UK race riots: Infighting is preferred!

Editor's note: Keith Lamb, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a University of Oxford graduate with a Master of Science in Contemporary Chinese Studies. His primary research interests are China's international relations and "socialism with Chinese characteristics." The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The British media blame online misinformation over the stabbing of three young girls, by a man in Southport, for anti-immigrant and racial violence that has spread across the UK over the last week, leading to despicable attacks against mosques and asylum centers. The perpetrator was neither an illegal immigrant nor a Muslim but the son of Rwandan parents born in Wales.

The initial "fuse" lighting the "powder keg" was inaccurate but where did the "powder keg" come from? We are told that far-right ideologues are to blame but this credits the rioters with a level of political consciousness they lack. Furthermore, judging from the comments left after liberal media reports, there is a mass consciousness that something is wrong in Britain at the community level.

The violence represents an extreme reaction to a lack of democracy in the UK, a nation-state where "indigenous" Britons are considered intolerant for not accepting large communities of immigrants from all over the world as their brethren, despite many immigrants, naturally, having split loyalties and diverse cultural identities. Indeed, the very notion of associating the four nations comprising Britain in any ethnic form, as opposed to a multi-ethnic or cultural form, is considered racist now.

Furthermore, the history of British imperialism and Britain's role in wars today, means those who come to the UK, fleeing poverty and war, have understandable grievances against Britain. Consequently, white Britons who base their identity on imperialism, new and old, are likely to clash with the recipients of imperialism.

Politically, both the right and the (liberal) left provide confusing divisive solutions. Tommy Robinson, an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant nationalist, marches waving the Union Jack with the Israeli flag, when the creation of Israel and mass migration into the UK are part and parcel of the same unbroken liberal hegemonic order.

In contrast, the liberal left demonizes and disavows itself of large swaths of the working class as racist "despicables" for raising the specter of ethnicity despite liberals being the main proponents of a multicultural divide-and-rule ideology, where everyone is split into their ethnic cleavages. Even waving the national flag becomes a symbol not of national unity but of imperialism and racism.

Does the establishment want unity? Yes, but only on a superficial level and only insofar as it protects and disguises their class hegemony. This necessitates a utopian vision of multiculturalism as an innate good, whose underlying processes and material reality must go unexamined. Simply put, ethnic divisions are structurally necessary under capitalism in Britain and across the West!

Those who oppose multiculturalism, like factions of the white working class, must be ideologically targeted and blamed for the imperial crimes of the past. Here they become worthy of being reviled and deserving of their poverty, allowing their material complaints to go unexamined and their views on immigration and ethnic gripes to be pathologized.

British working-class ethnic solidarity can be built through a historical perspective. For example, white people are not responsible for historical imperialism just like multi-ethnic populations of the West today are not culpable for the wars waged on their behalf. Under former imperialism, the white working class due to poverty, famine and repression fled Britain. Today, they, along with British citizens of all ethnicities man the armies sent to die in far-flung places like Afghanistan, where refugees flee from.

The primary contradiction of mass migration, where people left Britain in the past and come to it today, leading to competition for resources and identity struggles, is not due to a racial or ethnic spirit driving history, but the symptoms of a historic class struggle waged by a transnational elite (many call them globalists), who continue to strive for global hegemony.

While war and economic repression lead to geopolitical gains for the globalists abroad the resulting immigration into the core of the empire bolsters their agenda at home. Previously, working-class rebellion could be alleviated by sending "white trash" to the colonies. Today immigration creates ethnic divisions and undermines established labor, leading the working-class struggle to express itself ethnically rather than on class terms.

The working class of all ethnicities in the UK is now challenged by increasing poverty. Materially, they have more in common with each other. Thus, working-class unity across ethnic lines, based on class consciousness, represents a greater threat to elite interests than racial infighting and tensions, which we see today.

For the continuation of globalist hegemony, at home and abroad, racial divisions must remain and their tensions are to be managed not resolved. To this end, the causes of the race riots must remain analyzed from the causal chain of the initial "fuse," not the "keg" – here unifying historical material explanations will be discarded in place of psychological demonization and the explanation of far-right pathological ideologies that arise in a material vacuum.

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