This violence has a long history, with the far right having been mainstreamed in the UK for decades, from the top. From New Labour’s harsh asylum seeker policies, to David Cameron pledging to cut immigration down to the tens of thousands, former Home Secretary Theresa May launching mobile vans telling illegal migrants to “go home”, to initiatives by the last government to send migrants to Rwanda, there is a general consensus across most of the major political parties that migration is a significant problem. Rather than challenging that xenophobic ideology, many policy makers kowtow to it, helping to shift the political dial more to the right. This against the backdrop of economic austerity for fifteen years has fed the narrative that British white people are poorer because of racialised migrants, rather than because so much wealth is accumulating with the richest at the expense of everyone else. A recent example was the MP for Tamworth who called for her constituency to “have our hotel back” from asylum seekers just days before it was set alight. There is no excuse for the violence we’ve seen, but there’s no doubt economic austerity, twinned with scapegoating migrants has created a racial tinderbox ready to explode. It’s not rational to explain a man chasing a Muslim family with a hedge trimmer as someone not radicalized by racism, but a normal citizen simply concerned about “the numbers” of people coming here.
