The riots represent a moment of choice for post-Brexit Britain

It’s hopefully not premature to say the literal, if not the metaphorical, dust has settled on last week’s riots. I’ve waited to write about them as I’m not a fan of ‘hot takes’ on big events, which are often foolish, and prefer to let a little time to pass before commenting. At the same time, I’m breaking my planned August break from posting because I think that it’s important to record the riots as a part of the Brexit saga. That doesn’t mean that Brexit caused the riots, but there are some connections between them. Equally, the fact of the riots having happened could pave the way for a new and better conversation about immigration in post-Brexit Britain.

The riots

Keir Starmer correctly called the riots “far-right thuggery” which had “no justification”, and it was refreshing to have a Prime Minister unequivocally doing so, and not back-tracking in the face of criticism. Some of that criticism was dishonest, denying that any of the culprits were of the far-right. Some of it was obtuse, in interpreting Starmer’s comments as a claim that all those who took to the streets were of the far-right. It’s true, of course, that some of them were anti-immigration without necessarily being doctrinaire fascists; that some were just thugs; that some were opportunistic looters and vandals; that some were inadequates and idiots. Still, at the hard centre of the riots were far-right activists and their sinister online allies. The far-right didn’t tag along with the crowd, the crowd tagged along with them. So Starmer’s description was correct. Indeed in some ways it was an understatement: some of the far-right thugs would better be described as lynch mobs.

Given that other elements were present, Starmer was also correct to talk about the riots in terms of mindless criminality, but this was manifestly a different truth to describing them as far-right. For, to the extent the violence was politically motivated, it was not ‘mindless’ and nor was it simply ‘criminality’. The use of violence for political ends is usually called terrorism, even if calls to treat the riots as such have not been heeded, at least so far. And this does not just apply to the doctrinaire fascists. Any of the rioters whose motivation was to change immigration policy, far-right or not, were attempting to change policy by means of violence. If people wanted a severe reduction of immigration, then, just a few weeks ago, they had an election when they could have voted for a party, Reform UK, pledging just that. Only 14% of voters did so.

That choice was also available to the rioters if they are understood in terms of the softer interpretation of their political motivation, which has been deployed very widely by people who range from disingenuous apologists to some well-meaning liberals. On this interpretation these were not so much riots as political ‘protests’ which arose because the country has failed to have an ‘honest conversation’ about immigration, or failed to discuss it at all, with the result that immigration levels are far higher than ‘most people’ or ‘ordinary people’ want. On such accounts, the riots, even if not justified in their violence, reflect a legitimate and respectable grievance that ‘uncontrolled immigration’ has been forced on the public without their support or consent.

And this is where Brexit comes in, because of course we’ve heard all this before. In fact we’ve heard it for decades, but never more so than during the referendum campaign, though the honesty of that conversation can certainly be questioned.

Back to Brexit

There’s no doubt that hostility to immigration was one of the main drivers of the vote to leave, but, rather as in some of the commentary about the riots, there was a studied delineation of the ‘respectable’ and the ‘unrespectable’ approaches to this. Vote Leave, the official campaign, was at pains to distance itself from the much harsher anti-immigrant message of Farage and Leave.EU. This enabled the overall vote for Brexit to be boosted by providing different ‘channels’ to corral voters to the ‘leave’ box. For all their subsequent protestations, the ‘liberal Brexiters’ knew that they could only win by enrolling many distinctly illiberal voters. Even more disingenuously, whilst happily harvesting such votes, some of them claimed that Brexit would spike the far-right, by removing the ‘grievance’ of ‘uncontrolled immigration’.

Thus many who voted Brexit believed they had been promised that immigration would not just be made subject to national control but would be reduced and, for at least some of them, the belief was that there would be fewer Muslims and less black and brown people entering the country. The campaign also cynically, and quite deliberately, conflated the issue of freedom of movement for EU citizens with refugee flows from outside the EU, especially Syria, and exploited Islamphobia in multiple ways, including the lie that Turkey was about to join the EU.

