The press and social media are awash with attempts to analyse far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson’s mass mobilisations over the last few months and the riots in the wake of the murder of three children in Southport. There’s a lot we don’t know about the perpetrators of the violence, but there’s also a lot we do know about the far-right and fascist ideologues who supported them.
What we should know from the history of the last century is that the rise of fascism is not easy to make sense of because its explanations for people’s problems, conflicts and fears relate to their real, everyday lives in shifting contexts. Nevertheless, some groups have an interest in treating fascism as though it is detached from “normal” life — a foreign import, like dragon’s teeth planted by outsiders, whose violent consequences we are left to reap.
In the current outbreak of violence, mainstream spokespeople for the state, like former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, blame money, misinformation and the Russians. Supposedly dissident commentators, like David Miller and Lowkey, blame money, manipulation and the Israelis.
Although there are elements of truth in both of these theories — Tommy Robinson pockets large amounts of money from wherever he can get it, probably including both Israel and Russia — the suggestion that fascist ideology could not be home-grown is myopic. In the 1930s the British state claimed that fascism was a German import. Today it’s being variously attributed to Russia and Israel — but not, notably to all the other fascist movements and governments, including in Poland, Hungary, Italy, India and the United States, with which it is enmeshed.
Most longstanding anti-racists and anti-fascists reject these oversimplified explanations. Instead, they are looking closely at the events, assessing the similarities and differences between the current upsurge in the far right and earlier episodes in order to develop effective strategies for challenging it. They recognise that fascists focus on different targets at different times — Jews in the 1930s; African Caribbeans in the 1950s and ’60s; Asians in the 1970s and ’80s; migrants and Muslims today — but this does not mean that they move on from one to the next. They still hate all minorities, and Tommy Robinson’s flirtation with zionism and Hindutva does not mean he has fallen in love with Jews and Indians.
The people who claim that Israel is the moving force behind the riots take the view that the recent far-right street violence has made a fundamental break from classical fascism. This time, they say, hatred of migrants is a side-issue (which will be news to the refugees too terrified to go out of their homes). Instead, we’re told, these are “Islamophobic riots” and this proves that they are inspired by zionism to punish Muslims for supporting the Palestinians. According to David Miller: “The riots show that Israel is trying to burn down the UK.”
Illustrating this in his latest video are pictures of demonstrators draped in Israeli flags. Pause the video and look closely, though, and it’s clear that these are not images of the riots. They are photos of a far-right zionist counter-protest at one of the London Gaza demonstrations, probably the one on April 27 2024. No nicer, but not the same thing as the marauding mobs in Southport three months later.
In this scenario, racism against Muslims is treated as a novel, alien phenomenon, brought in from outside, which is odd, given Europe’s centuries-long record of persecution of both Muslims and Jews going back to the Crusades and the Inquisition.
But even this tortured logic is missing from Lowkey’s interpretation of the riots in a recent Double Down News video. He lists names, episodes and “facts” — some reliable, others questionable — leaving us to string them together and draw the conclusion that Robinson is being financed and worked from behind by Israel. It would have muddied the waters to mention Robinson’s well-established connections with other far-right groups, parties and governments, such as when he travelled to Poland in 2017 to join the 60,000-strong far-right nationalist march on Poland’s independence day. It would be even more confusing to show that Robinson’s Polish far-right friends are as anti-semitic as ever, as well as Islamophobic, anti-Roma, anti-refugee and anti-zionist from a right-wing perspective.
The juxtaposition of this outbreak of fascism in Britain with Israel’s devastation of Palestinian lives is significant. There are connections between the genocide being enacted in Gaza and the upheavals on our streets. For thoughtful commentators this shines a light on the dynamic interrelationship of colonialism, racism, capitalism, neoliberalism and fascism, their economic foundations and their social and political manifestations.
John McDonnell has given a measured analysis of the different layers of far-right activism, saying: “At the top are leading demagogues, the political provocateurs … Beneath them are a relatively small phalanx of hardline foot-soldiers, who have been trained and involved in fascist groups like the English Defence League over the years … the true-believing fascist muscle behind the riots. …Then there is a larger group: the disgruntled, the dispossessed and the disillusioned, who are prey to the simple, beguiling message that someone else is to blame for how they feel.”
The emphasis on Robinson by those trying to hang the riots on the Russians or Israel, and the downplaying of other fascist groups and individuals, as well as the role of successive governments and the British state, creates a thoroughly distorted picture. We have just fought an election in which both Labour and the Conservatives tried to outbid Reform UK in blaming migrants and minorities especially Muslims, for poverty, powerlessness and the disintegration of state services. And the government’s response to the riots has been to ramp up deportations and announce the reopening of immigration detention centres?
We’ve also witnessed Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, feeding the mob with the claim that the police were withholding the truth about the Southport killer, and defending the rioters’ “sense of injustice” about “two-tier policing.” It is peculiar in the extreme to detach this sophisticated political operator from Robinson and his followers, many of them with longstanding links to football violence and anti-lockdown disorder, chanting: “We want our country back!”
In a recent interview, Robinson linked “mass immigration” with the “New World Order” and castigated the “far left” for allegedly being funded by the wealthy progressive Hungarian Jew, George Soros. This is a classic fascist, anti-semitic reference to the Great Replacement Theory which alleges that a shadowy Jewish conspiracy is replacing white Christians in the West with Muslims.
Despite all this evidence of a deep-rooted far-right ideology and relationships between different far-right entities, nationally and internationally, including fascistic elements in Israel and Russia, an alluringly simple analysis has captured the imagination of some anti-racists, including the targets of the rioters and their supporters.
The exclusive focus on backing from zionists (actually, far-right zionists, or the fascist-infused Israeli government) to the exclusion of their other backers is very dangerous. The fascists blame international forces for people’s troubles, rather than naming capitalism or the super-rich and the governments that sustain them.
But Lowkey and Miller are creating a mirror image of that claim. It seems extraordinary that anyone locating themselves on the left should ignore the breadth of support for far-right activism. How does this fit in with the backing of Donald Trump and US white supremacists, whose roots go back to transatlantic slavery? Or Robinson cosying up Indian fascism with its roots in Hitler’s Nazism? Not to mention his active support from far-right and fascist movements across Europe.
This exclusive focus strongly implies that the far right is simply being manipulated by Israel. This is worryingly close to a persistent anti-semitic thread in Western culture that portrays the Jews as puppeteers, controlling the world from behind the scenes. Miller’s latest theory is that the government’s decision to drop its objections to the arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and rumours that they might stop selling arms to Israel “would be enough for them to push the riot button.” Apart from the absurdity of the image, this lets the fascists at every level — the ideologues, the organisers and the rioters on the streets — off the hook.
No-one made them set fire to hotels full of migrants. No-one made them throw bricks through the windows of mosques. No-one made them whip up fears of so-called “Asian gangs.”
“He made me do it” is for the playground. These far-right activists take money and political support from wherever they can get it. But whether it comes from Tel Aviv, Moscow or New Delhi, Washington DC or Warsaw, they are not helpless puppets but are responsible for their own decisions to wreck and loot, and to force migrants and minorities to live under a pall of fear.
This article first appeared in the Morning Star. Reproduced with permission
