By Wesley Seale
We had not seen so many coppers in Brighton till the summer of 2011.
Riots had broken out in London and had spread across some parts of England. For students from the developing world, we were not expecting the streets of a developed nation and one of the world’s oldest democracies to be lined with police in para-military attire.
A year before, the Tories had been elected into office, promising fiscal cuts and a referendum on Brexit.
The riots in London followed the killing of a black man, Mark Duggan, by police. Duggan’s death sparked what would later come to be known as “copycat violence” and would see thousands arrested for looting, arson and other forms of violence.
In the debates and discussions on the riots that followed, many agreed that factors such as racial tensions, class divisions, economic decline and its results of unemployment, poverty and inequality contributed much to the stoking of the riots.
Yet even more worrying was the undue influence of social media and online misinformation.
Thirteen years later and not much has changed in the UK in terms of addressing these issues.
As the riots broke out in the last two weeks, this time spurred on by right-wing extremists, former Tory adviser to former prime minister Rishi Sunak on social cohesion and resilience, Dame Sara Khan, laid the blame for the latest riots squarely at the feet of the former Conservative government and her own party.
She pointed to the inflammatory language used by Conservative and right-wing politicians as well as the so-called “culture-wars” for fanning the flames of these extremists.
Unlike the riots of 2011, these riots that have riveted England and have seen right-wing extremists target black people. Some even tried to set fire to the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham while people were still inside.
Neil Basu, Britain’s former head of counter-terrorism, explained that the attacks should be viewed as terrorism, while earlier this week nearly 400 arrests had been made.
Yet the rise of the right and their riots are not unique to England. Since the global economic recession, countries across the world have seen the rise of the right, particularly the working class right.
Make no mistake, it is usually the middle class and the elites who facilitate these uprisings by the working class. Donald Trump (US), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Narendra Modi (India), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Giorgia Melono (Italy), Javier Milei (Argentina), Niyab Bukele (El Salvador), Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel), among a number of others, have all risen on the back of working class people coming under the influence of right-wing politics.
In what many had not expected and described as “one of the biggest political upsets in Dutch politics since World War II”, the right-wing Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, became the largest party in the House of Representatives in the Netherlands.
France continues to sit with a caretaker government which is warding off a government led by the right-wing National Rally party, under Marie Le Pen, which had made significant gains in the recently held snap elections.
But just as the rise of right-wing extremism is not unique to England, so too is the rise of riots by the right not unique to that country alone.
In 2018, the Chemnitz protests broke out in Germany, and in 2021, the world watched in disbelief as the US Capitol was attacked by right-wing Trump supporters. Under Trump’s presidency, right-wing fever escalated reaching its pinnacle at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
In July 2021, South Africa also saw riots similar to those currently occurring in the UK.
In their report titled July’s People, after Nadine Gordimer’s novel, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) highlight that “at the time of the occurrence of the July 2021 unrest, the material and social lives of South Africans were characterised by patterns that largely resemble their colonial and apartheid origins”.
While these factors speak to a racial and class divide, as well as rampant unemployment, poverty and inequality as the lethal cocktail in the cause of right-wing riots in England, another lethal ingredient was online misinformation and, as pointed out by London mayor Sadiq Khan, the culture wars and inflammatory language used by certain politicians.
One can also not write-off the heavy influence that ethnic nationalism and xenophobia played in the July 2021 riots in our country, and the use of online misinformation and social media. According to the SAHRC’s report, the former minister of state security reported that in respect of the 2021 July Unrest, “the continuous weaponisation of social media requires urgent government intervention”.
Therefore, as with the riots by the right in England and the rest of the world, social media and online misinformation continues to play a destructive role in spurring on these extremists.
For the first time in three decades, South Africa has a centre-right government in place. Some involved in forming the Government of National Unity are known to be right-wing conservatives who have not only questioned migration, whether from other African countries or between provinces, but have also participated in culture wars against, for example, “wokism”; not that one agrees with wokism, for according to Francis Fukuyama it is fundamentally the fruit of neo-liberalism politics. But the point remains: culture wars inflame.
These right-wing conservatives involved in the GNU defend racists within their ranks and one was even involved in the formation of the Tory-led coalition government in the UK in 2010.
Given that the lethal cocktail of ingredients for another wave of riots – as happened in July 2021 here, and currently taking place in England – continue to persist in our country, the ANC, PAC, UDM, Al-Jamah, and GOOD parties will do well to keep fellow right-wing partners in check and caution them against making inflammatory and populist statements.
As the consensus in scholarship suggests, while left-wing extremism may be more prevalent, it is certainly right-wing extremism that is more deadly and destructive.
* Dr Wesley Seale has a PhD in International Relations.
** The views expressed in this article are the writer’s, and do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media