which is a city in South Yorkshire, about 250 people gathered around a holiday in in which asylum seekers had been placed in a sort of

this policy that the Conservatives have brought in in which asylum seekers were spread around the country primarily into poor areas, de-industrialised areas in the UK. 250 people gathered outside, they rioted, they forced the police away, attacked the police and they started to smash up. The hotel got inside, they tried to set the hotel on fire it could have been, you know, really, really, really serious.

Well, it could have been murder quite easily. At the same time, actually the next day, I think there was a very similar incident happened in Tamworth in which another hotel, which was housing asylum seekers, was attacked. One of the truly horrible aspects of that was the recently elected Labour MP, Sarah Edwards, God curse her name. I'd recently done a video in which she had stood outside that asylum hotel and said that the community doesn't want them,

they made these claims that, in fact, the asylum seekers been housed in that hotel had cost a local area, $8 million a day, a complete fabrication. Anyway, the rioters got inside, smashed a hotel up, left graffiti with words, get out and fuck the P-word, a racist term of abuse outside.

In Hull, there were horrendous scenes in which an Asian man who was driving a car was blockaded, dragged out of the car and beaten. In Middlesbrough, there was another protest which turned into an absolutely classic pogrom in which the riotous stage roadblocks in which they looked at the drivers coming past. If they were white, they were allowed to go past if they weren't. Presumably, they were going to get dragged out and beaten up. And they also paraded through areas, smashing windows in houses, destroying cars. Some of which belonged to people from Asian extraction.

Some of them didn't. You know, there was a report when which, you know, this man saw somebody smashing up his car. What are you doing? What's going on? And they just beat him up, basically. And sort of like this sort of pogrom in which the boundaries upon who was going to get attacked or not. That was splitting.

In Crosby, a Muslim man was stabbed. There were a whole series of racist attacks, not necessarily in a big sort of crowd situation all around the country. In Belfast, there was a really odd situation in which Muslim shops were smashed depth. There's a march that tried to get to a local mosque. A mosque was attacked with a catcherobomb in New Tarnards. But what was quite strange in Belfast was that most of the rioters were from the loyalist community and which, you know, not all of the loyalist communities,

but between loyalist paramilitaries has been linked through to the organised far-right neo-Nazi groups in the UK for going back for several decades. But for the first time ever, there were a sort of conspiracy theorist far right groups from the south of Ireland, from doubling, etc., had gone up. And so they were flying the tricula and the loyalist flag both together until they tried to enter a nationalist area, a Catholic area, which they were stopped quite robustly. Also riots in Liverpool, a big protest in Leeds, which rampage through the city. Really, really horrendous series of events. And in answer to your question about how I received it, Jim, it was like, you know, I barely slept those days. It was just this horrendous feeling of vertigo, perhaps, of like, you know, what is going on?

Where's this going to stop? I remember going to the pub with people from my choir and we were just doing karaoke. And one of the songs that we sing, normally, when we get up together and do karaoke, is I predict a riot. And somebody requested it. And then I caught it very quickly and thought, maybe that's a really bad idea. because literally the screens behind us in this pub, this is two days before, we're showing people rioting. And I remember at that time, I was like,

like, fuck, this is really serious. Like, you know, we can't even sing this song because of these scenes that are going on and this is not some kind of film. Like, this is really happening. I think overall, my sensation was I had made a decision. You know, there was, there was supposedly, a far-right march that was going to be organized for my area, for my suburban area.

And because I don't live somewhere where there is a kind of mass resistance movement or like an anti-fascist movement, like there are parts of East London, you know, I had made the decision that I was staying home. And I made the decision to stay home because I did not feel that it was going to be safe enough for me to go out and join a counter-demistration because I had no idea how many people would go and I was not going to get involved in any kind of street fighting. But then I started to realize that more and more people were organizing, like people with links to the local Palestine Solidarity campaign, but also the Tamils in the area that I live, there was like a big organization and there ended up being, you know, 300 people went out

or more, like 300 to 500 people went out in a counter-protest in an area where we never really have protests, which was a lot. And there wasn't anyone from the far right that was spotted or like as in groups. So that was, that was very good. My main reaction, which maybe we'll talk about in a bit, is how the mainstream press reacted the next morning. But maybe I'll hold on that thought. But I mean, I have to say, I think I didn't really have sleepless nights.

And I think that's because I, I don't know, I suspended my belief that it was going to get any worse. But also, yeah, maybe I was just basically falling into some kind of escapism because it was so bad. I mean, I have to say I just stopped watching any of the footage. You know, I guess you guys have watched more than me I suppose. I, I, there's a, just watching you know, men being violent has like a very

personal disciplining effect on me. So I, it would just mean that I wouldn't leave the house and it would make me really anxious leaving the house. So I just decided not to watch anything until I'd get on with my life in a way. And by the next morning, that after, you know, Thursday morning, I felt fine. It didn't get to a point where I thought, what the absolute fuck is going to go on now. And from what I could see on, you know, Twitter X or whatever, there was a lot of bollocks. There were like people taking pictures of like police fans in my local area going,

guys, it's starting, guys, it's starting. And there are always police fans, you know, next to, you know, this town center bus stop, on a on a night because shit goes down like so so there's a lot of fake news already and a lot of hype and I think that's one of the things like the reporting of it and like the effect of social media and of like knowledge production is I think the main thing that I'm interested in and what it means for like organizing and also like counterorganizing like going forward yeah I think we need to be clear with people about the narrative here because Keir was really describing the first few days, the couple of days of the initial riots. And then, but then, like a few days later,

there was supposed to be, there was a planned series of, supposedly a planned series of further fascist demonstrations and attacks on buildings holding asylum, etc. And there was a big wave of counter-protest to those. So all of this took place over a kind of series of days, as I remember it anyway. I mean, there was obviously some spontaneous resistance, immediate resistance and counter-processed in instances like places like Bristol, I think, where there are immediate threats of violence to actual buildings with actual humans in them. But the news cycle really culminated in a day, a few days after the initial riots to a place, when supposedly a national wave of further right wing protest or pogroms had been planned and there was in almost everywhere

they were planned there were counter protests and in many of the places where they were counter protest there was no sign of any fascist activity at all either they'd been scared off or it was they were never really intending to organising those places I mean I wasn't there for any of it because I was in fitting fittingly giving given the theme of our most recent episode I was on holiday out of the country, but I was following either one as closely as I could. One of the things that was really interesting about the way it was being reported is you had the initial shock, which I think everyone felt, about a group of seven-year-old girls getting stabbed. I mean, it's so horrific.

It's just incredible. Like, I had my, you know, my jaw was dropped in front of the, in front of the telly that this was going on. And then that story was dropped very quickly because there was, you know, violence and all of these rumors, as Keir outlined. that, you know, the person who did it, which they hadn't released the name of because he was under age. And the judge decided to release the name of to stop all of the fake news around the fact that this was, you know, a Muslim man or whatever. But very quickly, then the news cycle, so it went from young girls being stabbed, being horrific, to that story about the riot starting and like, who is it? And is this true or is this not? And then it went back to like the specifics clear up and people in that area around where the young girls were murdered saying this is horrific.

