Lux Issue 11/12 features interviews and essays on the fight against fascism around the globe. Read more from Kenya, India, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and the U.S.
I was staying with family in London during the first week of August, over the same days that fascists across the United Kingdom attacked mosques, refugee shelters, and immigrants’ homes and businesses in racist, far-right uprisings, the scale of which had not been seen in decades. Throughout Britain and Northern Ireland many thousands of predominantly young white men marched and rioted.
A horrifying stabbing in Southport on July 29, which left three children dead, had been falsely blamed on a wholly invented Muslim migrant, conjured in the minds of the online far right. The lie spread like wildfire, stoked by right-wing influencers like fascist English Defense League co-founder Tommy Robinson and repulsive leader of the nationalist Reform U.K. Party Nigel Farage, accustomed to spreading paranoid fantasies about migrant crime and “the great replacement” of white Britons.
The lies fed a week of mass fascist violence so swift and widespread as to appear long awaited. The riots escalated even after authorities announced that the stabbing perpetrator was a 17-year-old born in Cardiff. When it was reported that the British-born suspect’s parents were originally from Rwanda, racist bile about dangerous new migrants from the Middle East seamlessly shifted to racist bile about failed integration. The changing narrative gave far-right agitators no pause — so little was this rampage for whiteness ever about the stabbing itself.
“Unbelievable,” I heard older liberal relatives and their friends comment. BBC News was broadcasting footage of 700 masked rioters surrounding and setting fire to a hotel that houses asylum seekers in Rotherham in Northern England. Fascists smashed the windows at another hotel-turned-migrant shelter in Hull in the Northeast; another such hotel was set alight by a far-right swarm in the Midlands. Newsreaders kept referring to the pogromists as “protesters.”
“Unbelievable… I can’t believe it,” so went the white bourgeois responses to news updates of extreme Islamophobic and anti-Black violence, viewed from a relative’s comfortable, quiet apartment. In the mainstream commentariat, such displays of disbelief were common.
“Stop it,” I snapped back at the third or fourth jaw dropped in incredulity. I ran hot with impatience at every expression of bafflement; this was no time for disavowal from Britain’s centrist liberals.
The last 14 years of Conservative Party rule saw the government pair austerity programs with anti-immigrant policy and rhetoric — messaging that blamed immigrants for draining British resources, while the government slashed benefits and offered tax cuts to the wealthy, echoed in frothing tabloid headlines and supposedly respectable broadsheets alike. The new Labour government, best understood as Tories-lite, is hardly a salve. In his election bid, Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised to slash migration, to “control our borders and make sure British businesses are helped to hire Brits first.” Both Tories and Labour, along with the entire establishment media, have spent the last 10-plus months demonizing Palestinians and other Muslims and Arabs for nonviolently protesting in vast numbers against Israel’s genocide.
Much like in the U.S., the white nationalists on Britain’s streets are the extreme end of a nationalist continuum. They express with bloody violence what the political establishment has discursively and legislatively endorsed. The racist riots were not an aberration, but the outgrowth of a nation-state ordered by harsh austerity and border logics. Under the previous Conservative government, Britain, which is the sixth largest economy in the world, enacted a policy to deport asylum seekers arriving in the U.K. to Rwanda for processing — a scheme deemed by the U.K. Supreme Court to violate international human rights law — but nonetheless pushed through.
While Starmer ended the inhumane program on his first day as prime minister, the Labour leader condemned the scheme, which he called a “gimmick,” not for its cruelty but its failure to actually deter migrants. Labour continues to frame the arrival of desperate migrants from across the channel as a risk of “criminal gangs” and has vowed to only bolster harsh border enforcement. Top that off with the embittered racist fantasies of British colonial nostalgia. Little wonder Starmer, among other leading politicians and journalists, spoke only of “disorder” and “criminality” carried out by “thugs.” The riotous form is what the British establishment opposed, not the content — Islamophobic, racist, and nationalist.
