The first lightning flashes – and what to do

One month after Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party was ‘swept to power’ by a paltry 20% of the electorate – the lowest support base of any government since the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1918 – violent protests and riots, instigated by far-right groups, broke out across the country. For those trapped in asylum-seekers’ hostels or mosques under brutal attack from gangs of rioters, the experience was terrifying. More generally, many Black, Asian and Muslim people feel that their safety is increasingly under threat. Tell Mama, a monitoring group tracking Islamophobic hate crimes, reported a five-fold increase in threats to Muslims compared to the same time last year.

The absolute numbers involved even peripherally in the riots were small, probably less than 15,000 nationwide. This is far fewer than those who came out on the streets in counter-protests or – for example – the many tens of thousands who peacefully marched for Gaza on the same Saturday as the right-wing riots started to spread, or the 50,000 who took part in Trans Pride the week before. Not one word, however, of the Gaza demo featured in the capitalist media; whereas the riots were at the top of the news bulletins every day for a week, adding to their momentum.

Unusually, however, the large anti-racist counter-protests on 7 August did top news reports, with overwhelmingly positive coverage, even from the most rabidly right-wing capitalist newspapers. In a total volte-face the headline on the front page of the Daily Mail, for example, was the ‘Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down Thugs’. (8 August) This, of course, from the rag which, alongside numerous Tory politicians, has routinely referred to the overwhelmingly peaceful mass protests against the slaughter in Gaza over the past ten months as ‘hate marches’.