Like how can people riot and not let us grieve? So there was that. And then it became completely overtaken by the escalating, you know, various different incidents of, you know, rioting and abuse and like horrific racist behavior and like violence around the country. the pockets of it. And then, as you rightly pointed out, Jeremy, it became headline news that there is, there are going to be these, you know, fascist marches organized. Well, they didn't say fascist on the news, but they started using the terminology right wing, right wing marches and right wing organizing, which I had not heard on mainstream media before. It became the nomenclature, became the normal terminology to, to refer to these groups as far right groups.

right or far right organizing. And then what happened was what happened the next morning. I mean, I've never in my life seen such a favorable sort of media report to basically people like us who were the counter demonstrators. I've never seen it. I mean, I'm holding in front of me here a daily mail headline which says night anti-hate marchers face down the thugs. I mean, these people are the hate marchers of the Palestine demonstrations, you know.

from a few months ago. It's the same people. We were the same people who had been called hate marchers. And here we're called the anti-hate marchers facing down the thugs, right? And the far-right protests are thwarted. So it was a very strange sensation to watch the news the next morning and be like, wow, we're being reported as the good guys. So we just finished that story off a little bit. So there was something like 40 far-right protests, if we can call it that, called for this Wednesday. afternoon and evening, and quite a lot of them actually were outside immigration lawyers offices. This was another moral panic which had been stirred up by the previous Conservative government

who had criticised these immigration lawyers who were holding up the asylum process and spoiling our plans, etc, etc, etc. People gathered around those in real trepidation because as Jim said, you know, when the march in Bristol, when it was going off at, when they were riots going off all over the country. There was an anti-racist march in Bristol about roughly the same size as the racist march. And that was up near the city hall, etc. And then the anti-racist marches had sort of worked out actually that what would happen was these racists would go from the city hall and they would go to a hotel at which some asylum seekers had been housed. So they said, well, we ought to get down there. And they get down there about 50 to a

anti-racist protesters they get down to this hotel and there are no policing site at all. So they said, well, it's down to us then. We have to protect this place or they're going to go and burn it out and people will die. And so they formed a barrier in front of it and like lots of racist protesters came and basically just attacked them. And I just had to hold the line, basically. They just got attacked and attacked and attacked. Eventually some police turned up. That was a few days before this other series of protests outside the immigration officer. And so people gathered in, like, real trepidation.

Like, they didn't know what was going to happen. They didn't know that lots and lots of anti-racists were mobilising come out. And in fact, that is what happened. In most places, they're like really large turnouts, basically, of anti-racist protesters. And, like, you know, the headline sort of protest was in Waltham Snow where 10,000 people turned out. But, you know, in lots of places, there were like 1,000 people turned out.

Some of them were smaller. But basically, by that point, the racist protests seemed to have blown themselves out. some racists would try to gather, but they saw the size of the anti-racist marches and basically put their scarves away and their flags away and these sorts of things and thought better of it, basically. And then the next day, it was this incredible wave of newspaper headlines. As well as calling them right-wing protests, Nadia, one BBC report, a fairly infamous one, talked about anti-racist protesters and pro-British protesters, referring to the racist pogromists, basically. But by the point of that Wednesday, something had happened, basically, the press who'd, like, for years and years and years and years had been stirring up racism and, like, you know, creating this moral panic about small boats around the immigrants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, absolute endless tsunami of anti-Muslim headlines, these sorts of things. That next day really was. It's like that daily mail headline was repeated across the right-wing press, basically, except for the Daily Telegraph, as though, like, this is

the real Britain picture of Wolfram Stowe, the anti-racist protesters. Those people. approaches are organised by the same people as like the pro-Palestine marches, etc., which had also been incredibly large, and they have been castigated by both the Conservative government and by the right-wing press as hate marches. Yeah, well, it was pretty extraordinary, but of course, it's not like the Daily Mail was explaining to its readers that this bunch of a pleasant-looking, you know, stalwart Brits standing up to fascism were the same people. They had been castigestion. mostly the same people. They've been castigating as racist and hate marches and anti-seemites for supporting people in Palestine. So it's not as if your average daily mail reader is going to come away like further enlightened about the situation. Clearly what happened is over the course of that week, the really significant, politically significant elements of British political culture who I think we would all say are objectively pretty far right, including the daily mail newspaper, which has specifically supported fascists, going back to the 30s.

Nigel Farage, the leader of reform, former leader of UK Independence Party, notorious sort of political entrepreneur on the right. It became quite clear over the course of that week that they realised that the riots had not really captured a public mood, that they were alienating more of their own conservative base than they were attracting. And partly just because the right-wing influencers

who had been disseminating information to the effect that the perpetrator of the original crime as a Muslim had been completely exposed as just complete liars. And that partly had really weakened the case. But also because the level of violence was just more intense than the British public is generally willing to tolerate for any reason.

So they had misjudged it. And to some extent, you know, it was an act of co-optation. I mean, the same thing happened. You saw the same thing for the right wing of the Labour Party, the Labour leadership issue. instructions to MPs and councillors so they should neither attend the demonstrations nor encourage others to do so. Walthamstow, who we've mentioned a couple of times, that is the neighbourhood of North East London that I live in. It was a completely classic, northeast London,

highly gentrified, multicultural, left voting part of London. I mean, it's completely, you know, completely typical. Huge majorities for the Labour Party, but a huge increase in the Greenvoke, huge swing from Labor to Green actually at the last election. And our MP is really a classic 2010 intake, Blairite MP, was initially discouraging people from attending the process at all. And by the end of the whole process, she was making it known to everybody that she had in fact been in the physical proximity of the protest. So they wasn't actually committing herself to having participated in them, but definitely wanted everybody to know that she was on their side and had been there.

I'm so happy you brought this up, Jeremy, because this is exactly what I was thinking. Two days before when people were talking about, you know, these demonstrations being organized or like whatever, these far right marches being organized in all of these places. I thought, what is the constituency that could actually organize for this? And it's the local labor parties. Like the local labor parties could have come out and went like, right, this is a threat. We have the infrastructure. to organise our membership locally to come out and protest against racism and fascism.

But instead, we got a letter sent round from like RMP basically going, we've spoken to, you know, the police have spoken to the EDL. There's not going to be a demonstration. And it's like, well, A, no one said that this is officially organized by the EDL. And then like, what are you even talking about? So like all of these communicates that were put out by local Labour MPs. And then exactly as you said, then, you know, the day after everyone pretends they were there. It's like so cheap.

It's unbelievable. We should continue that analysis a bit further because Nadia is completely right. Like it was available there for Keir Starmer to position himself as the leader of the anti-racist, huge majority of Britons who fought back and, you know, who were the real Britain. He could have had a, it's there for a national unity position in front of. against the riots, and he'd have the Daily Mail on side, which he's very, very concerned about. But he's resolutely, really resolutely, he didn't flip-flop like Selagreisi. The leadership firmly, firmly are, we will not mention racism. We will not mention Islamophobia in terms of these riots, basically.

They will continue to condemn the anti-racist protest, basically. They want to just treat the riots as a problem of law and order, perhaps public disorder, something like that, and so it can be dealt with through strong, strong policing, strong court action. Yeah, this is, this was precisely the approach taken by the Labour leadership and therefore the government was that they would not condemn the pogroms as racist pogroms. They would only condemn them as violations of law and order, and they would only respond to them as law and order violations to be punished in that way.

So there was no question of the government or even or the Labour Party aligning itself politically with the opponents of these fascist pro pro pogroms. And this has, it has to be said, this is one of the reasons why. Here we are August 28th, 2024, less than two months since the election, and Keir Starmer's approval ratings are through the floor. If you're wondering, listeners, that is not not. normal for a newly elected prime minister in Britain. It is not normal at all. Everybody predicted it. It would really be great to say that was some really clever prediction made by people like

us, but it's not literally everyone has been predicting that this is what was going to happen in the first few months of a Labour government led by Kirstama. You've got to stand up when events happen. You have to be reactive. This is the issue. It's an issue of like, basic values rather than tactics. Like every time something occurs, like there's a big event in the country. They're literally reacting with like, you know, like, how is this going to affect our media image? Then you're just as bad as like the Tories beforehand on that, on that plane. Do you know what I mean? Like it was an opportunity. It was such an opportunity for them to like, you know, to make himself into like this massive statesman. Well, there's an opportunity for something. But I think

we can dig into the reasons why they don't do that, which it's more than just a kind of calculated mistake on their part. I wanted to say something about, I mean, before we move away from talking about the actual experience of the, you know, the riots and the protest, though, given that we've mentioned, like, the huge turnout in Walthamstow, which, I mean, Walthamstow, my neighbourhood in Walthamstow, it has a deserved reputation, like, not only for being sort of gentrified, multicultural, left-wing, but also I think now has a deserved reputation for being arguably the smugglest neighbourhood in London, the most kind of self-congratulating. You've had that already.

