Protecting our streets: police are never the answer
End Racism
Attacks across Britain and Ireland
Over the last week, Britain and Ireland have witnessed escalating violence incited by far-right groups. Mobs of racists have cynically justified their mobilisations as somehow in response to the murder of three young girls in Southport. Misinformation quickly spread that these killings were committed by a Muslim immigrant and - rapidly - violently racist mobilisations of people have been seen across the country. We have seen and heard reports of people of colour being attacked, including acid attacks, people dragged from their cars, mosques surrounded and damaged, Muslim businesses destroyed, people’s homes graffitied, smashed and attacked, and hotels housing refugees and asylum seekers set alight.
Whilst the murders in Southport have been cited as the ‘reason’ for this, the far right have been mobilising for some time. This includes years of regular protests and attacks on hotels housing migrants, arson attacks against migrant accommodation across Ireland, and marches organised in the name of “protecting children” - a popular rhetoric used to incite fear by the far-right. These activities are an extension of broader racist political rhetoric and government policy, demonstrated in the recent parliamentary election which saw media outlets dedicate substantial coverage to far-right party Reform, who won five seats. The majority Labour government also prioritised a “law and order” approach during their campaign and stood on an anti-migrant position. In a newspaper column in April this year, Keir Starmer declared that “Labour is now the true party of English patriotism”, and just weeks before the election told the Sun newspaper “I'll make sure we get planes going off… back to the countries where people came from.” As the far-right burnt down hotels, a Citizen Advice Bureau, and a library, their chants clearly echoed the message of our Prime Minister - “get them out”.
Control so far: The police response
The majority of these mobilisations have been organised publicly through messaging platforms and social media with pre-determined meeting points and locations, some of which have only tenuous links to immigration (for example, random law firms dealing with naturalisation, some of which have been closed for years). The networks and groups that plan hotel protests, self-declared “migrant hunters”, are well established and well known. In 2023, groups held at least 123 specifically anti-migrant demonstrations and made 158 visits to migrant accommodation. Whilst police officers were visible outside some mosques in recent days, they were seemingly not able to use this wealth of publicly available information on fascist mobilisations, and were not seen outside many attack locations, including the hotels resided in by asylum seekers and refugees that were set alight. Contrast this against the information about police information gathering tactics being made public in the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry in which police spies were sent to infiltrate mostly leftwing groups for decades.
Despite these failures, mainstream media reports have consistently led with reporting attacks on police by far-right groups, detailing bricks and other missiles thrown at police, with at least one knocking an officer unconscious. In a statement to Liverpool Crown Court, Chief Constable Serena Kennedy of Merseyside Police emphasised the emotional harm of the “disorder” on police officers, “Some have been waking up in the night with panic attacks.” Attempts to portray police officers as the real victims of the last week serve only to lay the groundwork for calls to bolster police resources, with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper already pledging additional costs for officers working overtime. Even still, officers can’t help but praise well-behaved fascists. In a comment to the BBC about the Dorset fascist assembly, Assistant Chief Constable Mark Callaghan said: “The majority of people are behaving within the law and I would like to thank them for their conduct.”
While we witness police retreating, injured or passive in the face of fascists, we have already heard reports of anti-fascist demonstrators being threatened with arrest or kettled by police. This includes activists protecting the Mercure hotel in Bristol, who held back fascist demonstrators when police initially failed to appear. A widely shared video shows a lone black man being attacked by a group of fascists and subsequently arrested when police finally intervened. It is unclear how many of the hundreds arrested in the past week are fascists and how many are anti-fascists.This should not come at a surprise given the history of police facilitation of fascist violence, including through kettles of anti-fascist demonstrators. Donna Jones, Chair of Association of Police and Crime Commissioners justified the “protest groups” as having “the desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty, the need to uphold British values and in order to do this stop illegal immigration”.
Call for more control
There have been widespread calls for a harsher response to control the violence. In the Prime Minister’s first statement he met this call, asserting that “Whatever the apparent cause or motivation we make no distinction. Crime is crime.” Rather than identifying racism, xenophobia or Islamophobia as the problem, this response shifts blame to abstract ‘criminality’ and ‘disorder’, and fails to meaningfully distinguish the difference between the fascists and the anti-fascists. All that matters is whether the action is “lawful”. While it’s understandable that people are afraid and that some hope the police are a strategy to resist racism, history indicates this won’t work.
In recent years we have witnessed huge crackdowns on protest rights through measures like the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act in 2022 and the Public Order Act in 2023. These measures grant police greater powers to impose harsh restrictions on legitimate protest and assert greater control over protestors movements and activity, encouraging police to adopt a “greater degree of intolerance towards protestors”. These powers have broadly been focused on policing demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine, or punishing activists taking action on the climate crisis. However, only a few weeks ago, Yvette Cooper had signalled to human rights group Liberty that she would be willing to discuss the future of this draconian legislation. That this legislation might be repealed now seems increasingly unlikely.
