DSince a deadly knife attack in Southport on July 29 that killed three girls and injured a dozen people, the United Kingdom has been gripped by racist riots targeting Muslim communities, mosques and asylum seeker hotels, as well as the police. A fake news story quickly relayed on the fachosphere designated the alleged perpetrator first as a Muslim and then as a Rwandan asylum seeker, when in reality, he was a 17-year-old minor of Rwandan origin, born in Cardiff and raised in the United Kingdom.
The first week of August was marked by scenes of violence of an unprecedented scale in more than twenty English cities and in Belfast, where racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic slogans were chanted: “Stop the rubber boats”, “Our women are not halal meat”… “I will not hesitate to call things by their name: these are extreme right-wing brutalities” reacted on new Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer.
These violent riots, exploited by the far right on social media, raise questions about the state of this political movement, which one might have thought had been pushed to the confines of marginality since the Brexit referendum in 2016: during the campaign, Labour MP Jo Cox was assassinated by a neo-Nazi white supremacist. Eight years later, she is still there and is making it known in a violent manner in the streets. Should we see this as a rebirth, a mutation or a new face?
What do we really mean when we talk about the far right in the UK? From the racist discourse, so-called “rivers of blood”of the conservative nationalist Enoch Powell in April 1968, the extreme right was represented by small political parties that were openly racist and violent and had a Nazi heritage, through mergers and splits. The National Front, created in 1967 and composed of white nationalists, experienced a decline from 1977 after a violent demonstration in Lewisham, a multicultural suburb of London.
In power, Margaret Thatcher adopted a very right-wing policy on immigration, which hindered the development of the extreme right. As for the British National Party, it underwent an ideological change with its leader Nick Griffin, abandoning the idea of ethnic nationalism. Result: two seats won in the European Parliament in 2009, and a few in some local councils, before also suffering a decline.
The unsinkable Nigel Farage
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Source: Lemonde