Yeah, of course, before that. And to me, there was something, I'm going to mean, there was something a little bit, I felt a little bit squeamish about the whole thing. I mean, I wasn't there. Because, I mean, part of what was going on, part of my experience of it was actually our youngest, more than our older, our oldest was 16, and, that her and her friends was obsessing over the GCSE results and the trip to Reading Festival that they were planning. But our youngest was like talking about it excitedly with her friends like from a D&D group

and they were all going to the protest and she was missing it. She's missing this big party in Walthamstow, where Walthamstow proudly declares to the world that he doesn't like fascist, as if anybody actually needed that telling to them. The most interesting question I thought I was asked when I was interviewed by an Italian journalist

about the rights before, during the week, that we're talking about after the riots before the big counter process, I was specifically asked the question, is there a strong anti-fascist movement in Britain? And my response was, and we can come back to this and sort of interrogate this, I said, I think formal, organised, explicit anti-racism is really, really weak. There hasn't been, like a big national organisation you can join that isn't overly dominated by the Socialist Workers Party, but is explicitly focused on countering racism in all its forms. There hasn't really been one, apart from for a couple of years, doing my whole adult life. But historically, it's pretty easy to mobilize large numbers against fascists.

I mean, the constituency of people in Britain who enjoy taking to the streets to share their collective dislike of the far right, it's pretty big and it's pretty easy to get them to turn out. And I said that slightly speculatively, and that was completely borne out by what happened. And that's not in any way to trivialise the importance of people doing that. But I think, I mean, part of what is being expressed there is a sense of momentary solidarity between the kind of people from the radical left who like make fighting fascism and racism like really properly, like part of their life, like over years and decades, and a more casually liberal constituency who, you know, will vote for Blair, they'll vote for Stama,

a lot of them, they voted for Corbyn in 2017, but a lot of them didn't vote for Corbyn in 2019 because they thought he wasn't remain enough and that he might be an anti-seemite. And it's, I mean, that's good. It's good that necessary coalition between liberals and radicals has a moment of kind of hegemonic and hegemonising self-expression. But I think that's sort of what's going on in that moment. The Labour leadership cannot respond to that by declaring themselves a part of that coalition. They cannot actually explicitly ally themselves to that coalition that necessarily includes the left and even the radical left. Just as they cannot, the Labour leadership and the most of the trade union leaderships, with some very honorable

exceptions over the past 50 years, has never been able to effectively articulate a popular anti-racist politics. Why? Because the minute you start doing that, you start down a road which leads you very quickly into having to offer people a completely different. narrative about what has happened to Britain since the 70s and to the one offered to them by the press, by the racist, by the anti-immigrant fearmongers. And that narrative necessarily very quickly takes you into territory where you, well, you have to admit, well, really the thing that's happened that has affected people's lives so negatively in so many ways is far too much power has been given to undemocratic and accountable capitalist institutions. And really

the only way to change that would be to take away some of that power. And that's the story going right back to the early 80s, with the Greater London Council, led by a radical faction of the Labour Party led by Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell and others pursued its pioneering policy of linking kind of a popular multicultural anti-racist politics to a popular politics of gay liberation and feminist liberation, to a populist economic programme of keeping down public transport fairs, keeping down social rents, and, you know, and had to be a project which had to be just shut down by Margaret Thatcher, simply abolishing the Greater London Council because the Tories just couldn't beat the Labour left in elections to it. Ever since that moment, when the mainstream

leadership of the Labour Party were just largely embarrassed by and hostile to that particular project of municipal, radical, democratic, cosmopolitan socialism, ever since that time, for the most part, with very obvious and honourable exceptions, Labour leaderships and later trade union leaderships have just been failing to create a kind of popular anti-racist politics, but why have they been doing that? Because the one thing leads to another really quickly. So I think Stama couldn't. Stama can't. He can't say, yeah, that those rights are bad, not just because they're like illegal. They're also bad because they're, you know, racist. Because the minute you start saying that, you have to start

saying, well, okay, so you're saying there's something actually wrong with the discourse, which has brought these people out onto the streets in the name of a racist politics. What might be wrong with it then? Might it be that it's telling people things that aren't true? Well, well what is the alternative story which is true oh what why it's neoliberalism you say which has caused people's problems not immigrants well what are we going to do about that then so they can't so as keir has rightly and well described it on recent episodes the cordon sanitaire between the left and necessarily the anti-racist left and the rest of the polity like has to be maintained so they can't they can't do it they can't even really celebrate the sort of popular liberal

broad cosmopolitanism that we saw on the streets of Waltham's Doe, because the minute they start doing that, they have to acknowledge it's necessarily alliance with the left and all kinds of dominoes start falling. I do agree just about all of that, but like one of the things that militates against that argument is the fact that the Daily Mail saw not just the people on those streets, they sort of intuited that like the vast majority of the rest of the population are going to see themselves in that protest. They're going to identify with. it and say thank God, thank God that's happened. Like the Daily Mail also don't want that story to fall apart, the story that they have played this huge role in arguing. You know, Starma was to the right

of the Metropolitan Police, not a renowned left-wing organisation. You know, the day after the protests, right, the head of the Met goes on the news, does an interview and he says, we were very apprehensive about these anti-racist protests. We, you know, we thought that's just going to cause more cares, et cetera. Now, I look and I say, thank God they came out because they're the ones who finished that, you know, that helped finish off the riots. You know what I mean? Even the head of the Met and editor of the Daily Mail are to the left of Kea Stammer on this issue. Well, that's not news. It's not a surprise. I've got four points of things that I would, you know, that I'm thinking about. So I'd like to

put them out there and see what you guys think, you know, maybe we'll discuss some of them. Some, we won't. The first one is basically like, if we completely pull back and look at 18th of July, Hare Hills, seemingly a completely different incident. So on the 18th, on the 18th of July, there was a situation where there was a immigrant family and there was a misunderstanding, as I understand it, between themselves with not very good English and social services, because there was a child which was injured, and social services came to investigate, and it was understood that the child was being taken away from its parent. Social services and the police went to a Romani family who live in Hare Hills, which is an area of Leeds, which it's got quite a large

Muslim population, quite a large Romanian-Romanie population as well. And that social services did, they took the child away. I mean, there's footage of police dragging the child away in tears, et cetera. There's a long, long history of, like, very poor relationships between both social services, the police and the Romney community in that area. And then, you know, basically that was the spur to some disturbances, a bus was burnt out, etc. One of the other big things that happened, though, was that lots of the local community,

including a green councillor, a Muslim green councilor, we've just been elected as a councillor. Basically, they physically stopped people from putting stuff on the fires, etc. Physically, we'd go, look, we had riots here 20 years ago. We know what happens after these riots, you know, people in that house over there, and they calmed it down, basically,

took control of the streets and calmed it all down. Because police had gone, they wouldn't go back into it. The far right tried to have a mobilisation around that. They tried to have a protest to march into Hare Hills, basically. They didn't get enough numbers. It was a bit of a damp squib. like the far right have been in this mode where they're looking for a trigger incident basically from which they could launch, you know, what we could even call an attempted insurrection,

