The Very Online right has gone down a very dark path

What do the right and the woke have in common? At first glance, the answer may not be obvious. But in the aftermath of the anti-immigration riots across the UK, the similarities between the identitarians and the Very Online right are becoming harder to ignore.

Disillusioned and frustrated by uncontrolled immigration, by an elite class that seems to despise Britain and by a lack of a real small-c conservative party, more and more young right-wingers are gravitating towards grievance-based identity politics. Take Harrison Pitt, a fellow of the New Culture Forum and an editor at the European Conservative, who claimed on X that a counter-protester holding a sign reading ‘let the pigs eat the gammon’ (a reference to the uncharacteristically heavy-handed policing of the riots) was an example of anti-white racism. It was, Pitt said, a ‘racial slur against the host population of Britain’. He went on to demand that the Crown Prosecution Service charge the protesters with ‘incitement to racial hatred’. While there are certainly valid conversations to be had about two-tier policing, or the classist bigotry of the left, this doesn’t make charging anyone with the crime of ‘hate speech’ any less absurd. Whatever happened to defending free speech?

Or take comedian and right-wing commentator Nick Dixon. He described a case in which white police officers were purposefully passed over for promotion in favour of a non-white colleague as an example of how ‘systemic anti-white racism exists in every part of our society’. Similarly, GB News’s Steven Edginton called it ‘disgusting anti-white racism’. Again, we should all be critical of DEI practices that divide people up by race, but does anyone seriously believe they are driven by ‘anti-white’ animus?

Pitt and Edginton have flirted with notions of white ethnic racial peril. Pitt recently delivered a lecture presenting migration as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white Brits, warning that they are due to become ‘a minority in their own homeland’. He suggested that even former prime minister Rishi Sunak had ‘not integrated well’ into British society, because he once said diversity ‘built Britain’. Edginton, in an interview with Liz Truss, asked the former PM if she was ‘concerned’ or felt ‘threatened’ by ‘the decline in the white population in Britain and America’. This is racial identity politics on steroids.

The parallels between the arguments of the right and those of the woke are striking. Many on the left cheered on the violent and destructive Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. Now it is the right that is seeking to justify rioting. Actor turned commentator Laurence Fox suggested that rioters setting fire to a police station in Sunderland was a valid response to prime minister Keir Starmer declaring a ‘war on his own people’. Just like the woke, many on the online right appear unphased by civil unrest, as long as it aligns with their politics and is carried out by ‘their people’.

This isn’t to say that there are no real conversations to be had about identity and immigration. Of course, the woke elite’s periodic cries that St George wasn’t really English are embarrassing. The idea that ‘diversity’ is the only true British value is absurd. But the increasingly loud calls from the right for ‘mass deportations’, for ethno-nationalism, as well as shrill cries of ‘anti-white racism’, will sound just as mad to the average Briton. They certainly don’t contain any solutions to Britain’s many challenges.

The reality many right-wingers fail to appreciate is that many of the problems they point to come not from migrants or people of colour, but from the white-dominated British establishment. In fact, polling suggests that ethnic-minority Brits also want immigration to be reduced. Unsurprisingly, most British people, of all ethnicities and backgrounds, are concerned about Britain’s fraying social fabric and crumbling institutions. The right could be making common cause with minority Britons, instead of attacking them.

The right’s reflexive blaming of mass migration and multiculturalism for all the country’s ills is unhelpful. It’s difficult to see how either could be responsible for the 2008 financial crash, the energy crisis, the pandemic-induced recession, post-lockdown inflation or the de-facto decriminalisation of many crimes. While there is evidence that immigration has contributed to increased rental and house prices, it is far from the sole driver, particularly in areas like Scotland, which have relatively low levels of immigration. Immigrants are also helping to prop up the NHS, with many newcomers paying an NHS surcharge.

Though some studies indicate that immigration from certain countries can be a net loss to the economy, there is also evidence suggesting that the children of these immigrants perform extremely well. Ultimately, it is not the fault of immigrants that politicians have chosen to drive the UK towards managed decline. The fixation on immigration and migrants lets our elites off the hook.

It is a bitter pill to swallow to see our country go in a direction that many of us never voted for. But few would agree that reviving the ideas in Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech is the way to turn things around. Today’s online debates over whether ‘Enoch was right’ suggest that the right has taken a very dark, racially essentialist turn.

Rather than mirror the woke movement, the right would do better to challenge the assumptions behind its arguments. It is a shame that what passes off as ‘radical’ politics today, on both left and right, increasingly relies on identity politics and the weaponisation of grievance. This must be rejected, no matter which side it comes from.

Inaya Folarin Iman is a spiked columnist and founder of the Equiano Project.