The room was packed, with every seat taken and dozens more standing or sitting on the carpet. The flyer had indicated that the meeting, held in the mosque, was called by faith groups, the local trades council and Stand Up to Racism, and the crowd was mixed in gender, race and age, though skewed towards the over-50s. The mosque is a few minutes from my front door; I walk past most days and admire the well-kept flower beds and stone entrance, a little patch of calm on a noisy, polluted road. This evening hundreds had gathered, the mood cheerful, determined, buoyed by the enormous antiracist protests the evening before in Walthamstow and Finchley, but still feeling the aftershock of the previous days, the live-streamed attacks on hotels, mosques, shops. There was a hum of trepidation in this mixed crowd as we entered the mosque, a light tremulous concern about showing respect. As people left their shoes at the entrance and helped themselves to tea and snacks, the anxiety dissipated. Soon the excitement and determination were to dissipate too.
We were in a London borough that squats across zones 2 and 3. It is the fourth most deprived borough in the capital, but poverty is patterned with extreme wealth. In some areas, houses go for millions; in others, slumlords gouge rent from the pockets of the very poor. It’s a familiar London geography. According to the council website, 67% of the resident population are from ‘BME or Other White ethnic groups.’ Four Labour MPs represent the borough in Parliament and their seats are about as safe as any safe seat in the country. In the recent election, the Greens took second place in three of the four constituencies, and Reform gained only a handful of votes across the board. I would be more than a little surprised to see Tommy Robinson’s followers mobilising here, but Turkish fascists maintain a presence. We are not without a far right threat, nor short of enthusiasm for confronting racists elsewhere.
The promised community meeting never transpired; in fact, we became both unwitting players and hapless audience for a tawdry production. A parade of speakers – representatives of mosques and churches, MPs, police officers, even the Deputy Lieutenant of the borough – all took to the stage, repeating the same few words: unity, respect, tolerance. Each new speaker was introduced with obsequious enthusiasm matched only by their reciprocal fawning over the MC, whose long roots in the community though her father’s religious work were rehearsed several times. Indeed, the most useful part of the event was the occasional prayer – if these are our leaders on earth, we need God more than ever. Inadvertently revealing the meeting’s intention, a Labour MP said that she had been instructed by party leadership to attend something in the local community. When Starmer’s directive was sent, the invitation for this event had already landed in her inbox. What luck! The photo opportunity had already been arranged, she needed only to show up.
Lavish praise was heaped upon the police from all quarters. They had protected us, they were under great pressure, they had stood shoulder to shoulder with antiracists. The only person who showed any awareness of the reality of police racism and brutality was a police officer himself, whose speech plotted a more careful track through the political morass than the other speakers. He insisted that the police had taken on board criticisms of its racism, its misogyny, its homophobia. He made note of the Met’s attempts to hire more widely, made a plea for the audience to consider becoming officers or volunteer officers themselves. This was a man who knew how to stick to the script, echoing the Met’s latest recruitment campaign.
In the only nod to history of any kind we heard that evening, he rehearsed Sir Robert Peel’s 1829 Principles for Policing. It seemed he understood consciously, rather than only on instinct, that this moment was an opportunity. Since the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, the repression of a vigil in her name at Clapham Common, and the subsequent drip feed of stories about police sexual abuse, British policing has endured several years of juddering crisis. It’s rare that a month passes without a viral video of police brutality, most recently of Greater Manchester Police assaulting several members of a British Pakistani family from Rochdale in Manchester airport. And the borough itself is the site of a vicious and constant police presence. Both Mark Duggan and Joy Gardner lost their lives at the hands of the police just a stone’s throw from the meeting. Their names would have been familiar to many of those attending. With the streets aflame and tensions high, this new crisis is an opportunity to rebuild the reputation of the police, to sever the emerging common sense link between ‘police’ and ‘racism.’ Racism can once again be the preserve of hooligans and rioters. By repeating Peel’s Principles, in which the idea of ’policing by consent’ was introduced, political consent was being judiciously manufactured. Simply by being there, those of us in the audience, myself included, were part of its production.
