It's almost a month since far right mobs went on the rampage attacking hotels hosting asylum seekers, mosques, and seeking confrontation with Muslims and anti-fascists. In this interview on Politics Theory Other, Nesrine Malik looks at the politics of the riots. She covers the changing racist discourses employed by the fascists themselves to the politically-muted response of Keir Starmer, and how the growth of social liberalism is employed by the press and right wing actors to portray a Britain under siege - with the effect of radicalising a racist minority.
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I recently read a slightly facile and at times ironic piece in the Grauniad by Nesrine Malik on this subject. Now my intention is not to pander to fascists and the far right, but calling the whole anti-immigration narrative as lies, is itself ‘gaslighting’ (see I can use modish terms too). She glosses over the scale and pace of mass immigration with the old nation of immigrants schtick. A cursory glance at ONS statistics for England and Wales shows that the level of immigration into the UK (yes I know E&W is not whole of UK, but is a reasonable proxy in this argument) in recent decades is unprecedented, in both absolute and relative terms. Something like 16% of population of E&W was born outside of UK, and this obviously doesn’t cover the proportion that are first or second generation immigrants.
The challenge is accommodating and integrating such rapid changes, especially when some parts of the incoming cultures are profoundly uncomfortable with the liberal conventions that deliver the benefits that attracted them. This is not far right lies; I certainly don’t think the ONS is far right, nor is anyone who notices what is in plain sight. Immigration is not of itself a bad thing, the bad thing is too much and too fast to be integrated successfully, or too much of the economic low productivity type versus high productivity type, or too much of the type that holds on to regressive behaviours (of which we have plenty enough without adding to) etc...
However, the laugh out loud part of the article I read was a barb at those in “search of perpetual grievance”, by which she meant the likes of Farrage and Yaxley-Lennon, and almost certainly not professional grievance entrepreneurs writing pieces for the Graun. The whole political spectrum is infected with commercialised grievance, venting righteous indignation at the ones selling the grievances we don’t like whilst giving a pass to those making a living from the grievances we’re sympathetic to is not analysis.
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