One year after the riots that followed the horrific Southport child killings, the British far right has been marching on hotels housing asylum seekers, sometimes clashing with the police and anti-racist campaigners.
At King’s College, War Studies Professor David Betz was already conjuring the spectre of civil war before last year’s riots. In a piece for the magazine Military Strategy, Betz stated that conditions were ripe for a full-blown armed conflict, with the rise of diversity and identity politics creating the conditions for ethnic warfare.
Claiming that over 50,000 Islamist insurgents were in the country already, he argued that it was only a matter of time before groups of angry white British men start targeting energy and water supplies to take the fight to the cities.
Although it’s easy to scoff at Betz for relying on cherry-picked data and tabloid claims of Muslim “no-go zones,” there may be some truth to his analysis. Just not in the way he framed it.
It’s the far right that wants war. And it’s doing what it can to promote it.
Asylum seekers who came to the United Kingdom by irregular routes—what’s commonly known as illegal immigration—are accused of child sexual abuse, drugs, murder, rape and theft.
Legal immigration is conflated with illegal immigration. Many members of the public now have the impression that millions of criminal foreigners have entered the UK by boat.
As was the case in the 2024 riots, the current protests target people rather than places.
Back then, they attacked mosques and block roads to harass non-white drivers. This year, the mobs converge on hotels they believe to be housing asylum seekers or other migrants. This past Saturday, they went after the Thistle City Barbican Hotel in South Islington.
The “flash mob” – once an internet fad defined by dance-offs in public places – has now become the far right’s weapon of choice. Participants don’t exactly need choreography as much as cans of Stella and bricks.
These protests are spreading. While there haven’t been attacks on critical infrastructure yet, that could change very soon.
Yearning for the End
The hotel protests follow a familiar pattern.
A local story about migrants provides the spark. Wider grievances serve as the timber. And far-right networks pour the fuel over the fire.
Fascist groups have long operated by moving into areas where there is a grievance they can exploit. But these protests wouldn’t be possible without some level of local support.
This belies the mainstream media’s narrative about how demonstrations turn into riots. It’s a mistake to suggest that these protests are instigated by outside agitators independent of any wider grievances.
The Epping protests began with local anger over the allegations that an asylum seeker staying at the Bell Hotel had tried to kiss a fourteen-year-old girl.
It wasn’t long before protests started. The Homeland Party moved in soon afterwards.
Founded on Adolf Hitler’s birthday in 2023, after breaking away from Patriotic Alternative, the Homeland Party is an example of how the far right is getting involved. Its organiser, Callum Barker, is running a Facebook group – called ‘Epping Says NO’ – to galvanise locals to rally against the Bell Hotel.
Familiar faces of the far right were soon showing up in Epping as well.
Local Reform UK politician Orla Minihane was soon giving a speech there. She joined Barker on a platform adorned with England flags. Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett shared the footage with his online network.
Angry local people were joined by far-right activists coming to Epping from as far away as Scotland.
This pattern has been seen in other parts of the country, too, as social media are deployed to mobilise locals against migrants.
In an age of civil desiccation, political action may no longer take traditional forms of mass parties or trade unions. This is the age of the lone-wolf assassin and the flash mob pogrom.
Although the prospect of paramilitarism is unlikely in these conditions, the ultra-nationalist right is the only force running athletic clubs and boot camps in the country.
Thankfully, this is still a diffuse, eccentric scene right now. But small groups are preparing for a fight.
The widespread talk of civil war reveals a nihilistic yearning among many on the nationalist right. Nothing is worse for them than the great replacement of whites with non-whites. As the far right sees it, anything is justified to stop this process. Remigration, the demand for the removal of non-whites from Britain, is the goal.
The threat of civil war is partly used to justify mass deportations, but this isn’t the only aspect of the narrative.
Many of those involved no longer believe in a normative culture or set of institutions worth defending. But they do believe in tearing down and laying waste to modern Britain.
Great British Malaise
The cultural malaise is palpable. Everyone in the UK feels it. The country isn’t on its arse, but its belly, face down in the muck. The new normal since the pandemic is that nothing works and everything is expensive.
This has been a long time coming. Brexit and COVID-19 exacerbated existing problems while creating new crises. The so-called small boats crisis is partly the result of Brexit. This was not a problem before 2018.
The Tories ripped up the returns agreement with the EU, as well as data-sharing on criminal activity, as part of the Brexit deal negotiations. Now the number of people arriving by sea is rising each year.
The sight of boats of men arriving at the white cliffs of Dover cuts deep into the British psyche. It’s common to hear the scenes described as an “invasion” and the men in the boats—who are mostly fleeing climate breakdown, economic collapse and war—portrayed as “a secret army.”
The Conservatives believed, just as Labour does today, that they could benefit from the fallout of anti-migrant anger. That’s why they backed the hotel policy even though it would’ve been cheaper to disperse asylum seekers across the country in private accommodation.
This resulted in the creation of flashpoints in many deprived communities up and down the land. The same goes for the spectacle of hotels in upmarket areas like Canary Wharf and Islington being used to house migrants.
Labour has ratcheted up the tension. In addition to creating a British version of ICE, Immigration Enforcement, it has engaged in shameless race-baiting with posts on Elon Musk’s toxic X platform using the silhouette of Deliveroo riders as the image of the illegal immigrant.
This racist caricature taps into the right-wing narrative of British decline and urban decay, exemplified by the sight of black and brown workers in public. Far right posts on X refer to this as the “yookay aesthetic”.
For Millennials like me, the UK has never felt so broken. In retrospect, the talk of “Broken Britain” in the run-up to the 2010 general election sounds downright quaint.
Back then, David Cameron was promising to repair the damage done by New Labour. He pledged a socially conscious Big Society conservatism. But he delivered austerity and ruin instead.
The last fifteen years have seen the British economy stagnate and public services crumble, with the Tories and Labour alike coming to represent “managed decline” at best. This is why many voters are turning to Reform UK and Jeremy Corbyn’s new party.
Things are so bad that many Britons are convinced that migrants living in hotels on a pittance are better off than they are. They truly believe that “stopping the boats” will save the country. But that’s pure fantasy.
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Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia. Published under a Creative Commons license.
