London’s Antifascist March, August 202421 Images
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Last week, the UK was wracked with violence wrought by far-right racists. Cheeringly, the vast majority of people were deeply disturbed by unrest: a recent YouGov found that 85 per cent of Britons opposed the disorder, while thousands of people took to the streets in nationwide anti-racist demonstrations this weekend, bearing signs reading “refugees welcome” and “smash racism and fascism”.

But, despite some of it being well-meaning, much of the online discourse surrounding the riots has left a sour taste. “Most of the ‘rioters’ are local chavs [...] the kind that hang round the local shops in black hoodies on their bikes,” reads one post on X. “No, Gary from Blackpool with 1 GCSE, two brain cells and three teeth, Dr Ahmed the surgeon did not steal your job,” reads another which has amassed 98,000 likes and 11,000 retweets.

Unfettered anger at the rioters is understandable. But many of the people tweeting about the tracksuits and haircuts of the rioters appear less concerned about the violence and their impact on racialised communities, and more excited about being given carte blanche to tear into the white working class: people too thick to understand the root causes of social injustice, too provincial to enjoy rubbing shoulders with people from all races and creeds in a multicultural melting pot like London, too philistine to have anything better to do than loot Greggs and Shoezone.

Jarringly, many of these tweets are from supposedly liberal-minded people who would presumably baulk at the idea of saying anything so flagrantly sexist or homophobic: so why does class-based prejudice still persist? Dr Dan Evans is a sociologist at Swansea University and author of A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie. He explains that it’s easy to get away with classism, as liberals can often “imply that the white working class are reactionary and have ‘bad views’, which legitimises all the terrible things they think about them – that they’re thick and uneducated with low IQs.” 

While it’s vital to refute pernicious, false narratives which suggest the UK working class in its entirety was behind the riots, it is fair to say there was evidently a class element to the disorder. According to Dr Evans, the vast majority who have been charged and jailed are part of what Marx calls “the lumpen strata” – a politically unengaged, “ultra-vulnerable” subsection of society. “To get swept up in a riot, often you don’t have that much to lose,” Evans explains, adding that he has spent years working with people in these communities. “They’re quite literally dependent on the state for things like housing and benefits, which is why they can feel in direct competition with migrants.”

This group of people, he continues, is particularly susceptible to far-right narratives which argue that the “societal decline” we’re witnessing in the UK is due to migrants. “Obviously, in my view, it’s not the migrants’ fault – it’s the government’s. But when you’re at the bottom, it’s very easy to latch onto this narrative.” While The Telegraph reported that one rioter arrested for allegedly participating in a riot in Middlesbrough was a “company director” in his family’s business, Dr Evans says that “this is what the lower classes look like now – they’re far more fragmented, ranging from ultra-marginalised people to those working in small businesses. Not everybody’s working in a factory.”

But it would be a grave mistake to say that the riots – and racism more broadly – are solely a ‘working-class’ issue. “These rioters are now carrying the can for a structural problem which has been peddled by the elites in our society,” Dr Evans explains, citing political commentator Douglas Murray, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Daily Mail journalists, the Tory Party, and even individuals in the Labour Party as forces which have been whipping up Islamophobia, xenophobia and racism for years. “They should take a massive chunk of the blame here,” he says. “But obviously nothing’s going to happen to people like Douglas Murray or the Daily Mail or the politicians who whip up this stuff. The crackdown is going to come down on the poorest in society.”

Historically, this has long been the case in the UK: notably, the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s was led by Oswald Moseley, the son of a baronet, and widely supported by ‘fashionable’ members of the upper classes such as the Mitford family and the press baron Lord Rothermere. “Fascism in the UK has always been directed by the aristocratic upper classes,” Evans says. “The lower middle classes are often used as sort of foot soldiers, but the ideologues and people funding fascism have often been the top aristocrats in society. Nothing’s changed there really.”

Evidently, racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia are found in all strata of UK society – and always have been. So why does the myth that these prejudices are kept alive by the working class persist? “Islamophobia has been a central pillar of ‘respectable’ discourse in the UK among the upper classes,” Evans says. “But often [the elites] will launder their beliefs through the imagined idea of the working class. They’ll say ‘all the working-class people in this country think this’ or ‘the ordinary man in the street thinks this’, instead of ‘I think this.’”

He adds that upper-class individuals can often express their racist beliefs in ways which obfuscate just how abhorrent their views are. “They’ll use irony, detachment, plausible deniability, whereas someone from the quote unquote ‘lower classes’ will just come out and say what they think without cloaking their language in this way.” Notably, back in 2018 Boris Johnson was cleared of breaking the Conservative party’s code of conduct over stating that Muslim women in burqas looked like “letterboxes”, after an independent panel ruled he was fully entitled to use “satire” in his Telegraph column where he made the remarks.

The riots are just the latest in a long line of talking points which have exposed how acceptable classism remains in the UK. It permeates everything. It was there when 19-year-old Jay Slater, an apprentice bricklayer from Lancashire, went missing in Tenerife and the public responded by cooking up wild, baseless conspiracy theories that he was a drug mule who deserved to die anyway. It was there when people were calling for XL bullies to be banned and blamed the spate of vicious maulings on “bad owners” – that is, the sort of person who would buy a big dog without the wherewithal to train it properly just to parade it around their council estate. It’s in the constant sneering at new build homes, and the supposed poor taste of those who fill them with crushed velvet sofas and plastic things from B&M. Dr Evans says it was there during Brexit too, as liberal Remainers gleefully slated Leave voters as stupid, ugly “gammons”.

As we continue to oppose racism in the UK, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that we’ll never achieve a truly equal society until classism is rooted out too. This doesn’t mean that we have to start saying the rioters have “legitimate concerns” and should be seen as innocent victims – just that it’s possible to condemn their actions without commenting on their teeth or education level or the brand of shoes they wear. And in any case, people from Black, Asian, and other minority ethnic backgrounds are more likely to live in poverty – so, anyone who has serious about creating a more egalitarian society should realise that eliminating classism and racism go hand in hand.