Peter Ramsay – The Far-Right Excuse

The official reaction to the recent riots in England is an ideological distortion that seeks to deflect responsibility for national disintegration

Peter Ramsay is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He is also one of the founding editors of The Northern Star

This article originally appeared at The Northern Star

The riots and disorder that spread across Britain last week involved outright racial violence and intimidation, criminal damage and looting. They were widely condemned, and prosecutors are rightly taking action against the rioters. They were also, by historical standards, small and did little damage.

Rioting is literally the dumbest form of political expression: dumb in the old-fashioned sense of not being able to express itself in words, not even slogans. Indeed, most riots are so dumb that they are barely political acts at all. Even if riots can be said to have ultimately political causes, in most cases their assertion of coercive power is chaotic, unmediated by political ideas and motivated only by the anger of some participants and the criminal opportunism of others.

As a result, understanding the reasons for these politically inarticulate bouts of rage from the outside is a difficult business. Not that this has prevented almost everyone from the far left to the Daily Mail jumping to the obvious conclusion: it’s the ‘far right’ that’s to blame. This answer is not merely a simplification of what has happened and why it has happened now, but an ideological simplification that provides a convenient political excuse for the ruling post-democratic regime. This excuse is one that makes it more difficult to understand what has happened or to have any sort of political (as opposed to a merely police) response to the underlying problems.

The left provides the intellectual core, such as it is, of the ‘far-right’ excuse and therefore of the regime’s ideological defences. From its safe space of the 1930s redux, where nothing ever changes, fascism is always on the march, and it is always Cable Street again, the left has shouted ‘No Pasaran’. It then congratulated itself on  mobilising crowds to counter the riots after they had mostly already ended. But the left’s story of fascism on the march is a simple-minded anachronistic falsehood, because things have changed dramatically in the past 80 years since fascism was defeated.

The racism that was on display in these riots is unlike the racism of the 1930s, or even that of British fascism’s brief revival in the 1970s, in one very important respect. As the authors of a detailed study of English Defence League (EDL) supporters in North-East England have pointed out, the racism of these rioters in 2024 is not:

‘an expression of the forms of supremacist thinking that emerged in the shadow of Western imperialism. Rather, the opposite is true. The racism we associate with the “far right” today is in fact rooted in perceived inferiority.’

The Empire is long gone. Many things might be said about Britannia today, but nobody thinks it rules the waves. Today’s racism arises as part of a reactive white identity politics adopted by sections of the working class who have seen other groups apparently prosper politically by asserting racial, religious, sexual or gender identities, and have spontaneously adopted this new way of doing things. Strikingly, the symbol of this identity group is not the National Front’s imperial Union Jack; it is the much more parochial St George’s Cross of England. It symbolises not an imperial destiny of a British Empire based on the racial superiority of the white race, but a purported victimisation of the English people within their own country. Above all, like the racial identity politics of their left-wing opponents, the racial politics of the ‘far right’ is a victim politics.

The protests and riots were triggered by the murder of three young girls, in which the teenager charged with their murder is a child of Rwandan immigrants. The fear that was articulated repeatedly in the protests associated with the subsequent rioting is that English people, and especially their children, are not safe. The protestors perceive a connection between the vulnerability of the girls killed in Southport and their own vulnerability and that of their children, a connection mediated by the failure of the authorities to protect them. (This connection is articulated by a London protestor here at 14.55). Of course, the police could not directly have prevented the attack in Southport, so there is no practical connection between what happened there and the wider perception of vulnerability. But that misses the symbolic connection between the two that is at the core of a victim identity. A remote act happening to someone else appears as a sign of a person’s own vulnerability. Ethnic minorities and other so-called vulnerable groups will frequently feel a comparable symbolic connection and a practical fear when one of their group is attacked. This is the meaning of identity politics.

I point this out not to defend violence in reaction to a murder of a type that is mercifully still rare in the UK (and one for which we still don’t know the actual motivation). On the contrary, it is to point out the similarity between the form of the protesters’ claims and the claims of the powerful race-mongers on the left (who were predictably quick to start parading their vulnerability in the wake of the riots). While it’s true that the fascists of old also claimed that the white peoples of Europe were being victimised by a Jewish conspiracy, they combined that with a vigorous assertion of Aryan racial supremacy that is simply lacking today. The key point is that the English victim-identity that characterises the protests and riots is a (no doubt unintended) product of the left’s own distinctive contribution to politics over the past 40 years: the nurturing of a culture and ideology of victimhood. And one function of the ‘far-right’ excuse, indeed of the category ‘far right’ itself, is to obscure both the disappearance of the conditions for fascism and the left’s contribution to the development of racism’s contemporary forms.

