Unravelling falsehoods of far-right and race riots
Hope not Hate, an organisation working to expose and oppose far-right extremism, said the week-long riots that engulfed Britain were the result of years of far right agitation by anti-Muslim figures like Tommy Robinson, the founder of the nowdefunct English Defence League (EDL).
The organisation also held responsible elements of the media and some mainstream politicians who, it said, “created a climate of hostility towards Muslims and asylum seekers”.
Nigel Farage is an obvious example. For years he has been demonising immigrants, holding them responsible for societal ills.
Lately, he has also been propagating the false allegation of two-tier policing, suggesting softer policing towards nonwhite communities. The claim is easily debunked by the police’s stop and search data, showing black boys are more likely to be targeted by the police.
Two-tier policing was also promoted by the Tesla chief executive and owner of X (previously Twitter), Elon Musk, who has weighed in on the unrest.
At the height of the UK riots, Musk posted on X that “civil war was now inevitable”. His prediction reminded me of one of his other predictions, which he also posted on X: that the pandemic would be over in April 2020.
Both predictions felt more like wish casting than forecasting.
Musk also holds strong antiimmigration views which I find at odds with his dire warnings about low-fertility levels in the West.
As a recent headline on the front page of New York Times said: “Fertility rates should be an issue for all”.
Yes, it turns out that the world population is due to peak before the end of this century before gradually falling.
The population decline is particularly worrying for Western countries which need their young generation to look after and support the ageing population.
The article reported, short of forcing women to have more babies, a feasible short-term solution was to encourage immigration from poorer countries, provided the age of the immigrants was below the average population age in the host country.
Both the UK and the US are among countries with birth rates lower than what is needed for population replacement. This means both countries should be actively encouraging arrivals of young immigrants, the very type the ultranationalists oppose because of their belief in “the great replacement theory” - a conspiracy theory which assumes there is a secret agenda to weaken Western civilisation by replacing the white population with non-white immigrants.
“The great replacement theory” is literally a deadly ideology. Both the Buffalo shooter, who killed18 black people in a grocery store, and the Christchurch mosque shooter, who killed 51 Muslims in their place of worship, endorsed the theory.
Many have said the ageing population and low birth rates were the reasons Angela Merkel allowed more than 1 million Syrian refugees to enter Germany, making it a country with the fifth-highest refugee population in the world.
Commenting on the sheer number of arrivals, Merkel said at the time: “we’ll manage this”.
Mostly young, smart and strong, the refugees who survived the arduous journey from Syria to Germany, via various immigration corridors, were grateful for the welcome they received when they arrived in the country.
Critics said it was Merkel’s great mistake, but eight years on, it is reported that her gamble has paid off and she has been proved right.
On the important subject of multiculturalism, it is important to understand that multiculturalism is a reality of British society and part of its social fabric. As such, the only relevant question is how to make it work better not if it is a good thing or a bad thing.
A research paper by Alan Manning, the head of the department of economics at the London School of Economics, has found that the greatest problem with multiculturalism, “is not that it has failed to create a sense of belonging among minorities, it is that the multicultural project has paid too little attention to how to sustain support among the white population”.
Elsewhere, research into football hooliganism (many EDL supporters who took part in the riots were football hooligans), shows heavy policing can, in the long term, be counterproductive as it will only harden the hooligans and encourage them to organise better. The answer is surely to address the issues of identify, dignity and belonging among those who feel left behind and unsupported.
Overall, multiculturalism in the UK has resulted in a dramatic reduction in racism. Research has found only a tiny minority of the UK, about 3%, is overly racist. After consecutive days of violent riots in Britain, it was immensely heart-warming to see thousands of people march peacefully in rallies up and down the country and say no to Islamophobia and racism in the UK.
Long may this unity and anti-racist solidarity last.