Actually, all that had been explicitly promised, even by Farage, was an ‘Aussie-style’ points system for immigration from anywhere, including the EU. This was even sold to ethnic minority voters with non-European, especially Commonwealth, roots as a way not of clamping down on immigration but of creating parity between people from their countries of origin and those from EU countries. Indeed some Brexiters even suggested that EU freedom of movement was inherently racist, implying to some voters that Brexit should be understood as an anti-racist, anti-discrimination project at the very moment it was being implied to other voters that it was anything but that.

As I discussed at length in a post last year, the inconsistency of the appeals to voters set up a massive problem as regards immigration, just as it did in every other aspect of Brexit, after the Leave campaign’s unexpected and unplanned for victory. Of course, we know what happened. In brief, having decided, initially under Theresa May, that, more than anything, Brexit meant ending freedom of movement in order to control immigration, Brexit was enacted as hard Brexit, with all the damage that entailed. But when EU freedom of movement was ended, immigration from the rest of the world soared, precisely because, under a ‘points-based system’, it was mandated.

This wasn’t because of some ‘globalist’ plot, or the wokeish multi-culturalism of the ‘liberal elite’, let alone evidence of the obscene ‘race replacement’ conspiracy theory. It was because businesses and public services would have literally collapsed otherwise. But it also meant, in very broad terms, that it became more likely that immigrants had black and brown skins and more likely they would be of non-Christian faith. As for irregular migration, if anything Brexit exacerbated it by removing the UK from the Dublin Regulations.

So, to the extent that those who voted for Brexit wanted lower immigration, including those who did so for straightforwardly racist reasons, it left them completely unsatisfied. Rather than spike the far-right, Brexit has given them a new grievance.

Whose country?

Thus in 2016 Farage declared “it’s been a hell of a journey but we have got our country back”, in what he called “a victory for ordinary, decent people”, yet in 2024 we still have people like Lee Anderson, now a Reform MP, whining bellicosely that "he wants his country back"*. It is no coincidence that the same phrase was chanted at the recent ‘Tommy Robinson’ rally, showing the continuities between the would-be respectable Brexiter politicians and those who, by any reasonable definition, are of the far-right.

For Farage, Anderson, Robinson, and those they represent, this is because Brexit has been betrayed, but the reality is that their demands could no more be satisfied after Brexit than before Brexit. For the deeper truth is not just that those demands couldn’t be satisfied without doing massive damage, including to the public services upon which those making those demands rely, it is that even if that damage was done it still wouldn’t be enough to satisfy them. They would shift to demanding not just an end to immigration, but the repatriation of immigrants, and then of the descendants of immigrants who are not ‘really British’ (a recurring theme within far-right ideology).

We can either go on trying to appease these unappeasable demands or have the honesty and courage to say that they are unrealistic and do not constitute ‘legitimate concerns’. Or, to put that in a more positive way, to have the honesty and courage to say that most people accept, and many are more than happy, that our country is multi-cultural, multi-race, multi-faith. This isn’t just a pious or unevidenced claim. Polling this week from More in Common shows that 48% of people are proud “that Britain is a multi-ethnic society”, 45% are neither proud nor ashamed of it, and only 7% are ashamed of it. In that sense, the Anderson-type desire to ‘have my country back’ is not an innocent demand for restitution made by the many, it’s an authoritarian demand by the few for the imposition of their narrow version of what the country should be.

To accept or welcome multi-culturalism isn’t to make some Pollyannaish claim that all immigrants are good people. Why should they be? They will include the vicious and the depraved, and the saints and the saviors, just as the ’indigenous’ population does. Nor is it simply about an abstract principle of diversity, though that is a principle which plenty of people would support. It’s also about economic realism, with which comes the need to be realistic about the families of immigrant workers and students, and geo-political realism about what drives refugees and asylum seekers. The latter actually affects the UK less than many countries, but it isn’t going to disappear and, yes, it does create moral obligations on all countries, including this one.