The distinctiveness of contemporary victim politics draws our attention to another, and perhaps the most important political function of the far-right excuse: the way in which it lumps together different groups of people, labelling them all as racists regardless of their actual views or behaviour. Not only were these protests and riots unlike the fascism of the past, but there is no need for this feeling of vulnerability and victimhood to have a specifically racist content at all, as the London protestor cited above insists. Even among the small numbers of protestors and rioters themselves, it is fairly obvious that there were at least four different groups of people involved in the unrest.

The first group is indeed the tiny networks of right-wing activists. Some of the more deluded among them no doubt regard themselves as fascists, and they doubtless played a role in getting the trouble going. These groups clearly have some very basic level of ‘infrastructure’ and organisation, but mostly in the form of local Facebook, Telegram or What’s App groups. These may be able to muster a few hundred people to the streets, exploiting popular outrage at an extraordinary crime. But they clearly lack much organisational form beyond this: they cannot count even every individual who participated in recent events as ‘members’, nor are they organised to take over small communities, let alone the state. Indeed, they lack any meaningful political leadership or organisation. The British National Party, which used to represent their tendency, was routed in the late 2000s, its vote share peaking at 1.9 per cent in the 2010 general election before the party collapsed and became defunct around 2019. The UK Independence Party refashioned itself as an anti-Islamist party (at one point advised by the notorious agitator Tommy Robinson), but this has consigned it to the political margins. Its vote share collapsed from a high point of 27.5 per cent in the 2014 European parliament elections to 0.1 per cent in the 2019 general election. The idea that the agitators behind the riots constitute a serious ‘fascist threat’ in the sense of the 1930s is a delusional conspiracy theory. Not only are these groups poorly organised and marginal, but they have no support among social and political elites who do not face a threat of communist revolution, as the elites of interwar Europe did.

The second group involved in the riots are the opportunists from what Marxists used to call the lumpenproletariat who have little to lose and are up for a bit of violence and looting when the opportunity arises. The third are a still small number of people drawn from a wider strata who came out to protest the killing of three girls in Southport and, more or less willingly, got swept up in the disorder. Many of these people, especially in the second and third groups, will also have adopted a specifically white victim-identity with its accompanying racist attitude, but this is not obviously true of all. A fourth adjacent group is local activists who oppose mass immigration and are anxious about crime, but explicitly repudiate the violence and the right-wing label. Even some of the organisers of protests who are called ‘far right’ repudiate racism as such, at least in their public pronouncements (see, for example, the speaker here at 16.40). Their fears and hostility are more specific, directed towards asylum-seekers, whom they see as abusing the immigration and welfare system, towards Muslims, whom they perceive as enemies of their way of life, and towards the authorities for seeming to protect those groups in preference to everyone else.

The critical political work of the far-right excuse is, however, to lump these different groups together with anyone else who is critical of the state’s policies of mass immigration, multiculturalism and intersectionalism. All can be presented either as an active part of an anti-democratic, right-wing conspiracy or as its dupes. It is the much larger group of the population who are not racist or right-wing but who are opposed to the direction of elite policy who are the real political target of a desperate effort by the regime to evade the underlying political problem from which the riots emerge.

One of the grimmer aspects of the new English victim-identity articulated in the protests is that the widely shared sense of victimhood among poorer white people is not without foundation, even if that foundation does not lie where some of those who feel victimised think it does, in the actions of migrants or Muslims. Three-quarters of the riots happened in the Midlands and the North, and of the six that occurred in the South, three were in coastal towns. In other words, this is happening in the poorest parts of Britain where living standards, infrastructure and public services are all in serious decay. The children of white workers from these areas are (with the exception of Roma and Irish travellers) the most educationally disadvantaged ethnic group, and the least likely to go to university.

Abandoned by the Labour Party that used to represent them, poorer voters in these places have now repeatedly voted against a political economy that is based on the mass importation of cheap labour substituting for investment in the skills of their children or the infrastructure of their towns and regions. But whenever they try to assert their interests against the rule of a cosmopolitan capital, as they did in the Brexit referendum of 2016, they have been met with a metropolitan chorus of hatred and scorn, especially from Labour activists and supporters, deriding them as ignorant, nostalgic, xenophobic gammons. Most decisively, in 2019 they voted either for Johnson or Farage’s promises of controlling migration and levelling up, and at that election even the defeated Labour Party was Jeremy Corbyn’s with its promises of higher public spending. But what the voters got instead was the same old, same old. Living standards have continued to decline, housing and energy costs spiral and a dramatic further increase in immigration was thrown in for good, insulting measure.

