Riots, cartwheels and brains interrupted
Becoming a parent has made me a more patient person. For anyone who knows me in real life, I fully appreciate that it’s hard to imagine what a less patient version of me would look like, but honestly I am comparatively f*ing zen these days.
One of the most annoying things about children is that they want you to stop what you’re doing every 0.7 seconds to watch them attempt what I think is supposed to be a cartwheel.
Now as much as I love watching kids fall over, it does make completing ordinary tasks quite difficult. It also makes thinking about things really taxing.
Imagine trying to think through a problem, or work out something tha…
Sorry. Imagine trying to think through a problem, or work out something that’s actually quite complicated, when your train of tho…
Sorry. Imagine trying to think through a problem, or work out something that’s actually quite complicated, when your train of thought is constantly being interr…
For f*’s sake. Sorry.
Generally speaking, most people don’t just “decide” to go out on a Saturday to set fire to a hotel full of asylum seekers. For most people, there’s a train of thought that would pretty quickly nip that idea in the bud. But, quite typically for Britain actually, that train was cancelled, and in two UK towns (Rotherham and Tamworth) we ended up with literal lynch mobs out looking for blood.
A few days earlier, three young girls, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar, were tragically killed and several other children and adults critically injured when a 17 year old boy, carried out a vicious knife attack at a children’s party.
We still don’t know why.
Despite living in Lancashire, being born in Cardi…
Sorry. Despite living in Lancashire, being born in Cardiff, and not being Musli…
A few hours after the news broke, this fake story had been viewed 1.4 million times and shared by several high profile accounts.Sorry. Despite living in Lancashire, being born in Cardiff, and not being Muslim, misinformation suggesting that the killer was an “illegal” immigrant and linking the killings to Islamic terrorism was suspiciously quick to emerge, amplified by the usual dickheads right-wing agitators, and spread quickly online.
The next day, a large group of far-right EDL supporters decided to take matters into their own hands by attacking a local mosque. Which doesn’t really make any se…
Sorry. Which doesn’t make any sense.
At all.
If you actually stop and think about it.
That weekend, even though by this point we knew that the killer wasn’t an immigrant, a series of “anti-immigration protests” (aka riots) were organised across the UK. I wonder though, why one would protest immigration as a response to killings carried out by someone born and rais…
Sorry. …born and raised in the UK. Perhaps it was just the killings themselves that made people angry – that would make sense. Then again, protesting immigration and attacking a mos…
Sorry. …protesting immigration and attacking a mosque still doesn’t make sense. And if it was about the children, where was this strength of feeling when 14 year old Daniel Anjorin was murdered by dual Spanish-Brazilian national, Marcus Arduini Monzo, in London earlier in the year? Or when Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering seven new-born babies in 2023?
It’s a f*ing mystery, eh?
To really demonstrate how people felt about UK immigration policies, Shoezones were ferociously attacked, Crocs and bath bombs were freed from their shackles, mobile phones were upgraded, and that well-known symbol of the oppression of the White man, the Greggs Steak Bake, was liberated from it’s high-street prison.
In all seriousness though, while some of the “riots” turned out to be five pissed up wankers standing outside Yates’s for half an hour, large groups of rioters shouted racial slurs, targeted random Black and brown people with violent attacks, flung Nazi salutes around like there was no tomorrow, and smashed shit up in cities and towns across the UK.
Conflating “dark skin” with “immigrant,” rioters in Middlesborough set up makeshift roadblocks, checking to see if drivers were White before letting them through. In Hull, another group attacked cars driven by brown people, and then… then… hotels housing asylum seekers in Tamworth and Rotherham were bombarded with bricks, racial taunts, and eventually set on fire.
brains interru…
Did people really know what they were rioting about? Immigration? Islam? Brown people in general? High-Street shoe shops?
All of this seems like odd behaviour. Even just stopping to think for even a few seconds, what these people were doing just didn’t make any…
Sorry. …what these people were doing just didn’t make any…
Sorry. …what these people were doing just didn’t make any sense. But how can we expect people to think logically and critically when they are CONSTANTLY bombarded by an obviously and unashamedly right-wing press, and grifters like Farage, Yaxley-Lennon, Musk and the like, are shitting their pants for attention every five minutes.
Labelling rioters and looters as “stupid” or uneducated is unhelpful too. First off, those groups aren’t homogenous. Yes there were the violent criminals and racist thugs, intent on fighting someone or something brown, and some of them probably were as dense as overcooked tofu. But there were some who were just out for a good time on the cans, some who got swept along, some who were alarmingly young and impressionable, and some with real fears about immigration (just wait… I’m not there yet).