I think, you know, a series of, like, of riots around the country. That one failed, basically. Thank you for clarifying that. I think, so the point that I'm trying to make is if you pull back and take a bird's eye view and you look at Hare Hills, and then you look at the incidents following the murder of the young girls, and then you look at the counter-demonstrations, and what you were both just talking about, you know, and Jeremy even like talking about your daughter and how she and her friends were talking about it. And the interest and, you know, plus the Palestine demonstration. So like on both sides, on the kind of far right side and on our side, is this year, is what we're seeing what I'm going to call the return of the streets? So are we saying, are we seeing, you know, battles, politics, fault lines, etc. being played. out like literally in a physical sense in the street. So that's kind of like my first question. The second thing that I would be interested in talking about is what this last set of, you know, the right wing mobilization or supposed mobilization and the counter demos,

what that did on that day, on the Wednesday, is it created the shared experience. And the shared experience is not something that you get as often in the 21st century as you do in the 20th century when, you know, everybody, the example I usually use is like, when everybody's, everybody's watching top of the pops or everybody's listening to charts, etc. And everyone in the country is like on the same page or the vast majority of people or a lot of people on the same page. Whereas on that Wednesday, that was an experienced phenomenon. I think there was, I mean, I went to like, you know, the local shop and I, you know, I spoke to the guy across the, across the counter. I went to another shop, you know, I spoke to people on the phone. Everyone I knew was

wondering what was going to happen at six o'clock, whether this is because of rumours that had spread or whatever, but everyone knew that something was going to happen on that day. And that creation of that shared experience, I think it's a very specific kind of phenomenon, because whenever hegemonic forces try and engineer that through something like, you know, a royal wedding or a royal death or something, you know, it doesn't work because there's a percentage of the population that doesn't give a shit. But I think in this case, regardless of what side you were on, there were people going, what the fuck is going to happen at 6 o'clock?

You know, it was kind of like New Year's Eve or something. And then the third thing is that I think I'd like to dig into more. And I don't know if we have the answer to that, but a little bit more on trying to understand who those people are who were perpetuating the stories about these right-wing gatherings that were going to happen and the people who participated in them. because, you know, we are using the term quite liberally that these, you know, were fascist marches, or right-wing marches.

But there would be a lot of people who don't define as that and are not organized as that who, like, wanted to get involved on, you know, the right-wing side. So what do we know about who, you know, people, as far as I understand, the people get added to WhatsApp groups, you know, somebody's, you know, cousin or mom that we know would have been added onto these WhatsApp groups. And then, you know, you start fanning the flames of, like, disinformation. and then people find themselves involved in shit as well, but then they don't know what they've signed up to.

Like, there's a percentage of that, but I don't know enough in the sense. And then the final thing that I think I'm interested in is the actual infrastructure of communication. Like, is this the first time in the UK that we have seen this kind of wildfire, like digital organizing and also like non-organizing where there's been hype about things that are going to happen

that often didn't materialize? And I think, you know, like Keir has spoken about this before, about how, like, they've not been able, that the right in spaces perhaps were not able to mobilize in the way that they thought they were going to based on the kind of hype that was created on social media. So, I mean, those are the big four questions for me in terms of like the reflection.

Well, they're good questions. I mean, is it the return to the streets? I mean, I was asked a related question I was asked in this interview that I did, was, is it basically just a kind of summer flare up? Because these things do happen. It's not like the only time. And it's not like there haven't been riots since 2011, that usually associated with exactly the kind of phenomenon you're talking about,

like some mixture of moral panic, online virality, and heat and alcohol out in the streets. There is obviously an element of that. But whether we're likely to keep seeing more of that in the future is a good question. I think, I mean, unless something really, changes at the level of the party political and the electoral sphere, we're almost bound to because one of the absolute characteristics of contemporary politics is the level of sort of democratic frustration experienced by so many people. I sometimes think about this. I've

never written about this. We haven't even really talked about it that much. But sometimes I think that I actually, I think the dominant affect of contemporary culture is actually frustration, like rather than anxiety or boredom or any, the other things people speculatively attribute to it sometimes I think it's the dominant political affect is just frustration because I don't think there really is one dominant affect

but obviously as lots of right wing and kind of also kind of socially conservative labor movement aligned commentators have pointed out people on the right do have a very immediate democratic frustration which is whether we like to talk about it or not

or whatever we think about its consequences or causes it is factually numeric numerically demographically true that mass immigration has happened on a historically unprecedented scale over the past 20 years and has continued to accelerate in recent years. It is also true that for much of that time, government

have been promising that it wouldn't keep happening and it does keep happening. And so that is a thing. That is a thing that's so they are frustrated. We all know why people on the left, or whose desires are on the left, are politically frustrated. But even with the sort of liberal centre now,

there's a huge cause is a frustration. You know, the inability of liberal centrists and their technocratic masters to prevent Brexit or to restore the kind of lost cultural authority of the professional classes in this country, as we said in the humiliation episode, I think Brexit really represented this kind of loss of authority for them. And just the fact that even their hero, Kirst Arma now, is telling them, yes, forget, we're not, you know that mild restoration of the public sphere you hoping for. You can forget about that. So there's this latent frustration from many different constituencies. And historically, well, what happens when people are frustrated with the inability

of representative mechanisms to deliver anything like the outcomes they want? Yeah, they take to the streets. So it's very hard to envisage circumstances in which the streets are not more of a sphere of expression and action over the past few, over the next few years. Given that really, I think our line on the show is that, well, the key historical phenomenon conditioning our current moment in British politics is the very deliberate and ultimately successful attempt to negate attempts to use the mechanisms of democratic and representative democracy to achieve progressive and democratic ends over the past few years. I mean, people who study contentious politics as they talk about it and they sort of roll in like big social movements alongside riots and these sorts of the sorts of pogroms that we saw. etc. The classic analysis is that like that happens when access to express grievances, frustrations through the political system are blocked off basically. And you could totally say yes. If you're on the right, we voted for Brexit because that was a, for lots of people who voted for Brexit.

We thought that would, you know, stop Polish immigrants, etc. You know, it hasn't worked. We tried politics. It hasn't worked. The other part of that, right, is in the recent election. Reform did quite well. and like, you know, they did quite well, but like Labor are solidly in. And so, you know, when right with far right parties such as reform do well, it tends to lead to an upsurge in far right street politics as well, because there's a confidence there that, you know, lots of people think like a sort of thing. The other thing you'd probably add into that, bro, is that the absolutely extreme, really, really extreme anti-protest laws brought in over the last couple of years.

I mean, in fact, it's you're probably better off rioting than you are doing disruptive protests. of that the jail sentences you might get. So most famously, Roger Hallam and several other people from just stop oil who have this tactic of disrupting traffic. Roger Hallam was sent to jail for five years. The maximum you can get sent to jail for that charged 10 years. The maximum you could get sent to jail for violent disorder, which is what most of the pogromists have been charged with so far is five years. If you plead guilty, you get a third off that. So we haven't seen any sentences over three years. So three years for, in some of the instances, extremely violent behavior, you know, beating people up, just grabbing, random people, attacking them, trying to set things

on fire. These sorts of things, basically, it's been three years. Having a Zoom meeting to discuss causing a traffic jam, you'll get five years. It's almost like that, you know, if there's no access to the political, the formal political system, and there's no access to protest as a method of expressing this, when anti-protest laws are so extreme over the top, you know, absolutely unprecedented for democratic countries, right? The message is, riot, do not protest. That's basically the message that, not consciously being sent, but that is the message of this massive overinflation of anti-protest laws that the conservative is brought in. That is true and is really interesting. I'd like to return to Jeremy's point about frustration, because I think

on top of, you know, the different constituencies and the different, like, political constituencies and the different kind of frustrations that have been felt there, along with what Keir said about frustration of not being able to protest, there's, of course, you know, the quality of life and economic frustration, which we have all felt unless you are super rich. And looking at the latest headlines that our water bills are going to go up again and our other utility bills are going to go up by 10% by this Christmas. Again, I saw a vid. of, you know, like a really angry, quote-unquote far right rioter, like going, we've had enough, we've had enough. And in that moment, I was like, I don't know what he was saying we had enough

about. Maybe he was saying, I've had enough about something particularly, you know, horrific and racist. But I really could empathize with that guy. It was like, I've had enough too. Like, we've really had enough. And I think it's trying to understand, people are basically thinking, like, when is my life going to get slightly better? And I think, think that's what we all have in common. And that was my interest with the election. And it is what I think a lot of people consciously or subconsciously's interest is. Like when our thing is going to become a little bit less shit. And I think, you know, you guys are right. I think, you know, whether it's on international issues, like whether it's on Palestine or like national

issues or like local issues, people are like, well, the mechanisms are not working at all for any of it. My next question was about whether there is something special. It's not unique, but it's special as a moment about the shared experience of a event like this. When everybody is waiting to see what is going to happen at a certain time. I think we should talk about that and we should talk about it in relation to the question of what was kind of effectively involved in for the people actually taking part, the people on the right as well as people against them.

