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A counterprotest against the far right in Newgate, Newcastle, on Saturday.
Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
View image in fullscreen
A counterprotest against the far right in Newgate, Newcastle, on Saturday.
Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
OpinionThe far right



WERE UK PROTESTS AGAINST FAR RIGHT ANTI-THUGS OR ANTI-RACIST? THE ANSWER WILL
TELL US MUCH ABOUT OUR NATION

Andy Beckett



There is little doubt anti-racist activists led the pushback, but it is also
important to know why so many others took a stand

Mon 12 Aug 2024 07.00 CESTLast modified on Mon 12 Aug 2024 11.31 CEST
Share



In some ways, the counterprotests across the UK against the far right have been
a straightforward, much-needed good news story. A great array of people, right
across the country, mobilising almost spontaneously to protect refugees, Muslims
and other minorities from the worst wave of racist attacks for decades. The
counterprotests are a sign that this country has become less tolerant of racism
and more politically engaged, in a fundamental rather than party-political
sense.

At the counterprotest I went to in north-east London, people of different ages,
races, sexualities and religions filled the road and pavements. The crowd was
tense at first, but then grew chattier, almost festive, as it became clear that
the racists weren’t going to turn up.



Yet taking part in one of these actions is more complex than it first seems. Are
you there just as a decent citizen, or as a committed anti-racist? Is your
presence a one-off – a desire for a novel experience, even – or a long-term
commitment? And what are you prepared to do if the far right actually arrive?
These are questions we may have to ask ourselves if their toxic campaign
continues.

At the north-east London gathering, 50 yards away from the main crowd, a line of
mostly young Muslim men blocked the street outside a mosque. They were chatting
like everyone else, but some of them were wearing masks and had their hoods up.
Their response to any racist threat, it seemed likely, would not be to ask for
peace and love.

The politics of this unexpected season of disorder are treacherous for the main
parties. The Conservatives have done so much to cause the violence through their
language and policies. Labour, new in government and often misrepresented as
soft on law and order, needs to show it hasn’t lost control. Meanwhile, both
parties do not want to alienate dissatisfied white men – of whom the rioters are
only the most extreme example – partly because since Brexit they have been seen
as a key electoral demographic. Anger against the status quo is an energy both
parties would like to coopt and redirect.

Labour ministers have used the need for public order to justify their tough
treatment of the rioters and to avoid supporting the counterprotests. Tory cuts
have made policing thousands of stirred-up people on the streets even harder.
Yet the government’s simple, stern approach is also an attempt to make the whole
situation less political. Racism, Islamophobia and hostility to immigrants, and
the counterreactions these bigotries provoke, have often been tricky issues for
our mainstream politicians, conscious of how these topics divide society, and
not always along party lines.


Anti-racist protesters march across the UK – video

This country’s last comparable surge of far-right violence was also under a
Labour government, with an economy and public services under strain as now.
Between the 1974 and 1979 general elections, the National Front (NF) – an openly
racist party which advocated that all ethnic-minority Britons “immediately be
disenfranchised” and then rapidly “repatriated from this country” to their
supposed countries of origin, even if they had been born in Britain – more than
doubled its vote. At the same time, NF members, voters and sympathisers
regularly marched through multiracial areas and attacked homes, businesses and
local residents, sometimes fatally.

Then as now, many mainstream politicians, while not supporting racist violence,
saw anti-immigrant feelings as justified. In 1978, the then Tory opposition
leader Margaret Thatcher said that the NF was gaining support because “they are
talking about some of the problems” of immigration. She adjusted her party’s
language and policies accordingly.

When many thousands of people mobilised against the NF, in Asian areas of London
where racist murders had taken place, such as Southall and Spitalfields, and
nationally through new anti-racist organisations such as the Anti-Nazi League
and Rock Against Racism, the response of the police and the political
establishment was often cool or actively hostile. Officers formed massive
cordons to enable NF marches and meetings to take place, and often treated
anti-racist counter-demonstrators with aggression and contempt. In 1979, days
before Thatcher’s increasingly xenophobic Tories won the election, a white
anti-racist, Blair Peach, was killed while trying to leave a demonstration
against the NF in Southall, almost certainly by a police officer who has never
been named.

There are some signs that we live in a different country now. The
counterprotests have been praised by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Mark
Rowley, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and, in cautiously general language, by
King Charles. Police officers are a target for the far right, rather than their
protectors. Public attitudes towards immigration and multiculturalism, while
volatile, have gradually become more favourable. And whereas in the 70s white
participants in anti-racist events tended to be young and seriously political,
often activists from trade unions and fringe leftwing parties, this summer’s
mobilisation against the far right has drawn in pensioners, the middle-aged and
relatively apolitical people as well.

A week of riots across the UK filled me with fear, but Wednesday’s show of
solidarity has given me hope
Remona Aly

Read more

Even the rightwing press, its instinctive prejudices temporarily outweighed by a
fear of falling out of step with its readers, has felt compelled to cover the
counterprotests positively at times. “United Britain stands firm against thugs,”
said the Daily Express last Thursday, above a front-page picture of massed
counterprotesters in a left-leaning part of London, as if the paper had
momentarily been taken over by an anti-racist collective.

And yet, such vital, photogenic political victories need to be considered
alongside much less uplifting, equally lingering experiences – of people of
colour closing their businesses early, or too scared to go out, as if subject to
some racist lockdown – if the damage the far right has done over the past
fortnight is to be understood and then reversed.

Keir Starmer, the ex-prosecutor, is making sure that plenty of violent racists
go to prison, but their obsessions will not be so easily confined. When and if
the next racist surge comes, how the state, society and the media respond will
again reveal with startling clarity what kind of country we are becoming: one
actively committed to multiculturalism, grudgingly accepting of it, or still
fundamentally hostile. This summer’s riots may be ancient history by the time
this is resolved.

 * Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

 * Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would
   like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for
   publication in our letters section, please click here.

Explore more on these topics
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