Statues and gangs: fascist panic and policing
‘You’re antifa! This is what antifa looks like. She’s antifa!’ So shouted a far-right demonstrator at a police officer in London, in June 2020. The officer’s cordon separated him and his fellow demonstrators from the mostly young, black counter-demonstrators nearby. This choice moment in Britain’s white nationalist history occurred a week after the Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising had resounded over the Atlantic and swelled into demonstrations across the UK – the largest anti-racist mobilisations in the country’s history. This far-right rally gathered in response, purportedly to ‘defend statues’. Initially called by premier neo-Nazi Tommy Robinson, the ‘Democratic Football Lad’s Alliance’ (DFLA) and their allies from a constellation of far-right, nationalist and outright fascist groups were present. They were not racist, they insisted to reporters throughout the day, but rather incensed that last week the statue of Edward Colston, a man who had kidnapped, killed and enslaved 84,000 people from Africa and donated to the poor of England with some of the proceeds, had been dumped in the Bristol harbour by BLM demonstrators. The London monument to Winston Churchill, wartime Prime Minister and architect of the Bengal famine, too, had been daubed with the strapline ‘WAS A RACIST’ that day.
Seven days of media debate about etiquette and iconography ensued. A friend was asked to go on the BBC to discuss, as the producer made clear, not whether statues of men from ‘our history’ with ‘views we might not agree with’ should be taken down, but rather how. Weren’t petitions preferable to protests? Criminal damage was surely not an appropriate vehicle for positive change, it being, after all, a crime.
Were they condoning criminality? The course of the debate in the liberal press seemed to all but obscure what had first driven BLM demonstrators to take to the streets – racist police violence. Indeed, although at the protests police had gathered personal information from BLM demonstrators in legally dubious ways; a horse had trampled over and seriously injured one protester after police charged like cavalry on a group of unsuspecting young black people whom they had kettled; children as young as 12 had been arrested late at night; and police had held protesters, during a contagious disease epidemic, in tight cordons of hundreds until 2am – their conduct, their violence, their aggressive and repressive racism, was scarce mentioned.
For both a far right that accuses police of being ‘antifa’, and for liberal commentators terribly worried about crime, police are understood to exert force in order to uphold agreed-upon standards of conduct: to protect protesting citizens from fighting, property from being stolen, and statues from being dumped in rivers. I argue, however, that policing is being increasingly weaponised by far-right strategists who understand that the already existing racist brutality of liberal policing can be agitated to expand state violence against black, brown and migrant populations, and that perceived failures or insufficiencies in this violence may be leveraged to legitimise hard-right vigilantism in the form of racist attacks.
Fascist panic and the police
Largely absent from discussions about the conduct of BLM protests, the figure of the police returned to centre stage for the far-right’s counter-mobilisations. Alongside the above demonstrator’s accusation that police are ‘antifa’, the Met faced smoke flares, bottles, barriers, fireworks and punches thrown their way. Throughout the beer-saturated spree of racist chauvinism, demonstrators continually asked police: where were you last week? At least one crowd of several hundred demonstrators broke into song – ‘Where the fuck was you last week?’ – as police cordons held them back. The fascists were upset that cops had not defended the statues. But it was more than this. Previous defacements of those same statues at almost every mass demonstration in central London over the last decade had not solicited such a large, aggressive far-right response. They were upset more particularly that the police had not meted out appropriate discipline on the predominantly black protests for black lives. Then, tens of thousands filled the streets to condemn systematically racist, sometimes lethal, police violence, even as they were subjected to it; here, the far right were bussed in from across the country to say: this violence is not enough.
A number of liberal and centre-right commentators condemned far-right attacks on ‘our police’ while holding up their loutishness as an example of what an own-goal the march had been. They looked like thugs. Even Boris Johnson, a Prime Minister who has consistently refused to acknowledge or apologise for his own instances of gross racism, condemned the day’s ‘racist thuggery’ (on the sure footing that he had condemned BLM demonstrators’ own ‘thuggery’ a week prior). Certainly, the far right had shown themselves to be a disrespectful bunch. But were they there to be respectable? It is true they had gathered to affirm the titans of UK establishment history, enshrined in statues at its town centres: the slave traders, the genocide architects, the heroes of imperialist war. All in all, however, their tone was anti-establishment. It was vehemently anti-police. It was a show of force, a corrective to a perceived deficiency of police violence against black protest.