I think partly what you're raising is the issue of the way in which a sense of thing, of the sense of undecidability, it can create fear and anxiety, but it also creates a sense of possibility and the sense of sort of potential agency. I mean, that is involved. That is partly what happens at these moments of disruption of the normal order. I mean, that's partly what's going on in that moment that Keir was describing earlier, where people felt an urgent and correct need to go and physically defend. end a building that had people in it, from being burned by right-wing pogromers.

I don't know what the correct noun is there. I think there is something quite powerful there about the way in which just the suspension of the ordinary everyday business of social and political life in the sense that nothing can ever change. Like it does get what everyone is trying to do, even the fascists are trying to do on some sense, though, is to create that, aren't they? Even the fascist, to some extent, they're trying to create a moment of possible. It was then they want to exploit, but to some extent what happened under these circumstances

is that the progressive forces were able to exploit it better than they were, arguably. Historically, that is often what happens in terms of, you know, the relationship between the far right and its opponents in Britain. To the point, right, yeah, I have to admit, like at certain points in my life, I've been, I mean, I've always obviously been sympathetic to and around, actively just around the fringes of, kind of organized, anti-fascism since I was in my like mid-teens really. But just because, partly just because if it's like the mid-80s and you are feeling like frustrated politically like we are now and you're looking around for an easy target on which to vent your frustration, then, you know, skinhead,

fascist, dickheads are, you know, pretty handy, pretty easy, easily accessible target, you know, to hate and to organise against. And then when I was a little bit older, by the time I was in my mid-20s, I'd actually, I'd become quite cynical about a lot of anti-fascism. in Britain, I sort of had come to, my sense that a lot of my friends on the radical left, like, sort of Trotskyist and anarchists, like, got really, really excited every time there was a fascist mobilisation and just really enjoyed it, really loved it. And my sense that sometimes they were, you know, so often it would be the case. Like, it is, it's the norm. I mean, I talked about this, you know, with reference to my dad's experience on the fascism episode. It's literally

the historic norm in Britain that anti-fascists turn up in much larger numbers than the fascists themselves. On the one hand, that's good. It's a good thing that's a norm. It should be carried on. And on the other hand, and it's also, it's not always what happens. And when it doesn't happen, it can have disastrous consequences for the actual lives of victims of fascist violence. But, you know, at a certain point in my life, I became quite cynical about the extent to which it felt to me like a lot of anti-fascism was sort of performative. And it was people having a good time, getting their endorphins going, running down the street. Well, it's a paradox because on the one hand, yeah, you can make that cynical description

of it, but it's still better that that's better than it not being the case, if you like. That was played out over that week because there were early anti-fascist demonstrations and they were outnumbered and in Plymouth, the small anti-fascist demonstration, they got pelted with bricks and cans, et cetera, and bottles. They turned out they didn't know who was, if they were going to be bigger or smaller. And it turned out they were small or equal size and the police were just basically not going to get involved. And so that's that thing of like, well, are you going to turn it? Well, you know, I don't know because, you know, I might get smashed on the head with a brick.

I'm not sure about this. Once it gets past a certain level of size, then it becomes a much more safer thing to do. Do you know what I mean? A much more enjoyable thing to do. The really challenging thing about talking about the affect of that week is that the sort of relief of the Wednesday large anti-fascist mobilizations, they were mirrored to some degree and preceded by like the joy of fascism, as we were saying. The sense of release that the racist rioters were enjoying,

it's quite obvious that they're organised, not particularly organised. There are small, organised far-right fascist groups, just a patriotic alternative who are selling their militants round from place to place, etc. Then there's this wider sort of milieu of conspiracy theorists, sort of like English Defence League, you know, which has got linked through to certain parts of like football hooliganism, etc. Tommy Robinson, who was the leader of the EDL and major figure and agitating for these riots. When you look at the arrests, there are some of those people.

And when you look at their employment, they tend to be self-employed. But when you look at the other arrest, there are like lots of people, either older people who have got just a series of minor petty crimes, basically, somebody who'd been living on that sort of like a life of poverty and semi-legal sort of criminality for a long time and lots of young children. The excitement of those sorts of crowd experiences drag people in, people who didn't expect themselves to be dragged in, basically.

And because the crowd has been anti-migrant, etc., you get dragged into being anti-migrant. You know, over and over again, you see this testimony of like, I don't know why I got involved. I'm not a racist, you would say that, wouldn't you, when you're in front of the beak, do you know what I mean?

But, like, perhaps some of that's true. And they're attracted by the joy of the crowd, the release, finally, you know, finally, we're the ones who control. the streets. That's the sort of sensation that anti-racist protesters had a couple of days later. This is really, really important, and I'm really happy that you've brought it up here. And I think, I think, you know, there are several kind of vignettes around this. I mean, the one that you've just described of like basically, you know, that like the young

kids, you know, especially boys, you know, young men in this situation going, you know, this is the thing that's happening. And when I spoke to people who are talking about Hare Hills, they were also saying there were people who were like, yeah, this is what's happening tonight. There is shit going down and I want to be part of it, you know, partly. But then also, you know, I want to reflect on, and, you know, I don't know how to what extent this happened. I haven't looked into it. I haven't done extensive research. But also the looting that occurred around that week in the lead up to the riots where, or the lead up, sorry, sorry, to the Wednesday supposedly organized riots where there were people who, as did happen in Tottenham in 2011, like people were like going into shops and like, you know, clearing out, you know, for, you know, you know, expensive trains.

or whatever. And what I'm specifically interested in is, and, you know, I'm not saying this is widespread or whatever, but like the real kind of put down attitude and kind of elitism and sneering at these people by, you know, sections of like the online, whatever, commentariat or, you know, people, I don't know who these people are, in fact, I wouldn't be able to say. But that kind of like, oh, look at these people they are thieves, you know, the kind of like they are chavs, like that kind of like really putting down effectively like discrimination, like it felt really anti-working class, the language that was being used. And I think that's also an interesting in, because I wonder whether there are people who were incredibly critical, not particularly because they care about

minorities and Muslims or whatever, but they really hate the aesthetic of effectively, like, poor white people like quote unquote rampaging through town centres. So I think it's more complex, you know, and it's important to complexify and speak about the nuance of all of the different kind of groups of people who were involved and the different interests in terms of how to comment on it. Yeah, I think that's completely right. I think that this might be an opportune moment to address one of the issues around the question of who was involved and why, or some of the analytical conclusions that have been drawn by some commentators on the basis for some observations as to who is involved. I'm referring specifically to a discussion that would have placed on a

