The United Kingdom woke up Sunday morning to city streets covered in debris and smoldering rubbish as a weekend of far-right, anti-immigration demonstrations — stoked by conspiracy theories spread on social media — erupted into violence in seven cities across the nation.
Police arrested at least 100 people, and riot police wearing helmets and holding shields came out in force as Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged to take action against “extremists.”
On Saturday, groups in Leeds waving St. George’s Cross flags, England’s national flag regularly flown by far-right groups, shouted “Muslims off our streets,” pairing it with a slur suggesting they were criminal child abusers. In the city of Hull, rioters threw bottles and smashed a window at a hotel housing asylum-seekers as demonstrators clashed with police.
What started as targeted anti-immigration demonstrations quickly descended into directionless disorder. A library in Liverpool, reopened in 2023 as an “education to employment” service for people of all abilities, was set ablaze.
Just goes to show that conservatives are the single biggest threat to civilised societies everywhere.
How do we deal with them? It should be obvious by now that something needs to be done, but the rest of us can’t just go full conservative and shove them in extermination camps like they’d do to us
Honestly, get rid of the tabloids full of misinformation. Make blatantly false misinformation illegal. Better education. “The more you know 💫” adverts. The biggest problem is the Torries who blame everything they can on immigrants. They need to legally be held accountable for the mountain of lies.
Realistically, the only real way to deal with them is counter-protest, but that’s difficult since the right has completely taken over the direct action/protest field in the past 10 years, so it’s a question whether or not the left can organize anymore (unless things get really bad, like how Antifa was very active during Trump).
We can try to combat misinformation and propaganda on the media to try and prevent this from even happening or telling people that it’s all bullshit, but it’s not effective since many popular sources directly benefit from this misinformation (be it in clicks or political goals) and either turn a blind eye or purposefully spread it (notable instance being Twitter).
Unless some sort of magical fairy-tale leftist revolution happens where most people get rallied under class issues and inequality rather than race and shared bigotry, this will probably continue happening more and more.