I returned to my adopted home of New York on the same day that a broad anti-fascist coalition of tens of thousands of people across the U.K. took to the streets in solidarity against further far-right attacks. They far outnumbered the fascists, whose rampages have since died down.
That we must converge in great and visible numbers against fascists in the streets — left and liberals together — is one lesson from the U.K. riots. The recent defeat of the far right by a broad (if fragile) left coalition in France’s parliamentary elections instructs similarly: When it comes to keeping ascendant fascists at bay, we often need strategic united fronts. The British press, even the odious Daily Mail, praised the “anti-hate marchers.”
But to commend a broad coalition is not to speak against militancy or leftist conviction; in the U.K. streets and the French elections, both were key. The mainstream reports omitted that the anti-fascist rallies were made up, to a significant degree, of those who have also protested for 10 months in solidarity with Gaza, and against Israel’s genocide — the very people defamed as antisemitic and violent by the same publications that praised the anti-hate marchers and by every major British political party.
In fact, those praising the marchers seem likely to become their enemy. Starmer, a former crown prosecutor, framed the fascist violence only as an issue of aberrant “disorder,” and called for a huge policing and prosecutorial response, and harsher laws around protest and online speech — laws which will no doubt be used most readily against leftists, climate protesters, and the Palestinian solidarity movement. We know this from the brutal policing and extreme prosecutorial overreach that followed the 2011 Black proletarian unrest in England, sparked when the police killed a Black 29-year-old man. A “law and order” response then saw 1,800 years’ worth of prison sentences handed down to predominantly young, Black Londoners; a student with no previous convictions was sentenced to six months for stealing £3.50 worth of water from a supermarket chain. Then, as now, political leaders simply spoke of “disorder” and “criminality” — throwing them in the same bucket with fascists, when the only commonality between the 2011 unrest and the 2024 fascist riots was the presence of broken glass.
I shed no tears for the fascists who now face punishment, including, in some cases, three-year prison sentences for online incitement. But carceral punishment, state-corporate surveillance, and mass policing are never tools of anti-fascism. For the state, after all, the response to the far-right riots was a question not of fighting fascism or racism, but reasserting “order” — that is, the state’s own monopoly on violence. Politicians, talking heads, and scandalized liberals — they all now seek tidy endings with swift criminal convictions and the myth of justice done. Bertolt Brecht warned of such self-identifying anti-fascists, who “are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself.”
Labor government advisors and columnists, meanwhile, are politely ignoring the problem of raging xenophobia in favor of addressing online misinformation (as if incorrectly identifying the stabbing culprit was the real issue here). Conservative politicians and their media allies call the riots no more than a heated response to “legitimate concerns” about immigration. Such is the convergence of the center and far right: purporting to keep the far right in check by doing exactly what the far right wants, until the difference between the center and the extreme is really one of optics, costumes, and weapons of choice.
For leftists invested in truly exorcizing fascism from our midst, appreciating the importance of a united anti-fascist front in the streets is only a first step. It’s no accident that the riots were fiercest in post-industrial cities and towns like Hull and Middlesbrough, most harmed by austerity, and the left has a duty to fight against these economic conditions. As the great cultural theorist Stuart Hall cautioned, however, channeling Antonio Gramsci, “No crisis is only economic. It is always ‘over-determined’ from different directions,” but “you can’t think about a crisis and its resolution until you deal with what he [Gramsci] calls the economic nucleus.”
Socialist theorist Richard Seymour pointed out in the New Left Review that a vulgar class analysis alone is insufficient here. A materialist understanding must attend to the role of white nationalism as an ordering force in British society, forged through colonial rule and racial capitalism. These were not, after all, anti-austerity riots in their explicit content. “Racism sometimes works as a form of displaced or distorted class politics, but not always,” Seymour noted. These were uprisings for white standing, contoured by austerity’s mendacious scarcity logic.
Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept and associate director of the Creative Publishing & Critical Journalism program at the New School.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.