different Navarra programme to this one a few weeks ago in response to the riots. There was Aaron, Rivka and Ash. And it was declared on that programme that the fact that some of the people involved in the riots were obviously very young, categorically, this wasn't. This wasn't just put forward. It wasn't just put forward as like, oh, this might slightly problematize a certain thesis. It was stated that it categorically disproves once and for all

a certain historical political hypothesis. The Generation Left hypothesis put forward by one Keir Milburn in his book, Generation Left. So the argument went, well, there was a bunch of young people on these riots, therefore that proves that Generation Left

is completely wrong. And this was enthusiastically agreed with by at least one of the other panelists. And I just have to say, I have to say, no, that's wrong. That's not the case. Because A, the Generation Left Hypothesis does not maintain that every single person in the world under 30 is now on the political left. It merely states that statistically, over the past decade or so, there has been a marked shift in the political allegiances and preferences of younger people

from the right to the left for various specific historical reasons to do with, for example, the long-term consequences of austerity after the 2008 financial crisis. And this is not a thesis that is any way disproven by the presence of a few dozen

young people on some of these riots. And if you look at the polling that was actually done in the wake of the riots, there was quite extensive polling done very quickly our polling firms to see how much sympathy sections of the British public actually had with the actual rioters. What did you find? Was there some big uptick in sympathy amongst Generation Z or Generation Alpha? No, there was not. It was very clearly related to age

and older people were more sympathetic than younger people. In fact, that listening to that discussion prompted me to go and have a look and see whether, you know, the claims being made in that discussion to the effect that, for example, figures like Andrew Tate are completely hegemonic now within the online culture of young people, whether that was actually borne out by the data and what did I found? I did in fact find a January 24 survey carried out by YouGov precisely asking the question, how popular is Andrew Tate actually with young men? The proportion of young men in Britain who actually like Andrew Tate, what do you think it is? Does anyone want to guess what it is? it's 14%

not a majority, not a majority at all. Now I completely understand why even 14% of young men in Britain not thinking Andrew Tate is an ignorant dick and a complete bullshitter is kind of shocking and I have, colleagues of mine

have had the experience, for example, of having Andrew Tate fans pop up in undergraduate seminars. It is shocking and it provokes a reaction that something terrible is happening that we really must do something about. I completely understand the kind of experiential reaction to some of those, that information and some of those experiences, provoking a sense of well, something very bad is happening, that very right-wing ideas are popular amongst young people in ways that they shouldn't be. And we really have to mention, as we haven't done so far today, friend of the show, Professor Alan Finlayson, has been studying and arguing for the significance of what he calls reactionary digital politics for several years now.

has been quite clearly charting the emergence of a particular sort of structure of feeling and set of discourses amongst various constituencies and with increasing prevalence among certain groups of young people, especially young men, and things like these pogroms, these riots, are clearly a manifestation of a phenomenon which Alan has been charting the emergence of with some of his colleagues over the past several years. So all that is true. But it's very, very dangerous and problematic for us to move from observing something is happening, something is maybe emergent, something is happening that is significant and noteworthy, amongst a relatively small but nonetheless historically significant section of the public

at whatever age. To move from that to talking as if Andrew Tate fandom and far right program participation are in some sense representative of the normative politics of younger people today. That's very dangerous to say that and it's totally inaccurate and I've gone on about it long enough. I think Keir should say something about it. Basically there's this thing that the idea that like young people who move to the right is incredibly popular. Let me coin a phrase, right, that the young people's turn to the right is visible absolutely everywhere apart from the data, right? Because there's just newspaper articles over and over again and they never refer to, they just refer to either voxpops or anecdote or they refer to well isn't Andrew

take very popular amongst young men. There is something going on, but it's not a majority of young men. It's a small part of young men. What the general story with generation left is, is that there's a gap between women and men in terms of young women are more on the left and young men. But what's happened is that all young people have gone to the left. It's just that young women have gone to the left much, much more radically, basically. At the last general election, for instance, the far right party reform got 9% under 30s, you know, and much more in the over 50s. I think the Conservatives got roughly the same. You know, that's 20% of the population. That's quite sort of like significant. But like that's the majority, do you know what I mean? And so the reason

I think it's important to talk about this, I think it's a very dangerous argument, this argument that like, I said very dangerous impression to give that young people are turning to the right because it confirms an overestimation of support, which is like a central plank of the contemporary far right. There was some polling just after the, after the riots, about whether you support the riots or not. And just 7% of people in the general population said that they supported the riots. 85 opposed it, 75% strongly opposed the unrest protest, was the actual term, rather than the riot. But out of that 7% who did support the riots, 62% of that 7% thought that the majority of Britain supported them. So they thought that most people

supported the riots and they were in the majority, basically. In fact, they were in the tiny minority. One of the arguments about what might be gone on in that week was that far right had just assumed that like everybody supported them. They overestimated their support and they went for an insurrection and they basically were proven wrong. We could talk a little bit more about Alan Finlinson's stuff about reaction digital politics because he's got this really interesting argument about, he says it, look, there's an emerging like anti-agelitarian worldview, which he calls reactionary digital politics, which is Andrew Tate fanship probably fits into. And it's basically, it's anti-agalitarian, really into hierarchies, race and the idea of

like some sort of race war as like the underlying fact of politics is like the crucial bit, etc. But it's really, really hemetic and self-enclosed, right? It doesn't touch down. It's almost like a loop. It doesn't touch down on the world that the rest of us believe in at various points. And it can't do basically, because if you believe that like, you know, races are real. Believe in or experience. Believe in or experience. I don't understand the question.

With that argument. So when you're saying, I'm trying to understand how you're using hermetic in this sense. So are you saying that they make an argument, the argument comes in a loop. And when you're saying it doesn't touch down, as in it doesn't touch down on,

you said the world that we experience, sorry, the world that we believe. Whereas I'm wondering whether you mean, you mean the world that we experience. I mean what life is actually like for the vast majority of people. It's more, it's more that in order to believe that, like, race exists, and that most people believe that, the dominant coordinates of politics are a sort of like social downist race war, a war between the races,

and that's the dominant view, et cetera. In order to believe that, you have to cut yourself off from like huge chunks of contemporary science, basically, right? You've got to be able to, in some way, inoculate yourself or devalue or push away a whole series of stuff in which there's a huge consensus around climate change, for instance. You've got to say that climate change doesn't exist.

There's a conspiracy of virtue signalers to pretend that climate change exists. So all of this science, there may be 98% of all climate science I have this huge, huge array of evidence, but you don't believe it because basically there's a conspiracy there for them to just a virtue signal, to hide what they really believe. And what they really believe is there's a race war and everybody's in a hierarchical race against everyone else, et cetera. The other thing you have to disbelieve is contemporary science of genetics, right? You have to find some way to say, you know, we are sealed off, seal off that worldview from contemporary view of genetics, which is, is not really a meaningful category. It's a historical legacy from like colonialism, et cetera,

et cetera. And the way you do that is like anti-woke discourse, basically. Anti-woke discourse is a way of inoculate, a preemptively inoculating you from left-wing discourse or from just liberal discourse or from just like a whole series of of knowledges and people who hold those knowledges. Woke discourse is the real reality is we're all in a war of all against all, race against race. Everybody actually believes that. And the people who say they don't believe that, they're lying. And they're lying in order of virtue signal, and as it's called, they're lying in order to get one over on somebody else. That's a completely hemetic world view in which any evidence which will disrupt your

worldview is already preemptively inoculated against, right? And that's why it's so dangerous to sort of like go along with this idea that, you know, the younger turning to the right, etc. Because it confirms their view that actually everybody knows that the world is the way they see it, and people who say they don't are lying, virtue signaling, because that's their way of getting one over on somebody else, basically. That's basically the contemporary far right worldview. It's really dangerous because, you know, it leads to an overestimation of support. It leads to, like, really radical violent action, etc. And that's the sort of big, big danger. And the big danger, of course, is that it's not, it is just this small group of people

sealed in this like hermetic worldview, but they see their worldview being reflected to one degree or another in the daily mail, in the telegraph, etc. They see it on G.B. News. They see it on talk TV. They also see it reflected with more and more frequency on the BBC, etc. They see it in Nigel Farage, leader of the reform. They see it in like the contenders for the Conservative Party leadership, but they also see it in one form and other coming from the Labour Party leadership. You know, they see their worldview of the most important issue is immigration, the most important issue is these small boats coming through. That's the thing that Labour Party want to talk about.

