THE rioting over recent weeks has a hinterland in a poisonous narrative perpetuated by Establishment party politicians. In particular, the small boats issue — culminating in a last-gasp electoral device by the Tories but sustained by the hypocrisy of the political class as a whole — gave an impetus to Nigel Farage’s electoral vehicle, Reform UK.

Anti-refugee, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment run through our monopoly media, and successive Tory governments share a poisonous politics that has made migration the issue on which much formal politics turns.

These riots drew in wide circles of people well beyond the minuscule fractions of fascists who, despite their pretensions, have little organisational reach, are thoroughly surveilled, and deeply penetrated.

These riots were made in Britain. Speculation from Establishment sources that the riots arose from Russian conspiracies or countervailing notions that Israeli intelligence lies behind the active role of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) are diversionary notions that hinder rather than help our understanding.

A critical mobilising factor is the social media reach of far-right and fascist influencers. But the deep wells of resentment and anger that exist in working-class communities in areas where the most egregious effects of capitalism’s general crisis and the peculiarly British way in which the shift from a manufacturing economy to casino capitalism is felt, is the foundation of this political crisis.

But no simply reductionist account that ascribes their cause to the dismal conditions in many working-class areas or to exploitation, wage theft and austerity is satisfactory.

An ideology, conscious or not, that draws on the corrupting influence of the British empire and the racism that accompanied the super-exploitation of the colonies and the incorporation of big sections of the English, Welsh and Scots in both administering this capitalist enterprise and profiting from it, must underpin any analysis.

Deeply ingrained racism has been sustained for generations by a presentation of migration as an alien invasion. This obscures the hypocrisy of a ruling class for whom the aggregation of a labour force by people who can be paid less for necessary work boosts their extraction of surplus from the working class as a whole.

The market in human labour is international. Five-and-a-half million Brits are immigrants in other countries.

Demystifying migration in the functioning of the profit system will go a long way — especially if it is presented with a truthful account of imperial Britain’s migratory flows that presaged any inflow to Britain of colonial peoples.

Digital demagogues and anti-social media

People like Tommy Robinson are a peculiarly contemporary variant of the corrupt entrepreneurial spirit that characterises Britain’s financialised economy.

His Musk-enabled and reinstated X account is approaching a million followers and intersects with the tangle of residual English Defence League networks that survived the collapse of that initiative. Toxic types like the online misogynist Andrew Tate and hosts of US-based operators add to the cacophony

It was the social media reach of Robinson that enabled a thousands-strong far-right rally in central London last month where the full range of Trumpian weirdness was on show. This went beyond the well-worn themes of small boats and asylum-seekers to include climate change denialism, an anti-vax sentiment that chimes with hostility to “big pharma” and a faked fusing of anxieties about women’s safety with a crude hostility to trans people.

How the people who make up the electoral support for Farage and Reform UK react and how far these strata intersect with the riot tendency, and whether this bloc of opinion coheres, will be the product of a political and ideological struggle that breaches the bounds of formal parliamentary politics.

In this, Farage functions as an exceptionally adept ideological entrepreneur, creating and discarding political vehicles with the dexterity of MPs flipping their properties.

He saw an opportunity in Rishi Sunak’s maladroit bid to get a jump on Labour and abandoned his lucrative love-in with Donald Trump for the allure of Clacton.

Farage made something of an error in responding to the Southport killings in terms that reinforced the fascist rendering of these events. He asked, not as an MP with a parliamentary platform, why the deaths weren’t being “treated as terror-related” and speculated whether or not the “truth is being withheld from us.”

Farage is a privately educated commodity broker with a mercenary outlook that expresses the venal politics and economic ideas of a section of parasitic finance capital that finds itself at odds with the main monopoly groups and financial interests that remain the decisive movers in the ruling class.

His strategy is to find leverage by appealing to the most racist sections of the nation, but he and his leadership cabal are a long way from the thinking of most Reform UK voters, except on a relatively narrow range of issues.

With backing for Brexit their common position, Reform UK voters are a cross-class mixture that includes workers, skilled and less skilled, small business people, tradesmen and women, with very few young people and a good number of pensioners.

A recent YouGov poll shows that they mostly reflect reactionary obsessions about issues like cross-Channel migrants, sentencing policy, multiculturalism, the death penalty and environment and climate change initiatives, but on many basic economic and class issues a majority are far from the Westminster consensus.

Nearly eight out of 10 think that rich people get around the law or get off more easily than poorer people; that big business takes advantage of ordinary people and that ordinary people don’t get their fair share of the nation’s wealth.

They think that utilities like energy, water and railways should be run in the public sector; that the rich should be taxed more than average earners and that transport spending should prioritise public transport.

Among the significant numbers of less class-conscious Reform UK voters, however, there is also a lot of confused thinking.

For example, 42 per cent think the government should not redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off, but 33 per cent think it should. This coexists with a belief that welfare benefits are too generous (60 per cent), and that taxes and public spending are too high (51 per cent).

On social questions the picture is mixed: 65 per cent think same-sex marriages should be permitted but it should not be legal to change gender.

Reform UK voters are divided on foreign policy; they think defence spending should be raised (77 per cent), but only 44 per cent back continued support for Ukraine while 39 per cent want a negotiated peace.

Significantly, on most economic questions Reform UK voters are closer to the overall views of the British as a whole than they are to Conservative voters but on some issues — further away.

On migration, the 78 per cent of Reform UK voters who think that multiculturalism has made Britain worse is more than 30 points higher than among the 47 per cent of Tory voters and much higher than among the wider public (32 per cent).

On the obsession with small boat arrivals, 86 per cent want the immediate removal of such migrants as against the Tory rate of 64 per cent and twice as high as the all-Britain rate of 41 per cent.

Reform UK voters are far more likely than Britons generally to think that young people lack respect for “traditional British values” (56 per cent), but less than the 81 per cent of Tory voters.

Reform UK voters are also significantly more likely to want further separation from the EU, 61 per cent, versus 43 per cent of Tory voters and 22 per cent of all Britons.

Running through the responses is grievance fused with a sense of loss.

The Farage paradox: Reform UK is all mixed up

Our first priority must be to isolate the fascists and that element that is most easily led to racist rioting.

While Keir Starmer’s punitive sentencing strategy makes potential rioters think another pint is a more attractive proposition than three years in jail, a law-and-order response does not tackle the political problem.

A broader strategy that includes defeating Farage must lie in bringing out the contradictions between the class questions on which Reform UK’s leadership — fractious as it is — differs from their electorate, combined with winning a wider understanding of the role of migration in capital accumulation and exploitation along with the need for a rational, non-racist immigration policy.

The forces that talk loudest about “Britain” — Farage and his imitators on the Robinson fascist fringe — have immediate mercenary aims but owe their deeper ideological allegiance to the partnership of British capital and US big business and an Anglo-American imperialist alliance that is facing new and unprecedented global challenges.

Reform UK is an enterprise that is deeply alien to working-class values.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.