In the hours after, the state assembled its own correction. Until 2am that night, police stopped, searched and arrested scores of black people in central London. Many were simply walking in the area, unconnected with any protest. Within a day, the government had thrown more of its own weight into the debate. A new law would ensure that those found defacing war memorials would face ten years in prison. Though the charge of criminal damage already carries a maximum ten-year sentence, here was a new power specifically to discipline statue defacement. The state offered its settlement on the iconography debate: no more Churchills would be defaced without heavy penalties; there would be harsher disciplining of black protest. The monuments to the slavers, the genocide architects, the imperialist war heroes were now protected with penalties longer than the average sentence for rape. Calls from the right, and from the far right on the street that day, were absorbed, formalised and bolstered into the state’s own violence. Statue crime was now its own entity.
State abandonment and state violence are a couple. Police in the UK, the oldest police forces in the world, are born of imperialist violence and the liberal state’s need to discipline members of its labouring class, particularly the under- and unemployed. It is true that since the 1980s there has been a drastic expansion of policing in step with the ‘neoliberal turn’. Increased state capacity came to bloat prisons and police departments while restructuring elsewhere hollowed out support for citizens and scaled up privatisation. But the abandonment/violence relationship goes farther back than this. For populations who have been consistently underserved, excluded from and stripped of resources – black and brown people living in the metropole, for example – a lack of resources and abundance of policing have long been the standard conditions of a life in the UK. This was the case even when the welfare state, whose erosion marks the start of the neoliberal turn, was in its heyday. To be sure, no government in recent history or near imagined future would concede such a connection exists. But this historical baggage, the basis of policing’s function, drives its shift (far-) rightwards and proves a sturdy launchpad for far-right demands on its conduct.
An anatomy of fake crime
The British public imagination remains replete with nightmares about racialised crime. This year, there are statue desecrators. In the 1980s, there were muggers. There is always the figure of the thug. The illegal immigrant. The terrorist. More recently, over the past decade, there have emerged particularly frightening types of gang: drill music producing gangs escalating knife crime within inner cities and running ‘county lines’ of child drug dealers outside of them; and the ‘Asian grooming gang’, networks of Muslim South Asian men engaged in child sexual exploitation who target white girls. Each of these formations have congealed into public consciousness in as little as a few months through liberal media and political posturing. They are often then reified in policing infrastructure. Databases for suspected radicalised youth and gang members require remarkably low thresholds of proof to store an individual’s data for further surveillance, injunctions restricting their movement and activity, conditions on immigration or citizenship status, access to essential services, or increased intrusion of violent policing – including home raids and repeated stop and search – into everyday life. The Metropolitan Police’s Gangs Matrix, for example, stores the information of almost 4,000 people, 78% of whom are black, and the majority of whom – by the police’s own estimation – pose no threat.
It is perhaps worth a disclaimer that all crime is fake, in a sense. Demarcations of behaviour as illegal, and the differential ways in which criminal law and its enforcement operate in people’s lives, are in constant flux. Notwithstanding the development of these categories over time, even as they rest as stable entities, they do not operate consistently. Murder, for example, often carries a life sentence for a woman who kills her abusive partner; for the police officer who orchestrated the fatal shooting of an innocent man in a tube station, however, there was merely promotion to head of the Metropolitan Police. The formations of the mugger, thug, gang member or terrorist that haunt public imagination are woven together in this context. They stand out as particularly fraudulent because they so disingenuously link crime’s demarcation, and its control, to race and its proxies – one’s housing, name, local area, school, religion, migration status or ‘culture’. Though the violent conditions that such categories can impose on the lives of those caught within them are devastatingly real, nothing about these linkages is authentic.
