Current Affairs

It was obvious that the riots in Britain were going to happen. The politicians have spent the past five years migrant bashing and arguing for tougher penalties on those entering Britain illegally. But it is stories that have shocked the British people that led to the riots, the stories of young girls being abused by Asian men, which have hit the headlines. Police not doing their job and branding the girls as promiscuous, even though some of them were eleven or twelve and stories of social workers writing the girls off in the fear of being branded racist. The police and social workers accepted that the men involved were innocent rather than being branded racist, and the girls were treated appallingly by a system that was to sensitive to a community rather than the girls who were from a low socio-economic background.

But it is the politics that has been most destructive, if it isn’t illegal migrants arriving in Britain on the back of a truck, it is now a question of the immigrants crossing the channel in small rubber dingies packed so tight that they are hardly above the waterline. The Conservatives have led the way in migrant bashing, they have rented floating accommodation blocks, put together draconian plans to punish the migrants and put together a plan that has cost the country a £1billion to deport migrants who do not make the cut, and threatened to send the illegal immigrants to Rwanda.

The likes of Nigel Farage have been to the coast in Dover and pointed at the small boats entering British waters and argued that there has to be a way of returning the migrants to France. “The Britishness of the state is being swamped by illegal immigrants,” a headline argument of Farage and co in the general election. The Conservatives dialled up the argument that illegal immigrants were coming to Britain and Labour were going to do nothing about it. Even NBC and Republicans in America fed off the headlines coming from politicians, that there were now no go areas in Britain, London was ruled by Sharia law and there were parts of the north-west where communities did not speak English.

The Mayoral race in London was particularly nasty with the Conservative candidate arguing that this was a fight for the survival of London from extremists. There were arguments of Jews living in fear for their lives, but when the war in Gaza started there were some waving Palestinian flags who drove through Jewish areas of London. The narrative was that people in Britain were living in fear of extremism and the tabloids highlighted that the nation was to afraid to confront Muslims in case they were branded racist.

But it is not only migrant bashing that has been going on in Britain, it is racially aggravated arguments led by the right wing and the press who have argued that Britain has lost control of immigration, whatever the reality is on the ground. The argument of immigration is also an argument of identity and the facts that the British health system is dominated by migrants who have come here to work under contract has been forgotten in the wake of the right wing -bashing migrants. But one of the first things the Labour government did when getting into power was to publicise a flight full of illegal immigrants being sent back to Vietnam. The attacks on illegal immigrants was very much a story that ran across twitter (X), facebook and other platforms. The government did its best to ignore the argument coming from the right and figures like Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick stood on a platform of illegal immigrant bashing, which enflamed the conversation throughout the political canon.

So the message board that is twitter (X), facebook and platforms such as Channel 3 Now fed into arguments from the right that the girls were attacked by a Muslim illegal immigrant was not such a surprise. Politicians such as Nigel Farage fed into the argument and when he realised he was wrong he blamed Andrew Tate and others who had blamed a Muslim asylum seeker. According to the BBC, Channel 3 Now, named the murderer of the three girls as 17 year old Ali Al-Shakati and that he was on an MI5 watch list after arriving in Britain by boat last year. This was a lie, but the story made it onto message boards such as facebook and twitter, enraging part of the population that had been riled up by a far right demonstration in London a week earlier. Tommy Robinson stoked the flames of those demonstrating by posting inflammatory posts from the newspapers, while on holiday in Cyprus.

It did not take a lot to light the touchpaper that stoked the ire of the right who had been fed a false story on twitter, facebook, Andrew Tate and Channel 3 Now, because there were so many headlines that were anti-migrant doing the rounds in not just the tabloid press but also social media accounts. Like all good politicians who had lit the touchpaper over the past few years – they were now silent. But voices such as Robert Jenrick who is fighting a campaign to win the Conservative party, now argues that Muslims coming onto the street to counter protest are also a problem and should also be prosecuted for inflammatory remarks, which demarks Conservatives who vote for him as being anti-Islamic..

In Leeds there were race riots after children were removed from their parents by social services. The police left the riots and returned to their stations, a bus was set alight, a police car was destroyed and the kids roamed the streets, before the community tidied up the mess. But this has led to questions of two tier policing, one law for one and another for the minorities that rioted. There have been scenes of men armed with knives running towards the right wing demonstrators, there have been calls from the police to the ethnic minorities not to take weapons, and the law has been put into action by a prime minister who has labelled one side as thugs and completely ignored the actions of the other side.

But the obviousness of the arguments emanating from the politicians to gain control of the narrative has moved into the courts. The question is whether the demonstrations in Bradford will be treated as harshly as those who demonstrated across Britain. In both cases the police were pelted with stones and in both cases property was damaged. But there seems to be a imbalance to the arguments coming from the police, political leaders and the states willingness to manage an argument that was set on fire by the politicians who labelled the migrants in the first place to gain politically before and during the general election.