That's the worry. And the worry is, of course, that, like, even a small part of the population, they can have oversized influence if there's a confluence of forces around them. Yeah, well, I think this is the big danger, isn't it? And this is why, I think, you know, the observations being made, you know, by people like Aaron and Rivka and Ash and Alan. who are all in their different ways, brilliant political analysts and commentators in their own right,

I think what is the correct intuition, which is informing a lot of those observations, is that we are now, as we've discussed before on the show, we are now in this historical period when liberal democracy seems totally dysfunctional, and consequently you have a situation in which the current Labour government was actually, actually, actively voted for by 20% of the adult electorate, the eligible electorate.

20%. They've got a massive, unshakable parliamentary majority. They've completely illegitimately taken complete control bureaucratically of their own party, the party of the working class in Britain, and they are supported by actively 20% of the electorate. They're totally dysfunctional liberal democracy all over the world. You can see what's happening in France now, but Britain is a particularly bad case. Under those circumstances, well, especially given the backing given to the far right by the press, the media, even tackily over the past few years by the BBC, which has platformed far right, far more the far left, and when you take account of the extent to which they actually represent sections of public opinion, it's been

completely disproportionate many years, you take all that into account, then you are looking at a situation in which, well, frankly, you know, 14% of young men liking Andrew Tate, 20% of young people voting for reform or the Tories, that might be enough, given what a large proportion of older people might support those forces. And given the other material and ideological forces of their disposal, that might be enough for them to be the political force, which is ultimately able to benefit even at the next election, from the total collapse of, you know, of the Stama project and the fact that the centrist liberals will continue to sabotage any political project led from anyone by anyone to the left of them, just as Macron is doing in France

right now as we speak. So there is a real fear. There is a real danger. So we can't be complacent. You know, we can't be complacent about fash on the streets in a way which, you know, I was kind of attending towards some earlier times in my life. And we can't be complacent, really, about even the fact that the generation left hypothesis as a hypothesis about what's happening to young people more broadly is clearly still correct, given that, well, they might only need, you know, 10% of the youth to take over the country, given all the other forces of their disposal, and that's the thing we really have to be sort of worried about, I think. I think in response to that, what I'd like to say is that my sense is, and I might be wrong,

So this is us maybe closing on this question of like, who are the people, of that, you know, not everyone lives in a big city. And if shit is going down in your town centre, for a lot of people, you're just going to want to be part of the action. And I think there's probably quite a lot of people who got involved, you know, and like you were both outlining, didn't really understand what they were getting involved in, not because they were stupid, you know, I don't want to look down on those people, but because that is what was happening.

And then you just got involved. and you let out steam, rather than us saying that especially for the young people, that everyone was really kind of ideologically organized by some kind of like in-cell Andrew Tate-style kind of radicalization, like a program of radicalization. Because I think it's quite different, and I think this confirms the argument that you're both saying, really, is that it's different if we're saying, okay, for months and months and months and maybe years, there have been, like, the vast majority of people who are involved in these kind of what we're calling right-wing actions, this was like an organized process where people were being radicalized for like years. And we don't, I just don't think it's that. I think there was a percentage of people as you both outlined who were like involved in like active like far right, you know, fash or organizing. But who ended up on the streets on the day is like people who are just being opportunistic because shit was going down and they wanted to be part of it. The last thing that we had from my list was about the infrastructure and how the

infrastructure of communication, like what it allowed for and, you know, fake news and stuff. And I mean, the only thing that I really want to say there is something that I found, again, I'm really interested in this kind of like bird's eye view, pulling back, like, what are we learning about this moment in history? And something that I just happened to be listening to by coincidence, came out at the right time, is this podcast on Radio 4 called The Third Information Crisis by Naomi Alderman, which was really brilliant, and it came out in the beginning of July by complete coincidence. And she does this fantastic analysis in this kind of five short podcasts about this moment in history

and effectively like this digital reality, which she is calling the third information crisis. And she makes a comparison with that point in history when the printing press was invented and how basically, you know, society goes absolutely apeship because they cannot manage information in the same way that people used to manage information before. And it leads to all sorts of kind of rioting and divisiveness in society. And I think it's really interesting in to try and understand like some of the social media organizing that made events like this happen

and the kind of spread of either misinformation or kind of certain organizing tactics. Yeah, I thought it was really useful to listen to when we should put it in the show notes. I mean, one of the responses, it is a really interesting argument because you could sort of like, you know, you could talk about like, you know, the 100 year war, the present revolts, etc., which come along, you know, after the Bible is translated, you know, into vernacular languages, et cetera, and it gets printed and, you know, you don't have to read Latin to read it, etc. And then it's all this questioning of like Christian doctrine and all this sort of stuff. But I would say that like the fault with that argument is this is not just like these

are the qualities of social media. Yes, they are. But what is a real immediate trigger for these riots is the fact that an oligarch named Elon Musk bought up Twitter in order to take down all of the sort of like governance structures of it, you know, the sort of mediation of it, etc. Specifically, you know, he bought Twitter as part of his radicalisation process into the far right. He debanned Tommy Robinson last November. He readmitted him to Twitter or X or whatever he wants us to call it, you know, and, you know, has amplified him, so he has 900,000 followers, etc. On the 3rd of August, Tommy Robinson tweets, what will it take for you to be angry enough to do something about this in reference to Southport? You know, that's direct incitement to riot.

In 2022, he reinstated Andrew Tate, basically. Who also does, he spreads this rumor about an undocumented migrant who just arrived on a small boat in the UK, viewed 12 million times on Twitter. Elon Musk himself was, you know, retweeting fascist accounts and saying, you know, this is always going to lead to civil war, you know what I mean? This is like oligarchs seizing hold of the printing press, refusing to let everybody else use it, even though people were printing their own pamphlets before saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, now we're just going to have these neo-Nazi accounts are going to be, you know, this is the playground for neo-Nazi account. It's almost like, you know, one of the effects of social media is, you know, these are platforms.

platforms, these are rentier business models, that funnels wealth up to the top as part of this wider sort of phenomenon that's been going on for the last 15, 20 years. One of the things that comes from that is that you have small, you have numbers of individuals to have just incredible wealth, basically, you know, like Elon Musk, which means they can buy a social media platform for 45 billion pounds. Other oligarchs can buy and set up TV stations, which you'll pump out this rubbish over and over again. Do you know what I mean? Not because they don't make money out of these things.

They're losing money. They're not to make money. They're to, you know, basically reinforce political views, etc. So it's that rise of the oligarchs, I think we have to take into account, even though perhaps most of the oligarchs are not on the far right,

just because of the obscene amount of wealth that flows to the very, very top and the present economic system adds this level of instability where, you know, you can have a crank oligarch who can fund all. lots of stuff. Have you listened to the podcast? Because in a way that that's not, I don't think

that's a counterargument argument at all. I think the argument that's being made by her in the series is effectively like there are two main points, which is that regardless of whether it is government or hegemony or oligarchs or private money or whatever, like we do not have the infrastructure in place to be able to manage the way information is being passed around. And secondly, we don't have the internal infrastructure as human beings to deal with the passing of mass information in the sense that if you get, and I'm not talking about Twitter here necessarily, it's more things like WhatsApp and Signal, like you're getting a message. And we've all experienced this.