This long experience of political exclusion has led many to give up on representative politics. Fully 48 per cent of those eligible did not vote in the 2024 general election (and there is next to no enthusiasm for the mainstream parties among those who did vote). A huge part of the population is now simply unrepresented politically within the state, and that part is primarily made up of poorer voters, and especially younger poorer voters, who are continuing to lose ground socially and economically. They do not need social media disinformation to tell them that they are excluded. Many of the poorest are deeply resentful of migrants who are housed at public expense, and disproportionately in the poorest neighbourhoods, when their own children struggle to afford a place to live and make a life for themselves. The anger of some white British citizens in these districts is bound up with their entirely justified certainty that the political class, the media, the state bureaucracy and above all the Labour Party regard them with contempt. Unsurprisingly, they feel abandoned, victimised and insecure, and the views expressed by those who do try to take extra-parliamentary action are neither liberal nor especially coherent. Very few among this large section of the population actually rioted but it is this wider experience that provides the fuel for the discontent. And it is this experience that explains why the political class has been so quick to adopt the ‘far-right’ excuse provided to it by the left, and why the victim politics of the protestors is a dead end politically.

By refusing to think about, let alone acknowledge, the fundamental change in the character of racial hostility and the sources of ethnic conflict in Britain, and instead deploying the ‘far-right’ smear against anyone who is willing to raise these questions, the political class avoids having to address the underlying political causes of the discontent and instead legitimises an authoritarian crackdown on political expression and free association. Moreover, in a state that is obsessed with equality, diversity and inclusion, the excuse of the ‘far right’ functions to guarantee the continuing political exclusion of a large minority of poorer white citizens.

We tend to think about ‘integration’ as an issue that applies to immigrant communities when in reality the problem is much larger. We are undergoing the wholesale dis-integration of the nation into warring victim-identity groups. The rush to the far-right excuse indicates that the response of the government will be to ignore the underlying reality of national disintegration and double down on the already established and officially recognised victim narratives of the intersectionalist left in order to justify more repressive censorship and policing as necessary to ward off the non-existent threat of fascism. Conveniently, the far-right excuse also provides a self-fulfilling prophecy to the extent that the continuing refusal of the political system to offer any representation to the interests of poorer white citizens will only tend to sustain the underground networks of racist agitators and a whole variety of crank conspiracy theories.

On the other side, for a group of relatively powerless citizens to base their claims on victimhood and vulnerability is ultimately, and in every case, a self-defeating strategy, since it is precisely premised on their powerlessness and dependence, as opposed to invoking their power and capacity to change things. This is true for every section of society for whom some group of activists has developed a victim-identity claim. But such a claim does at least have some superficial political efficacy if someone else, someone who has political power, also has an interest in ‘protecting’ the group claiming to be vulnerable. But this seems unlikely in the case of poor white citizens in the present.

In the 1970s, ethnic minorities went unrepresented, and their young people eventually reacted to the injustices visited on them with the (significantly larger and more destructive) rioting of the 1980s. The left of that time did come to recognise the exclusion of those minorities; the elite did to some extent ‘hear’ the message in the riots. And, with the Scarman Report, there began a long, if painfully slow and inadequate, process of reform. It seems far less likely that anyone in our senescent political class will be able to hear the inarticulate message from poor white citizens today. Certainly, liberals and the left appear completely unable to recognise the exclusion of this section of society. They are in significant part responsible for it. Moreover, taking this exclusion seriously as a problem would require a wholesale change to the political economy promoted by the post-democratic regime. This appears to be a task that is quite beyond our ancien regime. More ethnic conflict, censorship and political repression seems guaranteed.

The English victim-identity is politically self-defeating. It merely exacerbates the divisions among citizens, aggrandises the state’s bureaucracy and feeds the vanity of the bureaucracy’s left-wing apologists. In other words, it strengthens the political bulwarks of the cosmopolitan order of the global markets that demands the political exclusion of poorer citizens. The question then is how to develop a politics that grounds itself not on being the victim of someone else but instead on our universal interest in collective self-government in which all can find representation. We need a politics of nation-building, in opposition to both the regime’s cosmopolitan liberalism and the populists’ victim nationalism. We need to develop a political conception of the British nation as a democracy that seeks to protect the interests of all its citizens as a unity.

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