This week in Brexitland, August 8, 2024

View of the riots from America - and how I think we got here

I am in the USA at the moment. I hadn’t been here for 15 years prior to last week, and of course, I picked an interesting time to leave the UK on holiday. A string of race riots have engulfed Britain, in a way that seemed impossible before they happened and yet in retrospect, seem tragically inevitable, at least at some point.

YouGov did some polling on the riots. 8% of Britons think the rioters have a point that is at least somewhat empathetic. Eight percent. That’s insanely low. Insanely low. Even amongst Reform voters, only 21% think there’s a point to be bought into here on any level. I bring this up because of how so many hard right commentators are treating this like it is the rising up of middle England, when in fact it’s being done and supported by a very, very small group of what are almost entirely very online individuals. This “here’s the real Britain raising its voice at last” guff from certain quarters turns out once again to be the amplifying of a wildly unrepresentative group of people. A small, strange section of Britain sitting in for the rest of the country, a country which is actually filled with people with entirely different values, concerns and fears.

Being in America though, you’d think the following was happening: a huge chunk of the country has now risen up in defiance, tired of living under sharia law and Islamic banana courts beheading people in the streets, after the Muslim population of Britain has surpassed 50%. We are tired of all of our street signs, from Hartlepool to St Ives, being in Arabic only. We are sick of our children being told they have to be gay or trans while at the same having to read the Koran every day before school.

I know the above paragraph sounds like I am over egging the pudding, but try talking to a guy in rural east Pennsylvania (as I did a couple of days ago) about his opinion of what is happening in the UK right now and this is very close to what you will actually hear. The distortion of how they view Britain, based on what they pick up from various right-wing outlets, is so insane, you can’t begin to engage with them on it. How can you talk about what is happening in your country to someone in a foreign land when their view on what your country is like is based in dystopian science fiction?

This, incidentally, is how you get to Musk’s “civil war is inevitable” crap. His viewpoint isn’t original in any way, shape or form - it’s just what a lot of Americans think is happening in Britain, based on what they hear from astonishingly inaccurate sources.

I’ll close here by saying that one of the claims for Brexit, before the referendum was called, during the campaign and afterwards, and before we had left the EU, was that leaving the European Union was the silver bullet for ending right-wing extremism in the UK. The amazing thing is, not only was that obviously incorrect, it has done the opposite - Brexit turbo changed far-right thinking in the UK. And how that happened is obvious as well - Brexit promised to deliver a whole bunch of things that it has comprehensively failed to deliver. And you can either admit to yourself that you were conned and come to terms with that, getting angry at those politicians who told you it would solve everything, or you can lash out at random boogeymen, like immigrants. The latter is, sadly, much easier for people to opt into.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in the UK next week and hopefully still writing this. In the meantime, please take care of yourself and stay away from the violence.