From this perspective, the riots do show that Britain has an integration problem. But it isn’t the integration of immigrants, who mostly do so (probably rather more than most British ‘expats’, if truth be told), at least within a generation. The problem is the integration of a small percentage of stubbornly monocultural, and sometimes violent, white, mainly English men. They’ve had Brexit, with all the damage it has done. They’ve had the ‘hostile environment policy’, with all the misery it has caused. They’ve had an immigration system which, far from being uncontrolled, is tightly regulated, expensive, has left many sectors with endemic staff shortages and has banjaxed universities. But they’re still not satisfied. The issue isn’t that mainstream politics has not given enough attention to them, it’s that it has bent over backwards to do so.

I know only too well what the nationalist populists would say to all this: typical condescending globalist elitism from an out-of-touch academic. The irony is that the real condescension is the populist promise of something which is impossible to deliver in practice, as happened with Brexit and, for that matter, with successive Tory manifesto pledges of immigration caps. Equally condescending are those well-meaning liberals who insist that we must strive to ‘understand’ the concerns of the rioters, or to insist that their racism is actually just the cri de coeur of the disadvantaged. But we already understand them, and we’ve already tried to meet their concerns. It hasn’t worked, and it will never work. Whatever we do, they will still be angry, and still claim ‘their country’ has been stolen from them, just as they always have, irrespective of immigration levels, and irrespective of EU membership, decade after decade, including at those periods which, currently, they revere as the lost past of true England that they wish to reclaim.

After the riots

The riots have seemingly been quelled, partly as a result of robust policing and the rapid disposition of firm legal justice for the rioters and their on-line provocateurs. That has led to squeals from far-right apologists, with entirely bogus claims about ‘two-tier justice’ and ‘thoughtcrime’ prosecutions. In fact, it was liberal democracy in action: on the one hand, political arguments should not be advanced through violence, on the other hand, free speech is not a licence for incitement to violence. What’s more, the police response was not seen as excessive by the public, with only 7% thinking it was ‘too harsh’ whilst 42% thought it was ‘too soft’.

The riots were also partly quelled by the thousands of counter-demonstrators and by the evident disdain of the thousands who turned out to repair the damage the rioters had caused. These are the ‘ordinary, decent people’ of our country, not the neo-Nazis and their tag-along mobs. Again that claim isn’t simply rhetoric but is supported by the polling evidence from More in Common which shows, amongst other things, that only 13% think the rioters represent ‘the real Britain’ but 87% think that those engaged in the clean-up do so. Meanwhile, only 23% think the riots stem from ‘legitimate concerns’ and a mere 17% think those involved in them are ‘standing up for Britain’.

So this was not some popular uprising, and that is a crucial point. One of the things which distinguishes populism in the UK from that in other countries is, precisely, Brexit. The referendum put a single populist policy to the electorate and the majority voted for it (let’s please leave aside the cretinous point that it was ‘only’ a majority of those who voted – that’s how democracy works). That emboldened the populists to claim (and perhaps to believe) not just, as they always have done, that they spoke for the ‘silent majority’, but that they represented an actual, permanent majority for all populist policies, especially as regards immigration.

It was always nonsense, and they are still peddling it by claiming the riots represent a popular revolt against ‘uncontrolled immigration’. Indeed, it’s hard to resist the sense that for the far right and some of its apologists there was a salivating hope that the riots marked the moment when ‘the people’ finally rose up against ‘the elite’ (it reminds me of how, when I was student, my left-wing friends and I were always predicting that some moment of crisis heralded the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions). If so, small wonder that they are so angry about the way that Starmer’s new government, rather calmly and undramatically, but highly effectively, restored order.

A moment of choice

With the riots now, hopefully, over, their aftermath therefore presents a moment of choice for post-Brexit Britain. People of all types voted to leave the EU for all sorts of reasons. It would be absurd to deny that some who did so have a similar agenda to the rioters or their sympathisers, but equally absurd to claim that all or even most of them had that agenda. And, of course, many voted to remain. So post-Brexit Britain does not belong to the rioters and their sympathisers, any more than this country should be defined by the image of ‘their country’. If, as many Brexiters say, the purpose was solely to take back sovereignty and so, as regards immigration, to make our own choices about that, then we are now perfectly entitled to have whatever immigration policy we, collectively, want.

