The grotesque rise of white identity politics

Mosques pelted with bricks and bottles. Windows broken in immigrant areas, as rioters shout ‘smash the pakis’. Mobs trying to set hotels on fire then block the emergency exits, because they know migrants reside inside, or stopping cars to ask if the drivers are white and English before letting them pass. This is not protest. These are not ordinary folk, with legitimate concerns about migration and crime, letting passions overwhelm them. What we have seen across our towns and cities in recent days is racist, anti-Muslim violence. Beneath contempt. The question now is, how did we get here?

Across social media, hard-rightists and centrist dads are in a strange kind of alignment on this question. They have both tried to present the rioting of a few hundred scumbags – erupting first in Southport last Tuesday, following the horrendous murder of those three young girls, before spreading across the north and Midlands – as the violent expression of a more widespread feeling.

Hence, after some throat-clearing about violence not being okay, you get the blather from right-wing grifters about this all being the roar of the English lion, silent no more. Meanwhile, the great and the good’s desperate attempts to blame almost anyone but the rioters for the rioting – Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman, the Tories and their dastardly ‘culture wars’ – are really desperate attempts to associate any dissent on questions of immigration and multiculturalism with the criminals.

Of course, the vast majority of Brits have zero sympathy with the rioters, even though many still feel deep unease about a nation that appears to be coming apart. The rioters are a violent, bigoted symptom of the mess we are in – not a legitimate, explicable response to it. Indeed, there is much in the racist nihilism of recent days that appears to feed off the new sectarianism that ordinary people across the UK have come to reject.

The multicultural state’s treatment of citizens as members of ethno-religious blocs, to be tiptoed around and addressed only through ‘community leaders’, has led some minority Brits not to integrate into a shared whole, but rather to hunker down in group identity and communal grievance. The consequences of this have been writ large in everything from the now-memoryholed Hindu-Muslim unrest in Leicester in 2022 to the riots in Harehills in Leeds last month, apparently sparked by social services trying to take some Roma kids into care.

This has gone hand-in-hand with so-called two-tier policing – the authorities’ tendency to tread more lightly on crime and disorder when doing so might help to ease what are euphemistically called ‘community tensions’. At Harehills, police retreated, as a bus was still ablaze. Keir Starmer then made a perfunctory statement. By contrast, when out-of-towners showed up in Southport last Tuesday to throw bricks at a mosque, police (rightly) stood their ground and Starmer addressed the nation, calling for the roll-out of more surveillance technology and even hinting at a social-media crackdown.

The current unrest is not limited to the white rioters, either. In Bolton, Stoke-on-Trent and elsewhere gangs of young British Muslims, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’, have been showing up, clashing with both protesters and police. The BBC has highlighted a video, shared on social media, in which a police liaison officer appears to tell a group outside a mosque: ‘If there’s any weapons, get rid of them, we are not going to arrest anybody.’ (Staffordshire Police are reportedly investigating.) But this parasitic relationship – in which hard-right street violence is feeding off Islamist street violence and vice-versa – has sparked little commentary, even though mainstream news outlets have actually reported on it.

The gaping hole in multicultural logic – that every group must think of itself and be treated in ethnic, racial or religious terms, except for the white majority – is being exploited by the hard-right. Agitators have presented two-tier policing not as an affront to law and order and blind justice, but as an expression of white male British victimhood. Fetid talk of ‘Islamic invaders’ and ‘replacement’ by migrants presents the immigration issue in apocalyptic racial terms – of white British ‘erasure’. Indeed, what remains of the far right is consciously inverting woke identitarian notions of racial peril and repackaging them for their own purposes. ‘White Lives Matter’ is one of its new slogans.

Of course, the far right remains a marginal force in British society – certainly the organised far right, which has long been able to fit into the back of a minibus. Groups like Patriotic Alternative and Britain First appear to be jumping on and luxuriating in, rather than organising, the riots of recent days. The reality is perhaps more chilling. We appear to be witnessing a decentralised, almost organic, flare-up of racial violence – albeit one narrated and egged on by extremist grifters of various flavours, all reading from a white-identitarian script. The inbuilt contradictions of elite identity politics are being used to justify the violence of a tiny but – as we’ve seen this past week – potentially menacing fringe.

Much of this is cynical – racists latching on to a new language to promote their pre-existing bigotries. But in this identitarian age – in which racial identity is the lens through which social problems must always be viewed and group-based victimhood is the political currency – the rise of a white identity politics was grimly inevitable. You cannot encourage people to see themselves as racial beings and be surprised when sections of the white majority begin to see themselves as racial beings. At the very least, elite identitarianism – with its crusades against whiteness and white privilege – has been a recruiting sergeant for a white-identitarian backlash.

This infernal dynamic is what will make tackling the new sectarianism in our midst so difficult. We have an elite that will almost certainly fight this identitarianism with more identitarianism – not to mention censorship. There’s already talk of clamping down on social media, perhaps even banning ‘Islamophobia’. The pundits are having another one of their McCarthyite spasms, demonising anyone who has ever criticised multiculturalism, mass immigration or Islamist extremism. All of which seems guaranteed to push these conversations to the margins, where blowhards can spew their bile unchallenged. All the while, the state will continue to ignore the myriad other forms of racial and religious sectarianism that have reared their head of late – not least the anti-Semitic, Islamist agitation that has been blighting Britain’s streets for 10 months now.

Those racist rioters must face the full force of the law. We must show our solidarity with the communities menaced by this violence. We also cannot allow the bigoted criminality of a tiny few to become a pretext to silence the concerns and corrode the freedoms of the many. But beyond the days and weeks ahead we also need a much, much bigger conversation about how to confront the racial thinking, ‘multicultural’ sectarianism and identity politics that have brought us to this point.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_