On October 17, 1905, the Russian tsar Nicholas II granted a constitutional monarchy. He didn’t have much choice, as most of the country was on strike. Naturally, this was greeted with jubilation: people danced in the streets, above all Jews, whose language, religion and culture had been legally suppressed.
But one set of people were not jubilant: out of nowhere, far right mobs consisting of the “dregs of society” (according to one participant) launched a wave of attacks on everything associated with liberalism, the left, education and – of course – Jews:
“Beat the Yids, destroyers of the Russian tsardom,” read one leaflet, “beat the bloodthirsty robbers in the local council, beat … the student, even if he would be your son, brother, or relative… the more of them we kill, the less sedition there will be in Russia”.
I couldn’t help thinking of that Russian “dregs” movement as I watched the footage of far-right thugs – first in Southport, then in Hartlepool, and then in a rash of city centres last Saturday.
Because the pattern established in 1905 is basically one that’s been followed by all spontaneous fascist outbursts. What makes people attack mosques, torch the cars of Uber drivers, picket hotels where refugees are housed, and kick the windows of shows owned, as they put it, by “Pakis” is the same desire to agglomerate everything non-white into an enemy.
What brings people to the streets of Southport to hurl stones at the police, set fire to mosques, picket refugee hotels and punch random migrants in the face is a coherent theory known as The Great Replacement.
It depicts migrants as invaders, liberals as their “collaborators”, feminists as saboteurs for suppressing the white birth rate and behind it all (because no fascism would be complete without this) the Jewish-controlled world government.
That’s why – in the minds of the people who turned up to riot in Southport carrying cans of Stella – refugees, Muslims, transgender people, liberals and what GB News calls the “Left elite” merge into a synthetic enemy, driving them to irrational acts of rage against the police, who are seen as protecting that enemy.
In Southport, the far-right disinformation machine kicked into overdrive to exploit these irrational fears. First, it was rumoured that the attacker was an asylum seeker who had arrived by boat; then that he was a Muslim. Then pictures were circulated of another man being held by police, who had reportedly arrived in Southport with a knife threatening to repeat the attack, and was accused by GB News of being “of Muslim origin”. If you’re looking for rationality behind the torching of the mosque, that’s the core of it.
In fact, the alleged attacker was a British Christian whose parents are from Rwanda. And the man arrested and charged with carrying a knife was a Southport resident and not Muslim.
But that didn’t matter to the avatars of the global far right. As the disinformation expert Marc Owen Jones has shown, the lie that the attacker was Muslim was started from a Twitter account called @EuropeInvasionn, repeated by Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson and the influencer Darren Grimes, and received 27 million impressions in just a few hours.
The attacker was given a fictitious middle eastern Muslim name by the website @Channel3nownews, which originated as an account for repeating Russian propaganda but then mutated into a fake far right news website, gaining large numbers of followers rapidly.
The ability of the British far right to suddenly draw people onto the streets to commit violence is driven by a phenomenon the psychologist Erich Fromm called “fear of freedom”. Though the ostensible triggers are random – the Manchester Airport incident, the Leeds riot after a Roma family had their children removed, and the Southport murders – the underlying big change is obvious: we have a Labour government.
From now on, no home secretary is going to use dogwhistle racism against Muslims; the Rwanda scheme is scrapped; there will be no ministers going on GB News to validate its anti-migrant propaganda; the steady stream of anti-woke government gestures will end.
For the modern-day “dregs of society”, that’s as big a deal as the Russian tsar suddenly agreeing to human rights for Jews. Until July 4, people like Tommy Robinson had, if not allies in government, then “understanders” – people close to power who could see their point, and who would, if they could, deport not just most asylum seekers but large parts of the settled migrant population.
That’s why this is serious and strategic. Since Brexit in 2016, the nationalist wing of British conservatism, the right-wing populist electorate and the outright fascists have formed a cozy continuum, echoing each other’s prejudice and validating it in Whitehall. Now there is zero prospect of a Tory government and the mob is desparate, because their allies with power are gone. And as hundreds of them look set to be jailed for years, their world is about to fall apart some more.
We need to deal with it from three angles: the first was Keir Starmer’s decision to do tough, co-ordinated public order policing. The second should be to prosecute not only the originators and spreaders of disinformation, but to punish criminally those who do so on behalf of a foreign power, and those who incite violence. The third is to avoid provocation.
There is nothing that Farage, Robinson and GB News would like better than for the next headline to be a “Muslim riot” or a “refugee riot”. And let’s remember that, just as Russia is adept at using disinfo among the far right, both Russia and Iran run online operations reaching into the far left and British Islamism.
Above all we need all those in authority to understand: this is both an organic, deeply rooted and psychologically desperate movement, and the creature of Russian hybrid warfare against our country.
There is one surefire way of disrupting both elements: making sure that every racist who commits or incites violence, no matter how hapless their personal circumstances are, ends up sitting out the summer in a prison cell.
As they comb through thousands of facial recognition images, the police must not forget those who, via Telegram and WhatsApp, issued the call for violence.
