Race Riots — ‘Blaming All the Wrong People for All the Right Things’

When I first used the phrase ‘blam­ing all the wrong peo­ple for all the right things’ in a blog a cou­ple of weeks ago I could eas­i­ly have pre­dict­ed some of the extreme scenes of hate that we have seen in Ire­land and Eng­land since. Until there is a real Gov­ern­ment and police response to the cur­rent race bait­ing phe­nom­e­non it will con­tin­ue, egged on as it is by high­ly organ­ised and well-fund­ed far right ele­ments act­ing in a co-ordi­nat­ed way. And by Elon Musk of course.

Even the polit­i­cal response, or lack of it in Ire­land, is easy to under­stand. There is a gen­er­al elec­tion in the off­ing, most like­ly in Novem­ber, and Gov­ern­ment par­ties are actu­al­ly gain­ing ground through the chaos, the thug­gery, the arson and the hate. It’s suit­ing them elec­toral­ly even as dis­gust­ing hate is lit­er­al­ly brought to the door of the Taoiseach and oth­ers intim­i­dat­ing their fam­i­lies. That too is quite scan­dalous but yet it’s help­ing them in the polls. In Britain, where Keir Starmer has some­how just man­aged to vanil­la his way to a mas­sive major­i­ty and a new 5 year term for Gov­ern­ment his words this week­end are much more emphat­ic right­ly describ­ing those tak­ing part in race hate events as engag­ing in ‘far right thug­gery’. When pushed by a Jour­nal­ist as to whether all those attend­ing events in Rother­ham, Mid­dles­bor­ough, Liv­er­pool, Bris­tol and Sheffield were far right he stat­ed blunt­ly, and accu­rate­ly ‘if you tar­get peo­ple because of their colour or reli­gion that is far right’.

True.

I had an inter­est­ing exchange on ‘X’ with a man I have a lot of respect for. He is no more ‘far right’ than the vast bulk of peo­ple in this coun­try but he was hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty with ‘labelling’. There’s a lot of that about, com­plaints about peo­ple being labelled as if that’s the most egre­gious thing hap­pen­ing right now. He chal­lenged me for ‘labelling’ large groups of peo­ple ‘far right’ but I per­sist­ed that I wasn’t doing so, I was in fact labelling the activ­i­ty of attack­ing peo­ple over their race as a ‘far right’ activ­i­ty just as Starmer had cor­rect­ly done. He then agreed that the activ­i­ty of tar­get­ing peo­ple racial­ly is a far right activ­i­ty. But the piv­ot in argu­ment how­ev­er was again fair­ly typ­i­cal. It was to blame the ‘looney left’ for the prob­lems of soci­ety. When I point­ed out that we had nev­er had a left wing Gov­ern­ment, or in fact a sin­gle law or pol­i­cy ever enact­ed by a left wing Gov­ern­ment, he then accept­ed that too while mak­ing it bru­tal­ly clear that he didn’t ever want to see one.

Isn’t it fas­ci­nat­ing?

This man is exact­ly like me, exact­ly like many peo­ple, in hav­ing gen­uine and heart­felt con­cerns about the way our coun­try is. If I was to list all of my con­cerns with how this coun­try is run this blog would be triple it’s length. My views are on the record any­way so I’ll spare you. Suf­fice to say that my con­cerns are many, are fun­da­men­tal, and I’ve opposed every Gov­ern­ment by not vot­ing for them while always engag­ing in debate, protest, lob­by­ing, cam­paign­ing and even some strikes against each of them since at least 1997. So not being hap­py with things? I get it.

But, like many peo­ple, this response to the cur­rent far right inspired hate fests on our streets was ulti­mate­ly to blame an oppo­si­tion that has nev­er been in pow­er even once and has nev­er enact­ed a polit­i­cal pol­i­cy into law, ever. This hap­pens while those who have been in per­ma­nent pow­er have used that pow­er to cre­ate a hous­ing emer­gency, a creak­ing health sys­tem, an appar­ent­ly bro­ken polic­ing sys­tem and the con­di­tions that allow for a main­stream media that sim­ply doesn’t relate to increas­ing num­bers of the pop­u­lace any­more.  And yet the very peo­ple respon­si­ble for all of what­ev­er prob­lems are being cyn­i­cal­ly used to pur­sue a race hate cam­paign remain in Gov­ern­ment and, if the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry con­tin­ues, will con­tin­ue to.

The hate may well abate as the real agen­da of the actu­al fas­cist pro­tag­o­nists in the van­guard becomes increas­ing­ly exposed, exposed by events such as hap­pened in Belfast last week­end for exam­ple.  But for any gen­uine ‘con­cerned par­ents’ out on the streets with them noth­ing will change for the bet­ter. ‘Blam­ing all the wrong peo­ple for all the right things’ is a tac­tic that will just per­pet­u­ate fur­ther resource and wealth inequal­i­ty and fur­ther dam­age to our work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties while con­tin­u­ing to prof­it the vest­ed inter­ests that have cre­at­ed all of these inequal­i­ties in the first place.

Such is the nature of and the pur­pose of fas­cism. And such is the les­son of his­to­ry.