It is certainly reasonable to demand that this immigration policy be framed by honest discussion. The first place to start with that is for those who call for much lower, or even zero, immigration to be honest about what they propose the country would have to go without, including in terms of public services, if their policies were pursued. It’s easy enough to say ‘stop mass immigration’ until the effects start to bite. For example, when, as has happened in the last year, immigration applications to work in health and social care have fallen by 82%, it emerges that 64% of the public view this as a negative development and only 16% see it as a positive development. No responsible politician, in power, could come anywhere near stopping immigration, or in some periods stopping what critics call ‘mass immigration’, and so no responsible politician, out of power, can honestly advocate doing so. 

There’s also a need for a different kind of honesty, from those who are ‘pro-immigration’ as much as those who are against it, and that is to stop the conflation of at least three different things: immigration which is largely about the labour market, immigration which is about students, and immigration which is about asylum seekers and refugees. When these distinctions are put to the public in opinion polls, what is revealed is that, far from anti-immigration sentiment being dominant it is actually much more nuanced. So whereas when asked about immigration in the abstract, 54% think it should be reduced, the only types of immigration for which there is majority support for a reduction in present numbers (as at January 2024) are people crossing the channel in small boats (68% want to see a reduction) and dependents of students (54% want to see a reduction, and this is now happening, with disastrous consequences for the UK’s universities). In all other categories there is majority support for the current or higher levels of immigration. In some cases that support is very high indeed (e.g. 82% for doctors, nurses, and care workers, 77% for their dependents, and even 55% for asylum seekers).

Of course, to the out-and-out racists, such distinctions don’t matter. Foreigners are foreigners, and so are their children and grandchildren. So it actually suits them if the rest of the public are not encouraged to draw those distinctions. Indeed there can be little doubt that the relentless focus on ‘stopping the boats’ suits the far-right agenda, by conflating the most unpopular form of immigration with all immigration (just as, during the referendum, the ‘migrant crisis’ was conflated with freedom of movement). All the more reason, then, why mainstream discourse should disentangle different forms of immigration, and create policies for each of them on their own terms. And, above everything else, all the more reason to refuse to frame that discourse in terms of the false claim that the far-right speak for the ‘ordinary, decent people’.

A fresh start?

The riots, and perhaps even more some of the apologism for them, have been both depressing and alarming, and for their targets literally terrifying. It’s tempting to see them as a kind of continuation of the xenophobia which was partly responsible for Brexit and perhaps enabled by Brexit. But in a roundabout way that plays into the hands of the populists who claim Brexit as some kind of mandate for draconian immigration controls, and who enrol post-Brexit immigration into their grievance politics.

Brexit was Brexit, and it has happened. The post-Brexit politics of immigration do not belong to the Brexit Ultras – it’s notable that Farage has found himself on the wrong side of public opinion this last week or so – and it is just possible that the public disdain for the riots will turn out to be the moment when a new conversation emerges. How likely is that? Well, rather obviously, it depends on who chooses to participate in it, what they say, and how loud they say it. For too long it has been dominated by the voices of  a loud minority, which last week came to a crescendo with the raucous cries of the mob and the insidious dogwhistling of their ‘respectable’ apologists. For now they have been, if not silenced, then at least slightly subdued. What happens next is up to the rest of us.

 

*Risibly, but also disgracefully, Lee Anderson, usually so ‘tough’ on law and order, sought to defend the rioters as just “British working-class lads” who had “probably had one too many” and “got carried away”.

Note: my normal practice if I claim that certain things are being widely said is to link to evidence in the form of a study demonstrating that this is so, or at least to a high-profile example. However, doing so for some things in this post would require linking to the absolute dregs of online vileness, which I would prefer not to do.

On a separate matter, I’m hugely appreciative of all the kind comments on the previous post in response to my request for preferences about the future of this blog. I’m still considering how to proceed, but I am quite overwhelmed by the response. Thank you.