Maybe a lack of critical thinking skills isn’t the issue. Maybe it’s a real lack of opportunity to ever actually eng…
Sorry. …maybe it’s a lack of opportunity to ever actually engage in even a rudimentary level of critical thinking.
Labelling those involving themselves in the riots as “stupid” or uneducated is unhelpful too… those groups aren’t homogenous.
Many of the areas where the most violence and racism took place were some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Middlesborough, Rotherham, Sunderland, Hartlepool… all ravaged by austerity.
Fourteen years under the Tories have seen libraries, youth clubs, and leisure centres closed and schools literally crumbling. The NHS and related services have been deliberately dismantled. Poverty is rife, use of food banks has sky rocketed, energy bills have gone up while energy companies walk away with billions in profits every year. We all know what’s happened in the last decade and a half. We’ve watched it happen.
If you think I’m suggesting racism is a “working class” issue you couldn’t be more wrong. For one thing, that would ignore the fact that people from minoritized ethnic groups (except the Indian, Chinese, White Irish and White Other groups) are more likely than White British people to live in the most overall deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in England. Yet it looked remarkably like it was only people racialised as White that were “protesting immigration.”
But when you strip everything away from people, and then you drip feed them the idea, over years and yea…
Sorry. …years and years, that their problems are because of the brown people who are coming to live here (or who already live here), then you’re feeding their genuine insecurities with racist, Islamophobic lies.
The feelings of hopelessness and loss and fear of the future that are being experienced are absolutely real. But we can also see with just a little bit of thought, and an examination of the evidence that the resulting “legitimate concerns over immigration” are not legitimate at all.
But we just can’t have a sensible discus…
Sorry. …we just can’t have sensible discussion about it. Because it’s not about immigration.
It. Is. About. Racism.
Muslamic Ray Guns!
Rotherham is a particularly interesting case. A 2014 report carried out by Prof. Alexis Jay found that between between 1997 and 2013, around 1,400 children were groomed and sexually assaulted in Rotherham, “predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage.” The report highlighted systemic failures on the part of the police and the local authority that led to a lack of action being taken.
The emotions – the anger, the hurt, the fear – that people in Rotherham were experiencing, and the residual feelings they may still harbour are very real. But if we stop and think about things for a little while, the picture is actually much more comp…
Sorry. … much more complex than the one presented. The furore over “Muslim Rape Gangs” grew exponentially, and inaction was blamed on the police not wanting to appear racist – the “two-tier policing” argument.
But what was missed in this whole conversation was that many of the victims were British Asian girls, and both a lack of adequate training and honestly shitty attitudes towards working class, northern families contributed to how things were handled. And from a broader perspec…
Sorry. …and from a broader perspective, all of the available evidence points to the fact that the perpetrators of child sexual abuse are overwhelmingly people racialised as White.
Overwhelmingly so.
Let’s stop and think about that for just a few seconds. If you’re really concerned with grooming gangs and you’re only focusing on brown Muslims, then yo…
Sorry. …then you’re first of all barking up the wrong tree, but you’re also just inescapably racist and Islamaphhobic. But we can’t stop and think about it.
Racism is in Britain’s DNA. It’s baked in to all of our institutions. It’s in our buildings, it’s in education, it’s in policing, it’s in sports, it’s in sports commentary, it’s in the TV we watched as kids, and it’s in the TV we watch now.
Racism is in our politics, and it’s absolutely, unequivocally, undeniably in our media. It’s in our science and our technology. Our “great thinkers” and philosophers were racist, our political heroes were racist.
But we can’t talk about any of this, because it’s impossible to have a thoughtful, genuine, cons…
Sorry. It’s impossible to have a thoughtful, genuine, considered discussion about racism in th…
Sorry. It’s impossible to have a thoughtful, genuine, considered discussion about racism in the UK because eve…
OH FOR f*’S SAKE, STOP IT!
It’s impossible to have a thoughtful, genuine, considered discussion about racism in the UK because every 0.7 seconds, we have to stop and look at a f*ing cartwheel.
I’m utterly unsurprised that we are where we are, with race riots on the streets of the UK. Horrified, yes, but surprised? Not one little bit. Because this has been building for years and years and we’ve just watched it happen.
Until we can grow up and have proper discussions, with each other, with our kids, with our friends and families, about all of this, about how online manipulation works, about how misinformation spreads, about bias in the news and about the reporting of hate marches vs. protests, vs. riots, about how to stop and pause and think for a second and about racism in this country – until we can pat Nigel Farage on the head, say, “yes dear, very good, now play with your lego and let the grown-ups talk” – until we can do all of that…
we’re absolutely f*ed.
