A fascist Britain looms. We must understand how we got here.

.

I am white and a member of the English working class, I grew up on a council estate and I am familiar with the kind of people who are currently participating in riots.

Let us examine how these people come to be rioting (and I could just as easily be one of them had my life not had some lucky twists.)

Yes some of them are racist, but for the majority it’s not the ideologically driven racism that powered the troubles in Northern Ireland and insulates Israeli Zionists from reality; its more of a latent, sullen reactionary racism – a set of received ideas from the newspapers and the telly. Many of these people are racist only because they believe that the establishment doesn’t want them to be: a childish act of rebellion against the system.

The racism is just part of a package that can be (and often is) directed at any aspect of what they identify as ‘woke’ culture: the existence of which they blame for the steady degradation of life in the UK (an idea also fed to them for many years by the media and prominent politicians).

One of the key points to understand about the rioters is their longing for that which they don’t have: a prosperous community of belonging, meaning and purpose. There is no class of people today so bereft of genuine culture, belonging and prospects as the young English white working class. In the hollowed out neo-liberalised culture of the UK, they have no rights of passage, no religion, nothing worth fighting for, nothing much beyond over-priced football and the cheaper ends of consumerism to be distracted by. Their towns are bleak places and a lot of them do drugs to forget.

Every aspect of social solidarity, like trade unions, the NHS, local community centres, parks, libraries, sports fields, swimming pools and football clubs has been under relentless attack for decades – as has every working class group that might oppose it.

When migrants come and effectively import a community that is many times more cohesive and distinct than their own, they feel as excluded from that as they are from the owning classes of British culture. Who speaks for the English white working class they say? Labour? Tories? Lib Dems? Media? Nobody. From school onwards they are just seen as a nuisance to be managed / exploited and they know it.

When people within immigrant and minority communities build mosques, synagogues, churches and community centres and find ways to prosper together, it just adds to a sense of frustration and vague anger that they are an underclass in their own country: disposable fodder for zero hours contracts and food banks (and they ain’t entirely wrong).

Many in the English white working class don’t feel special: they don’t feel they belong and yet they are the majority. They go on holiday and wonder why they feel alienated abroad and at home.

There is an empty despair from still living at your mum’s house in adulthood, of being turfed out of your overpriced rental accommodation on a regular basis, of having shit agency jobs with long hours and shit wages; of the corrosive grind of debt, food banks, crumbling public services and a total lack of agency to change any of it. The losers of British society are legion and are encouraged to blame two groups of people: themselves via an internalised self-hatred and of course… immigrants.

Much of the UK is owned by foreign capital; British transport and utility companies are owned and run by foreign interests. The owning class with interests in the UK are well aware of the steady transfer of wealth and power away from the working class and call Britain ‘treasure island’. The rich have made sure that education about how that system works is limited to them and minority groups are offered via the media as handy scapegoats.

But the usual suspects have been too successful in deflecting legitimate anger away from them and towards asylum seekers and people of colour. These riots are not so much race riots, more the rumbling summer thunder of a beaten down class who want to matter and something to belong to.

It will do no good for the political and media class to call the rioters thugs and racists, for they revel in being violent racists and such views have been given mainstream moral legitimacy in the UK media. Finally the white working class have the nation’s attention and are minor celebrities in a culture that worships celebrity: they won’t give up that giddy excitement easily.

Bereft of community, identity and hope, the hatred of immigrants, ‘woke’ and all minority groups is in danger of becoming that which defines and unites large sections of the nation.

This carefully cultivated hatred of difference is EXACTLY the same narrative that Trump is riding in the USA and that Hitler exploited in the preamble to Nazi Germany: both offer(ed) a faux renaissance of culture, belonging, unity and power via a catalysing focus of hatred.

You think it couldn’t happen here? I and many others have been warning about this for decades. Corrupt disconnected and clueless, the political class of the UK has no idea how to respond to recent events beyond building more prisons and stumbling towards the tyranny of a police state.

But prisons can be used by any incoming government and the police deployed to round up anyone. All we lack for a de facto fascist state is someone with the charisma of Max Mosley and the furious intellect and oratory of Hitler. It won’t be Farage or Tommy Robinson, although both could smooth the path for such a figure.

We are now a few short steps from voting in a fascist dictatorship to thunderous applause. If you wonder what looks like, then look to Israel or watch the video of the 58 standing ovations given to Netanyahu by the U.S. congress.

Fascism is the late stage of capitalism: fighting it in the trenches is too late. The best way to avert it is to offer people better purposes than hatred, better things to unite around than racism, better ways to feel included than joining a violent mob.

Throwing people in prisons is not the same as making and winning a moral argument for something better. If you are absent from that argument, then you had better become present in it… or live with the consequences.