The violence in England is about more than just racism

Their comments weren’t overtly racist, but I felt they probably shared the same space. I’ve since visited several other towns and cities throughout England’s north east and north-west on journalistic assignments. They included Hartlepool, Grimsby, Manchester, Sunderland and Durham.

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In Grimsby, the editor of the local newspaper showed me a picture of Henry Kissinger attending a football match at Grimsby Town’s Blundell Park. The great American diplomat had been there to conclude a tawdry little geopolitical deal which ultimately killed off Grimsby’s fishing fleet, once the most lucrative in the world.

This involved Britain offering its fishing grounds north of the Humber to the Icelandic fleet in exchange for the US being allowed to build bases on the Icelandic coast for the purposes of tracking Soviet submarines. A few years later, I found myself in a no-frills tavern in Manchester’s Moss Side district soliciting views on the forthcoming Scottish independence referendum. All those I spoke with that night wished Scotland good luck on our big day and expressed the hope that we would vote to end the Union. “We would get out of Britain if we ever got that opportunity,” I was told. This would be followed by a diatribe against the London elites “who don’t give a f*** about the north”.

I encountered the same sentiments two years later in Hartlepool the day after this solidly-Labour town had voted 70-30 in favour of Brexit. There was palpable bitterness and resentment amongst the locals I met at being dismissed as racist for backing Brexit.

I was repeatedly told the same story: of how old industries and factories which had once guaranteed well-paid jobs had all disappeared. They talked about the EU legislation that permitted UK firms to pay wages to foreign workers at the reduced rates of their countries of origin, thus wrecking local wage agreements. It was a form of slavery, they said.

The violent civil strife that’s spread like a contagion across the north of England over the last few days has distressed those of us who hold deep feelings of affection for these communities.

Those who think that this is solely about the misinformation conveyed by racist, far-right elements in the wake of the Southport murders are deluding themselves. If that dreadful attack hadn’t happened then something else would have lit this tinder-box. The violent disorder we’ve witnessed will soon be contained. Stiff sentences will be handed down and decent people will express their anger at the influence of the English Defence League and other such organisations in exploiting the Southport slayings.

Labour is now the true party of English patriotism, Sir Keir Starmer told the Sunday Telegraph earlier this year. “The cross of St George belongs to all who love this country.”

Like his Tory predecessors, Sir Keir likes to deploy absurd levels of patriotism to mask political failure in England’s most disadvantaged and abandoned communities. When this gets out of hand though, they all refuse to admit that if they’d been listening to what their own citizens were telling them they might have averted this. This won’t end with jailing those racists who attacked the police and defenceless Asian citizens.

Educational psychologists often use the phrase “all behaviour is communication”. It means, I think, that those who might engage in certain patterns of behaviour might be trying to tell us something else.

The violence we’ve witnessed in the wake of Southport has been mainly confined to the north of England’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Poverty and a sense of abandonment will never justify lynch mobs and arson attacks on asylum hotels. Nevertheless, if addressing these factors doesn’t feature in the UK Government’s response then there will be more violence, triggered by something else in the years to come.

There is a sense in these communities that successive Labour and Conservative governments have punched down on them. And some in turn have responded by punching down on our Asian communities.

There is a sense too amongst white, working-class northerners that they are loathed by the politicians: for the way they speak; for their cultural preferences; for the way they choose to raise their children and for their concerns about mass immigration. Understandably, they ask why you’ll never find an asylum hostel in England’s leafier neighbourhoods.

In 1997 they’d hoped that Labour would reverse Margaret Thatcher’s anti-trade union laws. Instead, they’ve had to live with zero-hours contracts; a scarcity of affordable homes and endless austerity. Within days of Labour returning to power last month they’ve learned that the two-child benefit cap will remain and that there will be no more winter fuel payments for many pensioners.

A car burns during an anti-immigration protest in Middlesbrough on Sunday (Image: PA)

In the last 15 years the institutions and governments of the UK have been complicit in criminality conducted on the grand scale: lockdown parties; PPE profiteering; harbouring violent sex offenders; receiving benefits for political access; the Carillion scam; the Post Office scandal.

Before social media, the political elites could conceal their malfeasances: now they can be witnessed in real time. If the legislators are seen to be running a gangster state then why should the citizenry bother themselves overmuch about law and order?

In Scotland, the sanctimony of our own boutique radicals as England burns has been sickening. “It would never happen here,” they gloat.

Really? We live in a country where women can’t gather to discuss politics without being harassed by male gender activists. There are still prominent people in public life who want to shut Catholic schools. And tell this to the Roma Community on Glasgow’s south side who have been treated as sub-human since they settled here. Some SNP people want vigilantes to guard Glasgow’s streets at a far-right demo planned for next month. What will they do; chuck their artisan coffee pods at them?