The riots have been blamed on everything from the economy to Elon Musk. But the networks that mobilised violence on our streets were forged in opposition to vaccines and lockdowns
This seems like poor framing - "The policy to house asylum seekers in hotels was expanded in 2020, an attempt by the government to deal with the increased numbers of small boats crossing the Channel". It puts the focus on "small boats" and plays into the "stop the boats" agenda, by suggesting that's the core issue in asylum and immigration, rather than the government's actions to more or less halt the processing of asylum claims and close off "legal" routes. It's the backlog that was behind the use of hotels, and it's the "hostile environment" that's played into this violence. Use of hotels was not a reasonable response by a reasonable government to a problem they had no part in creating.
Would recommend reading Naomi Klein's most recent book Doppelganger to anyone interested in the web of connections between different online conspiratorial communities and how the pandemic fed many new people into this web.
As a bit of personal anecdotal evidence, I work on viral evolution and have done lots of work on SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19). I frequently hear all kinds of conspiracy theories when chatting to taxi drivers, waiters, strangers in pubs etc and answering the 'what do you do' question. I'm sure there's some degree of selection bias here in that I remember the conversations where people regale me with conspiracies better than those where they don't, but the numbers are really quite striking. This still happens often so it wasn't a 'blip' during the strict measures that left no lasting effect; just last week I had a taxi driver tell me about Dr Fauci and his nefarious links to Chinese bioweapon labs.
The vast majority of these people are friendly, polite, interested in my work and very happy to talk to an expert, even if I rarely feel I've managed to make any dent in their conspiratorial thinking. I have no doubt however that a minority of people who entered conspiratorial online communities during the pandemic picked up conspiratorial ideas about all sorts of other things. I have seen this happen in some of my personal relationships as well, although thankfully no one has gone fully down the far right rabbit hole. In general I think a lot of the longer-term problems caused by the pandemic have yet to fully come home to roost, especially among young people who were treated appallingly, and hopefully there will gradually be increasing attention and understanding of just how damaging it was.
A necessary and timely piece, and another excellent example of why I subscribe.
The narrative of "not from round here" is too easy, too cosy for us "nice" white people to pretend that it's an aberration born entirely out of the schemes of malicious actors. Yes, there are agitators, spivs, hustlers, and thugs helping to rile people up, but the hot mix of deprivation, misinformation, neglect, and underlying racism (both personal and systemic) have all come together to remind us that all is not well in the UK in 2024, and that many people are scared, lonely, and feel forgotten. In the vein of a true armchair activist, "something must be done!". This includes getting rid of regressive welfare policies, having humane, transparent, efficient immigration policy, fairer taxation, and proper investment in underserved communities. The alternative for many are the promises of the populists and crypto-fascists that are all too ready to jump into people's social media feeds and timelines.
That being said, the recent wave of counter demonstrations help prove that many want a different UK. One can only hope that momentary solidarity can help catalyse the real fundamental change to help those most in need, both the recently arrived and those who feel "left behind".
We're all trying to make sense of the world and how it impacts on us. Conspiracy theories are tempting because they easily plug a gap.
Despite the evolution of our brains, we don't do critical thinking well as a species. I'm an archivist and records stretching back to the old Quarter Sessions and church court records, where ordinary people would bring their complaints and seek justice, show that gut feeling usually trumps evidence, and hearsay and gossip is often held by the complainants to be the same as evidence.
This interesting piece reinforces for me that hearsay and gossip now includes the wholesale acceptance by some of what they read online. The section in the piece about gaining the trust of others in online forums in areas of immediate concern going on to open up opportunities to share a different agenda is a variation on having a chat with people down the pub and hearing the things you want to hear. The internet is a massive pub, though, and your mate with the level head isn't necessarily sitting next to you.
In my work, I've run sessions for undergraduates to introduce them to weighing evidence in research, including talking them through primary source versus secondary source material, questioning narratives, comparing different sources, contextualising what 'feels right', and so on. It's 35 years since I left school. I don't remember being taught critical thinking specifically in school. History was largely taught by rote. I studied sciences as well as history, though, and gained an understanding of gathering and weighing evidence from them, and then developed that understanding while studying for my degree. The internet was in its infancy back then, and I have been struck in the sessions I've run by just how much some students take from online sources without question. How much more so for people trying to make sense of the world without the requirement of a formal education framework?
