Angela Rayner says immigration and deprivation are fuelling public disenchantment. She talks of atomisation, deindustrialisation, time spent alone online, the decline of trust in institutions. As if social collapse is some slow-moving natural disaster, something we all just watched happen. As if nobody lit the match.
Let’s be clear: it wasn’t immigration that broke Britain. It was politicians who made immigration the scapegoat. It wasn’t deprivation that turned neighbours against each other. It was the right-wing press, the Farages and Bravermans and GB News demagogues, who poured poison into the bloodstream of every national conversation. The very people now warning of “societal collapse” are the ones who profit from it.
Rayner’s analysis is a familiar technocratic evasion. She talks about community breakdown without naming the people who broke it. She blames “high levels of immigration” without confronting the fact that immigration only becomes politically toxic when it’s weaponised by bad actors. And Labour (her party and now government) has spent the last five years validating the logic of those actors. From Starmer’s “smash the gangs” policy to their embrace of the “illegal immigration” frame, Labour hasn’t opposed the narrative. It’s joined it.
You cannot build social cohesion on the terrain of scapegoating. You cannot address the collapse of trust while reinforcing the politics of fear. You cannot fight the far right while parroting their lines about migrants overwhelming public services. Especially when it is now your government underfunding those very services.
Rayner claims this is about restoring faith in politics. But what faith can survive a political class that treats fascist talking points as legitimate concerns, and economic vandalism as good governance? The Southport riots weren’t spontaneous. They were kindled by lies, proven lies spread by far-right agitators and indulged by mainstream cowards too afraid to call it what it was. Now Tommy Robinson is promising to bring “thousands” to protest outside asylum hotels. Where is the clarity? Where is the confrontation?
Rayner says we need a long-term plan for social cohesion. Here’s a start: stop reinforcing the narratives of those who want to see society torn apart. Name the far right as the danger it is. Rebuild public services and housing as a right, not a zero-sum game. Defend migrants not as a burden, but as people. Stop pretending that the state is a passive observer in all this. It isn’t. It’s complicit.
The truth is, Britain has not been divided by immigration or poverty alone. It has been divided by those who saw political advantage in the division. If there is a threat of civil unrest, it is not simply because people are angry. It’s because the far right has been allowed to organise that anger into violence, with barely a challenge from the people who claim to lead.
This is, primarily, an English problem. The Southport riots, the hotel protests in Epping and Diss, the aggro whipped up around asylum seekers, these are English phenomena, with deep roots in English political culture. Scotland hasn’t seen these disturbances. Cymru has seen fewer and less intense incidents. While the north of Ireland faces its own complex tensions, these recent outbreaks of anti-migrant fury have a distinctly English character. So what is it about England that keeps returning to this poison?
Part of the answer lies in the specificities of English nationalism: directionless, aggrieved, and increasingly inseparable from imperial nostalgia. Scotland and Cymru have, in different ways, built a stronger civic national identity, more inclusive and less prone to the kind of siege mentality that has taken hold in post-Brexit England. Deindustrialisation hit the whole of Britain, but only in England was it followed by a politics that turned economic decline into cultural resentment, stoked by a hard right press that sees migrants as a threat and the state as a weapon. England is governed by Westminster, and Westminster has perfected the art of punching down. The result is a volatile cocktail: economic insecurity, media hysteria, and a political class that treats racism as a pressure valve rather than a problem. Now we are back here again: small-scale riots, far-right mobilisation, fear in the air. The English disease has returned with a vengance.
It’s got fuck all to do with saving children or communities. We even see children attending the disturbances, dragged into the spectacle. This isn’t about defence. It’s about transmission, creating the next generation of knuckle-draggers, raised on hate, bred for street theatre, marched into the arms of demagogues.
If this Labour governemnt wants to talk about cohesion, it needs to start by taking sides. Because neutrality in the face of far-right mobilisation is not leadership. It’s cowardice.
Oh, and the only person who benefits from this is the man rubbing his hands together, whispering told you so, told you so, and you all know exactly who that is: Nigel Farage.
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