But it was not only support for the police that was uniform among the speakers. So too was an absolute refusal to offer a single reason for the riots. Indeed, the riots themselves were a vague, implicit thing – a notional badness that had offered us the chance to gather. Like at a funeral, a few speakers speculated, we should do this more often, in good times as well as bad! There was no mention of why pogroms were aimed at recent migrants, specifically at the hotels in which they are housed, no mention of why mosques were under attack. No one mentioned Palestine nor the characterisation of the ceasefire protests as ‘hate marches.’ Of course, to offer reasons here would be to implicate many of those on the stage, not least the Labour MPs whose party were the architects of the War on Terror, and as much the inheritors of Powellite racism as the Conservatives. It was Tony Blair who made the term ‘asylum seeker’ a tabloid staple, Gordon Brown who borrowed from the BNP in his pledge for ‘British jobs for British workers.’
Two brave attendees tried to interject some sense into this absurd performance, one critiquing the police, the other having been lured to the meeting under false pretences. Like many of us, the latter would not have voluntarily submitted to watch a Labour Party love-in. Both were quickly shut down, treated as hecklers. Despite the lip service paid to dialogue, not a single opinion was sought from the hundreds of people in the audience; there was no opportunity to speak, to ask questions, to do anything other than applaud or sit still or leave. In the final minutes of the meeting, an activist from Stand Up to Racism tried in vain to make something of the meeting, suggesting a local WhatsApp group incase of attacks in the area. Her voice was lost in the meeting’s close. Instead we were encouraged to get a cup of tea, enjoy a samosa. By this point, everyone was exhausted and wanted to get home. I suspect that was the point. I imagine Stand Up to Racism had thought having their name on the bill alongside the faith groups would give them some credibility and allow them to recruit from the local community. In fact, they had been played. The meeting was used to disperse and deflect the energy that had gathered for action. People wanted to get to know their neighbours, to show their solidarity, to be together. People wanted a way to cohere the shapeless but exciting energy they felt at the antifascist protests the night before into something practical and collective. With exceptional message discipline, even as they said nothing beyond empty platitudes, local power brokers had sent a clear signal: go home. The ‘community’ was, at best, an audience, at worst, an obstruction. We were to be bought off with pakoras and pretty words.
The MPs and ‘community leaders’ had nothing meaningful to offer – no explanations, no solutions. The closest thing to a theory of change was offered by the Deputy Lieutenant who suggested that ‘kindness’ may have the power to move the political dial. The meeting had been an exercise in cultivated ignorance, a refusal of the political through that hallowed, slippery word: community. Just as on the national stage, they had simultaneously taken credit for and disavowed the mass antifascist protests. They had closed ranks to deflect not only from criticism, but from the possibility that someone else might use this moment as an opportunity to gain a foothold, to build a base. As Stand Up to Racism have most successfully gathered energy and attention, bringing them into the fold (albeit in a very shallow way – they didn’t even the chance to make a speech) was likely the easiest way to undermine that incipient power. I mean this without sectarian rancour; no doubt a left-wing group belonging to another faction could be played just as effectively.
It will come as no surprise that the very organisations (the police, the Labour Party) that have set the stage for this rash of far right violence can offer us no solutions. For anyone with the scantest knowledge of colonial history or the development of diaspora politics in Britain, the participation of faith leaders in these power structures will be familiar. While this was just one small meeting in one corner of London, the dynamics were instructive. The centre right are no bulwark against reactionary violence; even in a time of fascist pogroms, they maintain a ruthless hatred of the left. The one brief mention of the left in the meeting was when the Chair of the Council Cabinet insisted that neither the Far Right nor the Far Left would be allowed to divide us. Though the trades council were named on the flyer, there was no visible or vocal trade union presence at all.
Though they are asinine and tedious, though they have nothing to say, though they offer no promises (even false ones) these local leaders are nonetheless well practised, coordinated, organised. They have an instinct for power, and they hold on to it, even if in a small, petty but enduring form. If we want to build a movement capable of defeating fascism, we will need to by-pass or entirely co-opt these power structures. We need to capture the energy they so assiduously diffused. Our task, however, is more difficult than theirs. Where they seek to orchestrate an audience, we will need to build an collective agent capable of both analysis and action.
Thanks to Jay Bernard for the thumbnail image.