Saturday 10 August 2024

The sausage roll road to fascism

 

One of the more absurd images to emerge over the past week was the one of the topless guy liberating a tray of sausage rolls from a Greggs shop during the riots in Hull. Whilst we cannot be completely sure that it wasn’t a carefully-planned intention to arm himself with sausage rolls to wave in the face of Muslims whose religion does not permit the consumption of pork, rather in the manner of pointing kryptonite at Superman, it seems much more probable that he was just feeling a little peckish. And we have no conclusive evidence to suggest that he’d know the difference between a pork sausage roll and a vegan one anyway.

Some politicians – and not just those of the political right – have suggested that stopping the riots depends at least in part on dealing with the so-called ‘legitimate concerns’ of the protesters about immigration. I don’t really understand what those ‘legitimate concerns’ might be, but I struggle even more to comprehend the link between a concern about immigration and a daring raid on purveyors of sausage rolls (delicious though they may be). It’s true that some services in the UK are under pressure – such as housing, education, social care and health. But the last two of those would be under even more pressure if it were not for staff who have come from elsewhere in the world to work in those sectors. And in more general terms, those pressures are more to do with underfunding by successive governments – a policy which Labour apparently intends to continue – than with such increase in demand as results from migration. Deliberately creating a shortage and then finding a convenient group to scapegoat is a divide-and-rule tactic which is as old as the hills.

It's also more than a little strange that an allegedly non-racist concern about total numbers manifests itself in the form of direct and violent action against the adherents of one particular religion. Even if the original rumour about the religion and background of the alleged assailant in Southport had been true, the leap to blaming, and then seeking to punish, all adherents of that religion surely owes more to prejudice than to logic. If I recall correctly, Marx once said something along the lines of: ‘anger in the multitude is enough – just give me six in the country who understand’. It’s not something which applies only to the political ‘left’. Those out on the streets attacking immigrants don’t need to have a worked-though political philosophy; they don’t need to be fascists themselves. They merely need to express their anger, whipped up by those who would use that anger for their own ends. And even some of those doing the fomenting don’t need any sort of ideology to underpin their actions. If the UK were to descend into fascism, it wouldn’t be the likes of ‘Tommy Robinson’ who would end up as dictator, it would be one or other of those who offer ‘solutions’ to the ‘problems’ which they themselves have blown up in the minds of the many. Locking up the pawns who are ‘merely’ angry might be a necessary step in the short term, but it’s dealing with the symptom. The ones we should really beware of are those whose ‘solutions’ involve authoritarian rule and restrictions of freedom.

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