LET’S start with the language and analysis. The tidal wave of racist gatherings that swept across Britain was designed for riot, not protest. 

It isn’t enough to describe them in terms of mindless violence, working-class bigotry or plain ignorance.

Behind the ugliness lies an organised attempt to undermine British democracy, divide working-class communities and shift political attention from redistribution to retribution.

The roots to Britain’s riots are not going to be found in Russia. Instead, look at the sources that have poured £1.5 million into Tommy Robinson’s personal bank accounts and who bankroll the lobbyists behind him. 

The same funders of the EDL support an ugly cluster of right-wing activists, both in politics and in the press. Their interests are more closely tied to undermining Palestinians than serving Putin.

Long before Benjamin Netanyahu’s onslaught on Gaza, right-wing lobbyists queued up to deflect criticism of Israel. Any mention of the country’s apartheid system was to be defined as anti-semitic.

Then, as Gaza slipped from apartheid into genocide, international criticism of the slaughter had to be neutered. In Britain, this meant shifting criticism onto peace protesters — redefining them as “hate marches” — and onto the very presence of Muslims in British society. 

Robinson, the EDL and their political allies were happy to oblige. Anything was acceptable as long as it avoided talk of suspending Britain’s arms sales to Israeli or redefining the IDF as a terrorist organisation. 

Lighting the fire

To be fair, the far right could not have triggered Britain’s riots and looting without the help of the Tory government. Over 14 years they had looted the British economy and created a poverty pandemic that will take longer to recover from than Covid.

I say this not to justify the riots or the racism, but as evidence of how easy it is to turn the dispossessed and exploited against notional outsiders. Eight hundred years ago Britain did this to Jews, when Edward I expelled them from the Kingdom of England. Today, the scapegoats are Muslims.

The silver lining to the riots, however, is that they spectacularly backfired. Across the land, people came together, demonstrating that we are so much better than the racists would have you believe.

From the ordinariness of everyday lives, people came to each other’s rescue. Streets were cleared, walls rebuilt, roads resurfaced, food and refreshments spontaneously offered, and shop frontages repaired. Communities everywhere came together in “not-in-my-name” solidarities.

Genuinely, “hope not hate” took to the streets.

Scouseland for all

It is important for me to begin his recognition in Southport. I still want to weep with the families of the bereaved and injured. Nothing can erase their grief or trauma. But it was from here that community compassion swept in to displace hatred.

Flowers and toys appeared in front of the building where the children had been attacked. Before breakfast, shops and supermarkets were sending water buckets to keep the flowers fresh. Neighbours arranged the dolls and toys as uplifting tributes.

Glaziers sent glass. Builders merchants sent equipment. Workers arrived with tools. And Muslims turned out to feed everyone. The mosque even invited protesters in to discuss their grievances, and fed those who turned up. 

I would expect nothing less from Merseyside. It is part of the DNA you grow up with. People look after each other. It’s how we get through the hardest of times. But this was happening everywhere.

The far-right riots ended up demonstrating that our society is so much better than the ugliness that fascists were looking for. In every part of the country, people recognised that such carnage stains us all.

We must nurture this response and keep it separate from retribution.

Starmer steps up

To be fair, Labour’s immediate response was clear and unflinching. Keir Starmer’s cancellation of his holiday plans, in order to focus on the riots, stood in marked contrast to the AWOL track record of his Tory predecessors. 

Starmer’s promise of swift, firm punishment of rioters, through the courts, is actually being delivered. To those hovering around the margins of riot and intimidation it offers a cautionary warning. Moreover, we are quickly discovering that many were far from misguided innocents. 

I welcome the fact that judges have spelled out how much some of the rioters have cost society from their own lifetimes of crime, long before the riots. And while it breaks my heart to hear of people trashing libraries and social amenities, it is also worth putting this “cost of criminality” into a wider context.

Campaign group We Own It has pointed out that, since 2010 financial “vandalism” by the Conservative government trashed 800 libraries, 279 school playing fields, 600 police stations, 750 youth centres, 1,416 Surestart centres, 1,086 swimming pools and 25,000 NHS beds.

I can’t wait to hear of the prison sentences former government ministers can expect.

Meanwhile, for ordinary rioters, this could still be the start of a journey that might change their lives. To do so just requires a bigger vision; one based on redirection rather than retribution. It is the challenge Labour has yet to embrace.

A Civilian Conservation Corps?

With the whole of society now facing environmental shocks from the “wild weather” upheavals of climate change, “payback” rather than prison must become the order of the day. For this, the starting point would be the ecosystem rather than the penal system. 

Turn the clock back 90 years and we even have a model of how it might work.

One month after his inauguration in 1933, president Franklin D Roosevelt set up the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was a cornerstone answer to the Great Depression and to the rebuilding of a society that might live more harmoniously with itself. 

In the decade that followed, some three million workers planted three billion trees, slowed the soil erosion on 40 million acres of farmland, created 800 state parks, 10,000 small reservoirs and 13,000 miles of hiking trails. 

The entirety of such a programme in Britain cannot be put on the shoulders of today’s rioters, but they could form the core of our own Civilian Conservation Corps.

Once established, this could then provide opportunities for wider cross-sections of people willing to learn how to work (collaboratively) on safeguarding our common future.

If Starmer had the sense to ask Ed Miliband to co-construct this, Britain might find itself with the foundations of a Green New Deal movement that offers security to us all.

Restraining the right

Such an approach would divert most rioters’ energies from the burning of cars and libraries, the looting of homes and shops and the assaults on individuals. More problematic, however, is how the fascist playbook would respond. 

This is not just Nigel Farage, the Tory right and the mainstream media. The bigger threats now come via social media, moguls, manipulators and bots.

National parliaments have yet to devise ways to constrain these threats to democracy itself. Something dramatic has to disrupt the disrupters. 

In the US, politicians are already arguing that those lobbying (and donating) on behalf of another country should register as “agents of a foreign power.”

Social media platforms that offer the same should face punitive tax rates and those advertising through them should lose all rights to discount advertising costs against tax liabilities.

All media tax allowances could be made conditional on meeting a defined threshold re the removal of racist, fascist and false news activities on their platforms.

And all media outlets should perhaps pay a “democracy levy” that funds independent investigative journalism, directly challenging the core of disinformation politics.

Labour cannot do all this on its own but, as part of a wider international movement, it will be central to the prospects of rebuilding democracy in the interests of people and planet rather than authoritarian regimes and oligarchs.

This too is part of the politics of cleaning our own streets.

Alan Simpson is a former Labour member of Parliament (1992-2010) for Nottingham South.