You get a message through and then people have really bad digital hygiene because people, because we don't yet have the internal resources to be able to manage this. And people are just forwarding shit. I mean, it was happening on all the local groups that I was involved in that are completely apolitical, like the neighborhood groups that we talk about like rubbish and like, you know, dead animals on the street or whatever, right? And then suddenly everyone is forwarding like complete fucking fake news and without thinking like what is the source, is this real? Like what is my level of responsibility of being able to do this? And what am I creating and what am I adding to by disseminating this information?

it's like the perfect storm of not having the right regulation in place because we're unable to regulate because we don't really understand this thing yet and like internally in terms of how it develops with us in terms of dopamine etc and then it results in this sort of thing so regardless whether it's musk or someone else I know but my my main point is it's not a we account managed haven't got the tools to manage it some of the tools were there Elon must bought it in order to take those tools away it's not we as a species are failing to do this. Lots of some of us as a species

don't want to do this and they're actively fighting against it. But it's not like on a global level we have agreed regulatory mechanisms for social media, right? And we don't. That's true, but I haven't heard that podcast. I'm very familiar with those kinds of

arguments from people like Shushana Zuboff, for example. The antitrust campaign is in the States, for example, make very similar arguments. And my problem with them is not that they are wrong, that what we need is those kind of regulatory frameworks. My problem is that historically, those kind of regulatory frameworks do not simply emerge because someone thinks they're a good idea. They emerge as an effect of class relations, basically. They emerge because

particular social groups develop enough resources, enough power to be able to impose systems of regulation for their own collective benefit. I mean, to some extent, this is a chicken and egg argument because partly I'm wanting to make a sort of pompously vulgar Marxist argument that well you will only get those regulatory frameworks when we have sufficient levels of collectives or working class power or you know just public power to be able to impose them but then if somebody asks people what would that actually look like what form would that take it would probably be the form it would take would be creating those kind of regulatory mechanisms and making them work so you know it's not an argument really but

My experience of those kind of arguments is they're often, they seem to be a bit historically naive about where do those things come from? They come, you know, they emerge out of class struggle to some extent. Just as an example of that, like we have in 2023, the UK introduced some regulation around the internet, the online safety bill. Now it's a criminal offence to send false information intended to cause non-trivial harm, right? And you may think, hang on a minute, that means every daily mail article is, you know, lying about their length. level of immigration or whatever, making a moral panic out at spoiled boats, it should be a legal offence. So you look at that bill and you see that, in fact, you know, print media journalists and media reports which circulate false information, even if they're circulated online,

they are exempt from the bill. And so the mouthpieces of oligarchs, which is what the daily mail, et cetera, and all of those newspapers are, they are legally allowed to spread information online when we're in theory aren't allowed to spread that. I mean, that's just expression of class power. This is the kind of issue on which we need a sort of broad coalition that will include

liberals who have no interest in advancing the class struggle and, you know, radical socialists. We could all probably agree that we need government absolutely committed to creating the kind of institutions that would make possible the forms of regulation that

you know, Nazi is referring to them. And I think that was kind of developing, I hate out always having to say this on the show. I suppose we're going to have to keep saying this for the next 10 years probably. But, you know, that was one of the things that was happening within the policy environment around advanced Corbinism. It was treated like with our absolute contempt, even by sort of centrist commentators. So I think we do need we do need to think about actually politically, like tactically just in terms of British political culture. Like how do we find a rhetoric? How do we find a rhetoric to point out to.

people that, you know, the centrist commentators mocking and still mocking in retrospect, you know, the Labour 2019 manifesto for offering things like socialised broadband, was in fact offering the only plausible solutions to things they themselves recognise as being massive problems, which are, you know, for example, massive disinformation on the internet. I think it's, I don't have an immediate answer, but to me that's what I think, that's what this is making me think about. And it's, this is partly, you know, an answer to the broader question. of like, well, what do we do? How do we respond politically to this kind of right-wing-up

surge and to the fact that, well, one of the conditions for that right-wing-up surge that the efflorescence of pogroms on British streets was indeed a kind of alignment of interest or an alignment of conceptualisation of interest between highly disenfranchised people in British towns and Elon Musk, for example. How do we respond to that situation? Well, we have to respond to it by kind of assembling constellations and coalitions of interest of our own. And they are going to have to involve people who are just liberals who are kind of upset about the fact that so much total nonsense can be spread online and it has freaky effects. And people who might have a more radical materialist critique of why that happens. Like we need to be able to

assemble those sorts of political coalitions because I think there is no question that that is part of the condition that what we are seeing is partly just old-fashioned. fascism and it is partly a direct consequence of the 50-year campaign waved by the British press to convince certain sections of the public that immigration rather than neoliberalism is the cause of their problems. But it is also absolutely specific to the current conjuncture and the forms of power that are emerging in the era of platform capitalism. And I think we do obviously need to build kind of coalitions which are able to resist those forms of capitalist power that Elon Musk is such a naked manifestation of, I think.

Yeah, because we are getting into, like, well, what is to be done about all of this. And I think we should go back to that, like, that Wednesday when there were those, the big, big anti-racist marches. And, you know, think about, like, why the Daily Mail suddenly came out and said, okay, now you're the British people, you're the representatives of the British people. Or, like, the way that Stella Creasy was, like, pushed from pillar to post, Her mind was changed because she saw the strength of that, basically, the strength of those protests. Because Labour is positioning itself to, we will not talk about Islamophobia, we will definitely

that means not lead a popular anti-racist movement. That creates a huge room for the left to take the initiative, basically, in a sort of popular anti-racism, but that has to be linked to pro-democracy. Pro-democracy, and I think that is right, in terms of, like pro-democracy, in order to try to work at what we do with the internet, this sort of like this internet dominated by the needs of oligarchs and like, you know, platform capitalists, etc. Rather than our needs as like, you know, in order to have some sort of democratic public space, once again, it would have to be, you know, some way of dealing with this complete collapse

of representative democracy and much further, basically. I think he'd also move to move into like democratising the economy, etc. I've probably said this a million times. But I think that's one of the, you know, that is the solution to this, basically, to link an anti-racism to repair democracy, basically. Which is why Stama's not going to do that. Well, Starmer's definitely not going to do that. In fact, he's going to do the exact opposite. But, like, that does leave a gap, doesn't it?

That leaves a huge, huge gap for the left to try to exercise some hegemony, basically. We managed to exercise hegemony on that over the British population on that Wednesday. We managed to exercise hegemony over the Metropolitan Police. and this sort of tabloid press, basically, really, really unprecedented. And I think there's a huge space there. I mean, because the Star Malagia is so right-wing, so authoritarian, so anti-democratic, and basically so austerion, it's just a huge, huge space there for the left. And, of course, if the left don't fill it, there is another force, but will.

That's the far right. When we planned this episode, we thought we'd talk a bit more about humiliation and humiliation, the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness as an affect that can drive the kinds of frustration we've talked about. But you can feel that in blank in for yourself, listeners, I'm sure. I'm not going to go on about that now. I just, we sort of concluded on the episode with a fairly pessimistic account of our expectation that the centrist were going to continue to try to engineer the situation. They've successfully maintained in places like Italy for decades, whereby the public is faced with a perpetual choice between centrist or

fascists. And I think you're right here, actually. We did have, there was a glimmer in that moment of a possible future in which they are not able to do that. And in fact, we are able to successfully make the case to liberals and to the broader public to some extent. The choice is not between the technocrats and the fascists, the choices between us and the fascists. And choices between fascism and some coalition that has to be led by the left as well as including a lot of liberals. And, you know, there are historic precedents for that happening. and that is quite encouraging.