I don't know how we change this, by the way. I'm just thinking out loud. Thanks, The Mill, for giving me something to chew on.
An interesting article giving an insight into how we have arrived at the present situation. I think the last government has a lot to answer for by its inaction to process asylum seekers claims to take refuge in this Country and the knock on effect that has resulted.
Trouble is, all the apparently outrageous comments about small-boat immigrants are true. They come without papers so we don't know who they are. And then they get housed. You do not have to be far right to see this as a recipe for trouble, even if you remember the 70s bullying and hate to see it coming back.
All true, Chris? That's pretty outrageous itself. You'll know there are obvious reasons why many people arrive without papers, given the situations they're coming from, although some people will want to promote the idea that we're being infiltrated by terrorists going through hell and risking their lives to try and cross the Channel. And as for the 70s "bullying" you should know it was much more than that, fuelled by racism as are the riots and attacks today, which as we've seen aren't far from lynchings.
In this whole debate, we are divided between sympathy for real refugees and concern about the game-players who will disappear into various underworlds - both facts of life. the over-riding fact is that Europe created an unacceptable loophole in its border system which led to the Brexit vote and all that has followed. Don't deny the racism, btw, but the "bullying" was the worst of it. And is again.
'... the networks that mobilised violence on our streets were forged in opposition to vaccines and lockdown.' Are you sure? It seems to me more like some people opposed or questioned vaccines and lockdowns, across a continuum of opinions, and some mobilised violence, and a few did both. Unfair to say one enabled the other.
Good piece which identifies that all the rhetoric from both left and right misses the nuances in our response to feeling under threat.
The government response -its all hard right hooligans- misses the point . When substantial people form a different culture come into a local neighborhood its inevitable that people feel threatened. its no coincidence that the majority of them are placed in poor areas . if life has given you a bowl of lemons its simple to throw them at the other
This seems like poor framing - "The policy to house asylum seekers in hotels was expanded in 2020, an attempt by the government to deal with the increased numbers of small boats crossing the Channel". It puts the focus on "small boats" and plays into the "stop the boats" agenda, by suggesting that's the core issue in asylum and immigration, rather than the government's actions to more or less halt the processing of asylum claims and close off "legal" routes. It's the backlog that was behind the use of hotels, and it's the "hostile environment" that's played into this violence. Use of hotels was not a reasonable response by a reasonable government to a problem they had no part in creating.
Would recommend reading Naomi Klein's most recent book Doppelganger to anyone interested in the web of connections between different online conspiratorial communities and how the pandemic fed many new people into this web.
As a bit of personal anecdotal evidence, I work on viral evolution and have done lots of work on SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19). I frequently hear all kinds of conspiracy theories when chatting to taxi drivers, waiters, strangers in pubs etc and answering the 'what do you do' question. I'm sure there's some degree of selection bias here in that I remember the conversations where people regale me with conspiracies better than those where they don't, but the numbers are really quite striking. This still happens often so it wasn't a 'blip' during the strict measures that left no lasting effect; just last week I had a taxi driver tell me about Dr Fauci and his nefarious links to Chinese bioweapon labs.
The vast majority of these people are friendly, polite, interested in my work and very happy to talk to an expert, even if I rarely feel I've managed to make any dent in their conspiratorial thinking. I have no doubt however that a minority of people who entered conspiratorial online communities during the pandemic picked up conspiratorial ideas about all sorts of other things. I have seen this happen in some of my personal relationships as well, although thankfully no one has gone fully down the far right rabbit hole. In general I think a lot of the longer-term problems caused by the pandemic have yet to fully come home to roost, especially among young people who were treated appallingly, and hopefully there will gradually be increasing attention and understanding of just how damaging it was.
A necessary and timely piece, and another excellent example of why I subscribe.
