Surviving the fallout of street violence post-Southport 2024
The violence that erupted on the streets of parts of the UK after the tragic, shocking and horrendous murders and woundings by a child suspect, in Southport on 29th July 2024 has led to many journalists, commentators, social media figures and citizen to put their forward perspective on what is happening.
Firstly, it is important to be clear about language, not wishing to split hairs but to be clear about what it is we are witnessing. The Terrorism Act 2000 (TACT 2000) in summary this defines terrorism as ‘The use or threat of serious violence against a person or serious damage to property where that action is:
designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public; and
for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.’
I am not sure that any reasonable person would find any wriggle room in applying this definition to what we have seen in the UK: violence meted out by multiple people in multiple locations, with the spreading of rumours with the intention of certain groups feeling under threat in the advancement of a cause to demand that the Government gives the UK back to ‘British’ people.
The challenge faced in social circles and in employing organisations is that highly problematic ideologies are normalised both explicitly (e.g. blatant political rhetoric) and by stealth (e.g. using words that embed ideas of hierarchy and a lack of empathy, without saying known racist words. As an example, “turn back the boats” does not explicitly name families and children on the boats whereas our human minds will do the work and interpret that some humans who made treacherous crossings can be sent back to high-risk crossings without any empathy about what might befall them). Some readers will immediately be making links with ‘propaganda techniques’ and their use in political life in the UK.
I will return to the issue of ideology but simply put, this is a system of ideas which are recognisable by some central themes, often linked to a political way of thinking.
The reason for starting my examination of the terrorism in the UK following the Southport murders and attacks with ideology is because it helps us understand in a more sophisticated way the causal factors behind the violence and what it means for friendships, networks and employing organisations.
There is an ideology built around the notion that groups can be distinguished along tidy racial and cultural lines, and that they possess essentialist qualities. With this is the idea that race and culture are the most relevant features to consider in relating to people who are not white. Robert Knox in his speech in Edinburgh in 1850 stated ‘race stampeth a man’ (yes, male gender pronoun). In these four words, Knox captured the ideas of biological determinism and cultural essentialism; in other words, the characteristics that are central to what can be expected from a racial or cultural group. In our day it shows up as follows: if there is an act of terrorism by someone, depending on who they are it can be seen as “this is what people like that do’ or alternatively ‘what happened? Why did they do this? Leaving aside the false rumours that were spread about the child suspect behind the Southport attacks, it is striking that the lead response for many (not just the terrorists on the streets of the UK) has not been overwhelming curiosity about what had happened to a child to lead to these actions. I acknowledge the potential that some conversations from a place of curiosity were immediately highjacked by the actions of the terrorists in the street.
You may have noticed that I have not yet used the term ‘the far right’ to discuss the terrorists on the streets of the UK. The political and media discourse implies that these are a distinct group from the rest of white people – the exact opposite of the cultural essentialism that is applied to black and brown groups. Note however that the sentencing on 8th August 2024, of retired welder William Morgan, aged 69, supposedly of previous good character, for his part in the street attacks suggest that this was not exclusively a sub-set of white people called ‘the far right’. To say white men have been attacking others and property somehow sounds unfair. We are not familiar with applying cultural essentialism to this group.
The development of ideologies around race and culture are achieved through our educational system and propaganda techniques: evoking emotions such as fear and a sense of threat among citizens by exaggerating information; making false equivalences (e.g. some reporting referring to this post Southport street violence as protests and allowing comparisons with Black Lives Matter protests. This is when even by the police accounts in 2020, there was a small minority who engaged in public disorder and the most notable Colston statue incident in Bristol was done by white people: namely Sage Willoughby, Rhian Graham, Milo Ponsford and Jake Skuse. (They were eventually cleared of charges). Other propaganda techniques include the distortion of statistics, the identification of an enemy belonging to an ‘other’ group and simplifying complex ideas, including presenting some as binary choices (e.g. either open or closed borders).
The migration observatory reports that in 2023, 33% of asylum claims where by people on small boats. In 2023 there were 85% more asylum applications than in 2019. This in part tells the story that the re-stated ‘really hostile environment’ policy under Teresa May, in May 2012 has not worked as an approach. This suggests that the stream of provocative statements by politicians about how to make Britain safe by stopping invasions and so forth, are words that embed an ideology but achieve little in addressing issues of immigration. Members of society could helpfully be given information to help hold politicians to account for why there are patterns of migration are as they are, and the approaches tried and failed and why they failed. It has not been so.
This leads me to why this blog. Ideologies are embedded through some techniques already set out but it is worth noting that they expand and morph. In her highly insightful book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes many interesting phenomena, two of which I shall present here. One is that of the diagonalists. People who start from politically opposite persuasions to form coalitions around a particular point. Referring to the global pandemic that began in 2019, Klein identified the mistrust of governments driven by them imposing controls and legal coercions to improve vaccine take up and how this played into a belief by people on the right that government is not serving the interests of the public but rather instituting state control and cash-lining the pockets of corporations. This shared territory of loss of faith in government fuels narratives articulated by the terrorists on the streets recently, demanding that the government gives them their country back. For those unclear about the attacks on the police, yes, there is the notion of two-tier policing of black and white protests, fuelled by some politicians, based on the false equivalences addressed earlier. However, there is an important point. The police are the most everyday representation of the power of government. Embedded in their role is state sanctioned violence. That’s as powerful as it gets. These waves of violence are attacks on Government itself.
The other concept that Klein talks about in Doppleganer is pipikism (taken from novelist Philip Roth’s work). Klein describes how language and ideas are mocked, belittled and made fun of so that people who once had a way of describing issues of social justice now feel that the terms are so sullied, they avoid using them, avoid seeking rights and justice. You may see reticence in colleagues or social circles to seek rights because such actions are in themselves framed as part of a culture war or identity politics.
In dialogue now, groups and individuals are often seen as positions. Use of language and ideas that sit within a particular ideology can be seriously hurtful and anger-making. A hurt response is often as a result of an accumulation of infractions which is impossible to know truly understand, literally until you have experienced them yourself; to be othered, humiliated and seen as not fully human day in, day out. However, the whole point of an ideology is for it to be relatable, portable and for its underlying beliefs to distributed so pervasively that they can be soft in transmission but set rigid once in position, a bit like epoxy adhesives where two chemicals are mixed to make a strong bonding agent. When friends, family and colleagues express things that come from that ideology, after the pain and shock, it is worth seeing that this is the same ideology the transgressor has been nurtured into. Much like the norm that we get the biggest house we can afford and get nice things even if it means sacrificing our life to work to sustain it. We so easily internalise ways of being when there is a constant, consistent and reinforced messaging designed to normalise it. What is seen often is an uncritical articulation of racist ideologies.
The greatest hope for breaking a constant stream of bi-direction conflict triggers is to remind people that others are not positions, they are people. It is also central that critical thinking a routine part of culture. What’s the source? What’s the research on this? How did you come to ‘know’? Why does this matter so much? When exactly were the good days and what made them good? Good for whom? How so? Without routinising criticality, organisations get stuck at EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) and not transformational work.
The essential ingredient that we cannot sidestep however, is that today can only be understood in the context of history, and the history of organised attacks such as lynchings, bashing and pograms are in recent family and community memories. The discourses and narratives that maintain destructive ideologies now, sound similar to the ones that have continued to drive violent behaviours over the course of the last 250 years. There might be disagreements and bidirectional conflict triggers, but they will always land in a different soup of existing pain.