Enough is enough. This was the phrase that first took hold in the days after the monstrous attack and murder of children in Southport. Online misinformation deliberately claimed the attacker was an asylum seeker and Muslim who had stolen into the UK on a small boat. Though that was quickly proved wrong, the original spark was all that was needed to embolden the few who would go on to wreak havoc on
the many. As if that would have been justification anyway. As if the storming and torching of a hotel used to house immigrants until their asylum application was heard was therefore fine. As if beating up a Black man in a public park for having the audacity to be Black was then fine. As if targeting immigration lawyers was fine.
A common line that has emerged in recent days goes something like this: we don’t support the violence, but we all have to recognise that there are legitimate concerns about runaway immigration to this country.
However, concerns, fanned and given wings by those with platforms who either want to foment disorder, or simply want to increase their influence for their own personal gain, do not make an issue an absolute fact. The nation is not being overrun. It is not immigrants who are causing issues with key services, rather at core are years of chronic underinvestment. There is a price to pay for austerity. Now, after the poorest in society paid for it, the outsider is under attack. Fingers are pointed at those with brown skin, those who ‘swarm’ in.
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There is clear underlying anger in some places that still feel left behind, who are yet to see any benefit of the twin false dawns promised by Brexit and levelling up. But that is no excuse for turning anger to racism. Not everybody in left behind communities riots.
Some senior politicians now claim the scenes are shocking, but they are the very people who had previous influence, who created hostile environments and poisoned the discourse, the people who turned to point at those seeking a better life in order to blame them.
Many of these leaders still persist with whistle calls like the claim of two-tier policing. Which suggests that if police show empathy with anybody not white, but arrest a white rioter, they are somehow part of the degradation.