The far right is agitated about all of these formations. Indeed, some of the largest far-right-led demonstrations in recent years have congealed them into a rallying cry against a generalised spread of black and brown criminals. In winter 2018, the DFLA held a mass London protest against ‘returning jihadists, [...] thousands of AWOL migrants, light sentences for paedophiles and an epidemic of gang and knife crime’. Central to their narration of why so many undisciplined criminals walk the streets are the police. Criminals are causing great harm to people, communities, towns and cities, to national security and to their conception of British cultural, racial and moral order because the police have failed. The mismanagement of gang and knife crime by the Metropolitan Police is chalked up to a soft touch and loss of control over the city, often attributed to a politically correct cautiousness on behalf of the city’s Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan. It is popular amongst far-right circles online, including mainstream far-right commentators such as Katie Hopkins, to nickname the city ‘Londonistan’ whenever another stabbing (that is, on the street, as opposed to any of the scores of fatal stabbings that occur in domestically violent settings) takes place. An Islamophobic slight against Khan himself, no doubt, and one indicating his perceived inability to control the black and brown residents of his city and their criminal violence. It is not a fringe view. President Donald Trump has regurgitated concern about Khan’s out of control London and its knife crime problem.
On ‘grooming gangs’, meanwhile, the story goes that rife abuse went uninvestigated and covered up by local authorities and police for fear of being ‘seen as racist’. Again, a desire for political correctness drove police to avoid investigating and prosecuting Asian men. This story entered wider public consciousness via a Times investigation that lifted the ‘Asian grooming gangs’ label from far-right literature and presented an equation of ‘sexual violence against white girls with national security’. Later commissioned reviews that went looking for evidence of these frightening and horrific networks found that in fact police had dismissed girls’ stories with victim-blaming misogyny. Far from being concerned with political correctness, police told a number of survivors they were ‘asking for it’, ‘risk fuelled’ or ‘prostituting [themselves]’. This total refusal of care, protection or interest in justice for these women and girls was intensified by their class position. Many were in institutional care settings, almost all were working class. They were black, white and Asian – and were targeted by groups of white men too. Police dismissals were, and continue to be, particularly acute when victims are themselves Muslim.
Fascist invocations of police violence
These formations of racialised criminals – the gang, the terror network, the Muslim paedophile, the statue desecrator – are galvanising the far right. Agitating around these issues has seen some of the largest far-right mobilisations in decades and has heavily shaped public opinion. On each of these criminal formations, the far right are demanding more from police. Far from opposing the law and order apparatus per se, they seek to expand and intensify their scope and use of force. Their rallies insist that policing, immigration enforcement and the prison apparatus are not bearing down heavily enough on these criminals, and by proxy the black and brown communities that harbour them. A cursory look at the DFLA’s website or those of organisations like Britain First, their allies on the street that day, shows petitions demanding escalated state violence: more weapons for police; no benefits, housing or essential services for criminals; more prisons, longer prison sentences and fewer ‘privileges’ in prison; and bans, deportations and revocations of citizenship for migrants. Again, this is not on the fringes of our politics. Access to essential services, from NHS care to free school meals, has been cut off for migrants with no access to public funds. Recent sentencing in child sexual exploitation cases saw Muslim men have their British citizenship revoked. Black people who have lived in the UK since they were toddlers have been deported as ‘foreign national offenders’ after traffic violations or drug possession convictions. Our youth offending institutions, though locking up far fewer young people in total than they were 10 years ago, are obscenely racially disproportionate: 28% of those incarcerated here are black, despite making up only 3% of the population.
In some ways, the far right well understand what police do. Indeed, police get to enact a great deal of disciplinary violence on the criminals that haunt fascists’ imaginations with apparent legitimacy and without consequence. Although, compared with Greece, the Philippines or the United States, British police are not an institution well-infiltrated or in overt alliance with the far right, they are proving to be a fulcrum for their demands. Far-right derision and condemnation of police failures can effectively agitate for the police, whose violence is born of racist control, to enact further state surveillance, discipline and brutality against black and brown people and political opponents. When police fail to mete out adequate violence, far-right figures are able not only to agitate for further police repression but to legitimise their own vigilantism: if the police won’t do it, who will? It is not incidental that alongside a growing and insurgent far-right movement in this country, we have an ongoing expansion of carceral capacity led by the British state. Bloated since the 1990s, there has been a continuous extension of activities categorised as criminal, of prison places, of police capacity, and of police access to – and powers over – people. Bolstered anew with tough law-and order talk from the government since 2019, policing can only ever go rightwards. The far right well understand this. It is time we did too. Abolish them.