Instead, Starmer has this week promised a boost to capability in policing including increased facial recognition technology, shared intelligence, and criminal behaviour orders, as well as reintroducing a feature from his time as the Director for Public Prosecutions: courts to stay open for 24 hours. This increase in surveillance and public control is less a response to the violence enacted on immigrants and people of colour across the country, and more a product of acute concern about attacks on the police and the establishment of “order”. Legislation which makes it harder to self-organise against fascists will now be further strengthened and enforced by police powers justified by the same fascist violence it’s now harder to resist. While anti-fascists self-organise to protect and defend migrants, the Prime Minister ramps up police powers so that the police can act more efficiently to protect themselves. Inevitably these measures will be used beyond their introduction to “tackle violent disorder” and become a part of day-to-day policing.
Police power is not the answer
Whilst policing power and capabilities are being justified now to keep communities safe, these same powers will, and have always been, used against us. Over the last 10 months, we have seen police use terror laws for their quasi-militarised crackdown on pro-Palestine demos, harassing people for wearing badges or keffiyehs, or holding banners. Netpol reported “confused”, “racist” and “threatening” police responses to marches and demonstrations, with “unusually high” levels of surveillance and harassment. Eyewitness accounts also report children as young as 10 years old subjected to police violence. In some cases, police appear to target children deliberately, alongside an increase in referrals to the Islamophobic Prevent programme. Meanwhile, there are accounts of police violence against older people, with a 71-year-old legal observer knocked unconscious by the police on one occasion, and a 79-year-old woman having her hip fractured by the police.
When organisers blocked the transfer of asylum seekers to the Bibby Stockholm asylum barge, 45 were arrested. In July this year, environmental campaigners organising with Just Stop Oil were sentenced to five years in prison for planning a protest. In 2021, a Bristol man protesting the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act set fire to a police van and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Conversely, in recent days, sentencing for fascists involved in racist violence across the country has been noticeably shorter. One “riotor” received two months for breaking windows on a police van, another 30 months for trying to set a police van on fire - a much shorter sentence than 14 years. Another man being sentenced was allowed to claim he “couldn’t remember” what he had been chanting whilst part of a crowd of fascists protesting outside a mosque.
Calls for greater control for “disorder” will inevitably be used against those protecting our communities against fascists. Measures like facial recognition and surveillance will be used against activist movements and produce conditions that make it more dangerous for anti-racists and anti-fascists to organise. Our government and the police have already made it clear that they do not distinguish between fascists and anti-fascists protestors, and that the consequences for participating in racist fascist violence will be far less harsh. We should not further immobilise our capacity to defend against fascist violence by inviting in the agents of state violence.
Taking back ‘safety’
These have been dark days, but there have been examples to take heart from. We have seen places where fascists have been outnumbered and pushed out. We have seen our communities come out to defend themselves rather than retreat. But we must recognise the urgency of the situation. The fascists have successfully destroyed community spaces and harmed our people.
It is not enough to argue against a policing solution: we must represent the tangible alternative infrastructure for supporting our communities. We need to work alongside and support communities and people most directly targeted by these fascist attacks - migrants and asylum seekers, Muslims, and racialised communities. This is especially important in the case of those living outside the heartlands and metropoles.
This is the time to utilise our pre-existing networks. The large networks of mobilisation and channels of communications that we have built up in our campaigns against Israel’s genocide can become the bases for confronting fascism going forward, as can our Anti-Raids, Copwatch, trade and tenants union networks. These can be sites of solidarity and support, as well as our eyes on the ground against any fascist movements locally.
We must also be prepared for police repression, including efforts to criminalise self-defence or equate those who choose those tactics with far-right violence. This includes equipping our communities with rights training for counter-demonstrations, as well as staying coordinated with groups who can provide legal and arrestee support if required.
Many have forewarned the rise and radicalisation of the far-right in Britain, particularly under a Labour government that has steadfastly refused to turn back the dial on the austerity policies that have incubated discontent. The scale and speed of the far-right mobilisations of the last week have been shocking. But we should not forget how the forces of progress have been able to claim the streets in truly mass numbers - for Black Lives Matter in 2020, for Palestine since October 2023, and the layers of society we have managed to bring along in the process. Our test now will be in our ability to consolidate those, and cohere an organised, direct response to paralyse and send Britain's far-right into retreat - and ultimately, defeat.
Resources
Self - defence and other trainings
Beating fascists in the past and understanding racism in Britain books: Articles & Podasts
From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain
Podcast Series - Racism & Racialisaion: UCL & Sarah Parker Redmond Centre
Beating fascists in the past and understanding racism in Britain: books