The narrative of "not from round here" is too easy, too cosy for us "nice" white people to pretend that it's an aberration born entirely out of the schemes of malicious actors. Yes, there are agitators, spivs, hustlers, and thugs helping to rile people up, but the hot mix of deprivation, misinformation, neglect, and underlying racism (both personal and systemic) have all come together to remind us that all is not well in the UK in 2024, and that many people are scared, lonely, and feel forgotten. In the vein of a true armchair activist, "something must be done!". This includes getting rid of regressive welfare policies, having humane, transparent, efficient immigration policy, fairer taxation, and proper investment in underserved communities. The alternative for many are the promises of the populists and crypto-fascists that are all too ready to jump into people's social media feeds and timelines.
That being said, the recent wave of counter demonstrations help prove that many want a different UK. One can only hope that momentary solidarity can help catalyse the real fundamental change to help those most in need, both the recently arrived and those who feel "left behind".
Thanks for writing this collaborative piece, let’s hope unpicking this mess helps us solve some of the problems and bring about greater harmony.
Thank you for making some sense of why the awful events of the past 2 weeks have come about.
We're all trying to make sense of the world and how it impacts on us. Conspiracy theories are tempting because they easily plug a gap.
Despite the evolution of our brains, we don't do critical thinking well as a species. I'm an archivist and records stretching back to the old Quarter Sessions and church court records, where ordinary people would bring their complaints and seek justice, show that gut feeling usually trumps evidence, and hearsay and gossip is often held by the complainants to be the same as evidence.
This interesting piece reinforces for me that hearsay and gossip now includes the wholesale acceptance by some of what they read online. The section in the piece about gaining the trust of others in online forums in areas of immediate concern going on to open up opportunities to share a different agenda is a variation on having a chat with people down the pub and hearing the things you want to hear. The internet is a massive pub, though, and your mate with the level head isn't necessarily sitting next to you.
In my work, I've run sessions for undergraduates to introduce them to weighing evidence in research, including talking them through primary source versus secondary source material, questioning narratives, comparing different sources, contextualising what 'feels right', and so on. It's 35 years since I left school. I don't remember being taught critical thinking specifically in school. History was largely taught by rote. I studied sciences as well as history, though, and gained an understanding of gathering and weighing evidence from them, and then developed that understanding while studying for my degree. The internet was in its infancy back then, and I have been struck in the sessions I've run by just how much some students take from online sources without question. How much more so for people trying to make sense of the world without the requirement of a formal education framework?
I don't know how we change this, by the way. I'm just thinking out loud. Thanks, The Mill, for giving me something to chew on.
An interesting article giving an insight into how we have arrived at the present situation. I think the last government has a lot to answer for by its inaction to process asylum seekers claims to take refuge in this Country and the knock on effect that has resulted.
Trouble is, all the apparently outrageous comments about small-boat immigrants are true. They come without papers so we don't know who they are. And then they get housed. You do not have to be far right to see this as a recipe for trouble, even if you remember the 70s bullying and hate to see it coming back.
All true, Chris? That's pretty outrageous itself. You'll know there are obvious reasons why many people arrive without papers, given the situations they're coming from, although some people will want to promote the idea that we're being infiltrated by terrorists going through hell and risking their lives to try and cross the Channel. And as for the 70s "bullying" you should know it was much more than that, fuelled by racism as are the riots and attacks today, which as we've seen aren't far from lynchings.
In this whole debate, we are divided between sympathy for real refugees and concern about the game-players who will disappear into various underworlds - both facts of life. the over-riding fact is that Europe created an unacceptable loophole in its border system which led to the Brexit vote and all that has followed. Don't deny the racism, btw, but the "bullying" was the worst of it. And is again.
'... the networks that mobilised violence on our streets were forged in opposition to vaccines and lockdown.' Are you sure? It seems to me more like some people opposed or questioned vaccines and lockdowns, across a continuum of opinions, and some mobilised violence, and a few did both. Unfair to say one enabled the other.
Good piece which identifies that all the rhetoric from both left and right misses the nuances in our response to feeling under threat.
The government response -its all hard right hooligans- misses the point . When substantial people form a different culture come into a local neighborhood its inevitable that people feel threatened. its no coincidence that the majority of them are placed in poor areas . if life has given you a bowl of lemons its simple to throw them at the other
Excellent piece.