Rightwingers warn of another blaze of summer riots in Britain – but they're the ones striking the match

The Guardian

3 days ago

A last stretch of this strange, uneasy summer remains. Between now and September, there could conceivably be further outbreaks of the kind of violence that rightwing politicians and their media allies have been frantically predicting. But for now, behold a fascinating spectacle: a country quietly refusing to chaotically combust, despite being endlessly encouraged to do so.
One word in particular symbolises the gap between hyped-up rhetoric and everyday reality. 'Tinderbox' was first used in the mid-16th century, to describe a crude instrument for starting fires: a container that carried a piece of either flint or steel, and a pocketful of the dry, flammable material that gave the device its name. With the invention of matches, the use of such implements fell away, and the word began its passage to how it is used today: as political shorthand for any situation supposedly on the brink of explosion. And here we are: over the past few weeks, 'tinderbox' has become an inescapable cliche.
At the end of July, the Institute for Public Policy Research published a report to mark the first anniversary of 2024's riots, which claimed that the loss of communities' shared spaces – pubs, youth clubs, community centres – can create 'tinderbox conditions for violence'. At around the same time, the protests and violence outside hotels used for people seeking asylum began to attract the self-same description. 'We need an emergency cross-party cabinet to stop tinderbox Britain exploding,' wrote a columnist in the Daily Telegraph. The former home secretary Sajid Javid warned that the UK is 'sitting on a tinderbox of disconnection and division'. And not long after, his one-time colleague Robert Jenrick – now the shadow justice secretary, and a man on constant manoeuvres – told the Today programme that 'the country is like a tinderbox right now'.
All this noise is part of a much bigger political development: a ballooning narrative about complete social breakdown. Just as people on the left have been predicting for at least 150 years that capitalism is about to chaotically implode under the weight of its own contradictions, so some of the loudest voices on the post-Brexit right have come up with their own version of a similarly historic meltdown: a vision of the immediate future in which rampant wokery, crime, failed immigration policy, weak policing and general establishment decay and corruption will lead inexorably to what Nigel Farage calls 'societal collapse'.
The Reform UK leader is now well into his summer of crime campaign, a breakneck run of pronouncements dispensed from behind a lectern adorned with the slogan 'Britain is lawless'. He says that 'the social contract between the governed and the government is on the edge of breaking down'. And for months – if not years – helpful mood music has been provided by elements of the rightwing media. Again, the comment section of the Telegraph offers no end of examples: a newspaper that was once a byword for the political stiff upper lip now constantly offers such warnings as 'Britain is lurching towards civil war, and nobody knows how to stop it'.
All this echoes the kind of con trick used by reactionaries and authoritarians down the ages: warning of the country's supposedly likely collapse in the hope that the rest of us support all the hardline policies they say would stop the rot. In Farage's case, apocalyptic rhetoric feeds the idea that now things are so bad, the public ought to take a chance on his completely untested party. But also, the warnings of imminent social breakdown from Tory and Reform UK politicians often sound quietly gleeful, as if they believe that some great moment of rupture is exactly what Britain needs, to wake up from its slumber.
Their talk always comes with caveats: Farage, for example, follows 'Goodness knows what may happen over the course of the summer' with 'We would encourage people to protest quietly and sensibly.' But, like Jenrick, he still sounds like someone with an alarmingly ambivalent view of unrest and chaos. Both of them make hyped-up claims of 'two-tier justice' and draw questionable connections between migration and crime, which are much easier to popularise online than the comparatively complex reasons why they are specious. Put simply, they warn of disorder while recklessly rattling the tinderbox.
Over the weekend, all this hit a new low. Friday and Saturday saw another spate of hotel protests, in locations including Portsmouth, Bristol, Nuneaton and Norwich. Compared with predictions of massed disorder, not much happened: a much bigger story, in fact, was the arrest of more than 400 people at demonstrations against the proscribing of Palestine Action. So, for want of a better story, the Mail on Sunday gave Jenrick – as ever, with the air of a callow opportunist flirting with mob politics – its front-page splash. 'I certainly don't want my children to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally, and about whom we know next to nothing,' he said. The accompanying messaging was less than subtle: an inside spread put a picture of Jenrick and his three daughters at what looked like a middle-English fete, next to an image of smiling young men 'aboard a boat in France yesterday'.
Just to be clear, the grim scenes that have materialised at those hotels are the signs not just of far-right activism and provocation, but broken policy. No one should underestimate how much the grooming gangs scandal has given many people a deep fear about the safety of women and girls, not least in places that have long felt ignored and neglected. But it is perfectly possible to acknowledge those plain facts while also highlighting something equally obvious: that the spectacle of politicians knowingly peddling inflammatory narratives is nauseating – and that, in the absence of the kind of countrywide immolation we were warned about, they are starting to look like desperate people throwing matches on kindling that refuses to ignite. That is a remarkable way for self-styled patriots to behave, and it would be nice to see a few Labour politicians loudly making such an obvious point. But we probably shouldn't get our hopes up.
Out in the real world, a lot of places suggest a social condition much more complicated than we hear from the prophets of British armageddon. The other week, I spent 36 hours in Pontefract, a classically post-industrial northern town that is part of the constituency represented by Yvette Cooper, the home secretary. Rather than a picture of incipient chaos and seething rage, it presents something much less dramatic: the feeling of a place that remains reluctantly locked into decline, but that also has a palpable and defiant community spirit. Its local council faces an £88m budget deficit over the next five years, and is in the midst of even more cuts; the everyday scene on its main streets suggests a quiet stoicism that the forces responsible for its predicament really don't deserve.
Neither Farage nor Jenrick's parties offer anything that would assist its renewal and revival. The people who live there, in fact, deserve something a lot better than warnings that they are about to be plunged into civil war and social meltdown – issued, as ever, by the kind of privileged and cynical politicians who follow a time-honoured script: warning of apocalypse while keeping a very safe distance from the places they say are about to go up in flames.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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