Things Got Bitter

 Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon is sunbathing in Cyprus. Once invited to address the Oxford Union, the millionaire (who now goes by the name 'Tommy Robinson') is lounging in a five-star hotel, scrolling through his phone, sending messages to thousands of ardent followers. He had fled the UK after breaching a court order, after losing a libel battle in 2021. This wealthy, powerful, criminal terrorist, fleeing supposed political persecution in his home country in order to reap the benefits of a safer place abroad, is a figurehead of the anti-Muslim violence currently burning across the UK. He doesn't speak the local language, he's got a history of criminally stalking and harassing a woman, assaulting a police officer, and his libel case was against a 15 year-old.

Naturally, this man, and all his followers, believe that powerful foreign terrorists are a great danger to our children, and that the best way to protect women is to close borders. Were the government of Cyprus to take Mr Yaxley-Lennon at his word, he'd have been deported and locked up already.

Obviously, the far-right are hypocrites.

But hypocrisy is an irrelevant charge when the ideology you're dealing with was never trying to be coherent in the first place.

This all kicked off in the aftermath of another tragic act of male brutality against women - this time, not even women, but girls - in Southport. A 17 year-old stabbed three girls to death with a kitchen knife at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. One of the girls was nine years old. One was seven. One was six. An act of such sickening magnitude absolutely demands a moral reckoning, a demand that things change immediately to reduce the chances that such a thing occurs again.

Such a moral reckoning may still come: but instead of a national conversation about patriarchy, instead of a widespread acknowledgement that billionaires in Silicon Valley have hyper-charged the toxicity of an already-lethal cluster of lonely men, instead of a mass media effort to place this attack in the broader context of a country where men spike women with needles on nights out, where police officers rape and murder women, where 97% of women have been sexually harassed... ordinary people have got to go and stand in front of mosques, because otherwise drunk blokes wearing balaclavas will set them on fire.

The racist acts of terrorism inflicted on shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and many other people across the country all follow closely after widely-circulated video evidence of a Manchester Airport security guard throwing a Muslim man to the floor and stomping on his head. It follows on not too far from the day when Martyn Blake, a serving Metropolitan Police Officer, shot Chris Kaba, a Black man, dead through his car windshield. Any attempts the establishment might now make to disavow their responsibility for fostering this culture (Keir Starmer the former Director of Public Prosecutions included) are nonsense, and will only delay the necessary reckoning further. 

While completely understandable, the comparisons between the justice system's treatment of the 'Whole Truth Five' and these white nationalists must be carefully made: the answer can never simply be to 'lock up the right people'. 

The 'Whole Truth Five', a group of people who attended a planning zoom call for an act of non-violent civil disobedience two years ago, with the aim of drawing the government's attention to the climate crisis, were denied the right to speak about their motivations during their trial, and given sentences of several years each. In contrast, police appear to have simply allowed much of the actual, intentional violence against vulnerable people, the arson, the projectiles, the Nazi salutes, to go ahead. The same media putting Cressie Gethin in the same articles as 'a despotic warmonger like Vladimir Putin' now touts the 'legitimate concerns' that literal Nazi skinheads have for torching public libraries.

Many have reacted to this by lamenting the state of a society in which peaceful activists get 5 years, while most of the fascists out terrorising the streets will likely never be punished. It's a perfectly reasonable lament - however, it cannot be forgotten that an expanded police state (which is Keir Starmer's proposed solution to this crisis) will only increase instances of white-supremacist and patriarchal violence, given that that is what the police do. More police means more skinheads.

The only antidote to bigotry is solidarity. Love is the only force capable of transforming hate into itself. I don't speak romantically or naively here - love, in the context of rampant fascism, is an inherently dangerous pursuit. Love requires standing with the people in your own community who are at risk from attackers, and that's a risky act. Love pulses through those crowds in Bristol, in Manchester, in Liverpool, who have outnumbered the fascists and de-escalated their rampage. Love is embodied in those wonderful groups already repairing the damage done to mosques and other buildings. Despite the knowledge that this might make them targets, people have gone out of their way to insist that refugees, that Muslims, that any far-right target is welcome here - 'here' being not some abstract narrative of a 'nation', but a real, concrete community - one formed entirely out of the diverse people living together in a certain area. Each of us is continually engaged in the creation of a community, and each has a responsibility to make our little part of it as welcoming and safe as possible.

The political establishment has committed to throwing more wood on the fire - more police, more austerity, more violence against more communities. Working class people are the only ones capable of preventing our own further fragmentation into pockets of despair, rage, consciousness and ignorance. Working class people are the only people who can build the communities, who can demand the public services, who can form a genuine mass movement against the ultra-wealthy terrorists currently sunning themselves in five-star hotels, sitting in Parliament, and laughing at the lot of us.

Stand up to fascists when they show up in your community today, and we must organise against the systems that facilitate them from tomorrow onward.