The UK’s politico-media complex fuels hatred and violence against immigrants, Muslims and non-white people through systematic narratives, but recent community resistance offers hope for change
[The following text & images are taken from chapter 5 of the article ‘What We Do Not Forget,’ first published in the zine accompanying our 2024 We Do Not Forget mini-album / EP release]
In the summer of 2024 all across the UK, ‘far-right’ extremists targeted immigrants, Muslims and non-white people generally with coordinated violence; along with organisations that help facilitate immigration. Of course people need to be held accountable for their own actions. However, this also includes those who have conceived and proliferated the narratives of hatred that have systematically vilified and demonised immigrants, Muslims and non-white people generally over many decades. These narratives have throughly permeated large swathes of the public consciousness and have shaped a false reality for millions.
Those behind such narratives are collectively known as the politico-media complex: a collusion between elements within the government, private interests, the corporate media and associated regulatory bodies like the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO).
The extremity of language used to demonise and vilify the aforementioned groups has been escalating in recent years, exacerbated to some extent by the binary opposition encouraged on social media platforms in order to drive engagement.
As far back as 2015 the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights urged the UK’s tabloid press to curb incitement to hatred in the wake of some particularly horrible language written by Katie Hopkins. She was referring to migrants as cockroaches in much the same way that the Nazis referred to Jews during the Holocaust and Hutus referred to Tutsis during the Rwandan Genocide. Complaints ensued but in the end nothing was done about it. The IPSO ruled that Katie Hopkins was within her rights to say these things because migrants are not defined as a specific group of people.
The UK’s politico-media complex clearly demonstrated then that it has no intention of restricting the use of these narratives. The real reason for this, I believe, is not because of some noble adherence to free speech but because these narratives are deliberately constructed and deployed to influence public perception. That wave of hatred towards immigrants in 2015—enabled by the politico-media complex—laid the groundwork for the EU referendum… and it worked.
This latest wave of violence is partly a consequence of the politico-media complex’s shameless deployment of hateful narratives that has, despite the Black Lives Matter movement and many other grass roots efforts to the contrary, continued unabated for at least four or five decades. Anti-Muslim rhetoric in particular helps to maintain a level of public mistrust of Arabic nations that feeds into pro-Israeli narratives and helps justify military actions in the Middle East.
Each person that commits an act of violence still bears responsibility themselves but if the politico-media complex remains unchallenged in any significant way then all we can expect is more of the same violence.
That said, one highly positive development is the extent to which these acts of violence were resisted by local communities. In the final week of escalation, plans were leaked and resistance was organised; in many cases outnumbering those intent on violence to such an extent that they were forced to back down.
To me this was an unusually large and visible demonstration by people in the UK who do not subscribe to the vilification and demonisation of immigrants et al, and who are sick and tired of having their cultural and national identities hijacked by purveyors and subscribers of hateful narratives. We count ourselves among them and the fact that they significantly outnumbered their counterparts in many places is encouraging.
[To be continued in the final Part 6: Breaking the cycle: challenging narratives, power and oppression]
