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August 1, 2024 - 5:00pm
Did the Southport riot symbolise a return of the English far-Right? The English Defence League has been blamed for this week’s attack on the Southport Islamic Society Mosque, during which protesters pelted police with bricks while chanting “No surrender” and “English ’til I die”. In response, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has threatened to declare the EDL a terrorist organisation.
It is odd, however, that an EDL riot would break out in Liverpool. For one thing, the city has a strong anti-fascist tradition: on several recent occasions, visiting fascist groups have been chased out of town or prevented from leaving the train station. And while Liverpool is not immune to far-Right influences, the city’s extremists tend to have their own ways of doing things. Their style of “cosmic nationalism” — with socialist and countercultural elements — differs greatly from the English nationalism of Tommy Robinson and the EDL.
And yet many Liverpudlians appeared to turn up to the riot. Few people from Southport itself were involved in the violence, but it appears that many protesters had not travelled very far. In footage of the riot, you can hear a few Wools, and the odd Southerner bussed in for the occasion, but audio from the evening suggests that a large number of rioters were from Liverpool and its environs. Of the five arrests made so far, the addresses of four have been released, all of whom were from Merseyside: two from Southport, one from Liverpool, and one from St Helens.
We do not know whether these individuals are themselves “cosmic extremists”, but cosmic extremism has some key commonalities with the language and priorities of the contemporary far-Right. These include hostility to immigration, conspiratorial thinking, a focus on “nonces” and supposed threats to children, and vaccine scepticism.
But here the similarities end: whereas the mainstream far-Right embraces English or British patriotism, cosmic extremism often rejects both, with an anti-nationalist “Scouse not English” attitude. Similarly, while the mainstream far-Right tends to hold authoritarian views on law and order and supposedly reveres British history, institutions and figures such as Winston Churchill, the cosmic extremist has always despised the police, has never trusted the system, and is more likely to tell you that Churchill sent a gunboat to the Mersey during the 1911 transport strike.
One of the X accounts that was most prominent in speculating about the identity and motive of the Southport attacker was Anthony Fowler, a former boxer from Liverpool who has now become a prominent online conspiracist, combining anti-immigrant rhetoric with a promotion of New Age remedies. Fowler pushes the same line of CBD products as former footballer Matt Le Tissier, and there are shops in Liverpool which bear the two athlete’s grids in the windows, side by side.
More prominent than Fowler is UFC fighter Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett — currently the star of his own BBC series — who displays both sides of the cosmic extremist mindset. He’s known for leading chants of “Fuck the Tories” at his fights and claims to be a socialist, yet at the same time reportedly told Dagestani-born Muhammad Mokaev that he wasn’t really British, and called Georgian-Spanish fighter Ilia Topuria a mongrel while demanding he speak proper English.
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SubscribeThe evil racist who walked into a Taylor Swift dance club and stabbed white children is responsible for the protests. As you say, they were largely local people, and so the leftists – like Starmer, in his sickening speech just now – who always seek to label ordinary white people as quasi-terrorists, are responsible.
You know the system has a major problem when it starts labelling its own citizens as terrorists.
At the moment we don’t know enough about the perpetrator to indicate what drove him. What we do know is your racist reflex well ahead of that.
Lobbing bricks at the Police and threatening a part of the community that had nothing to do with it is nothing to do with ordinary folks so don’t cowardly be hiding behind that. It’s to do with ignorant idiots getting played by malign actors posting conspiracy.
Childish comment, sorry. You are not different from Starmer
You are a disgusting human being. Shame on you for this comment.
You are a disgusting human being
He’s really not, you know. He just has no self-awareness at all and is completely in thrall to the establishment narrative. Blame the brainwashers, educate the brainwashed.
What we do know is your racist reflex
If the circumstances were reversed you wouldn’t hesitate to call the killer a ‘racist’.
“If the circumstances were reversed you wouldn’t hesitate to call the killer a ‘racist’.”
This is how we know he is a disgusting human being. He hates white people. His, rank, rank, rank, double standards, which are the double standards of the fascist racist ( anti-white) ideology he is part of, prove that.
Would he ever call a non-white a racist for caring about their own communities??? No, therefore, he is a racist.
The Far White.
Would you ever call a non-white a racist for caring about their own communities??? No, therefore, you, disgusting woke leftist, are a racist. Very simple logic.
This feels a lot like the disturbance/riot in Knowsley over the migrant centre. I seem to remember that being blamed on elements of the far right. I also remember some of the images, and there were quite a few mums with push chairs (which doesn’t rule them out as fascists obviously!).
It seems any time the MSM see a large crowd of predominantly white people its deemed a potential far right gathering. With that methodology Glastonbury should be considered super dangerous.
It’s getting to the point that you don’t even need to read the article or listen to the commentary on the news, you know what it’s going to say.
It’s ‘far right’ to revere Winston Churchill now.. maybe the Overton window has shifted too far to the left?
And maybe a rabble of thugs on the street don’t actually represent a definable, organised political mass movement? They’re just a bunch of guys on the street participating in random outbreaks of mob behaviour over popular concerns?
Hysteria about misidentified cases of paedophilia a few years ago was not retrofitted with the catch-all tag – ‘far right’
Nah. ‘Far-right’ is just a progressive/liberal shibboleth that can be roughly translated to ‘white people people directly in opposition to thing I support’. It is an ill-defined and largely meaningless word by design, that way it can be pressed upon whoever convenient. The same applies for ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘Nazi’, and all manner of x-‘phobes’. While some of these terms have actual well defined meanings and identifiably associated groups in contempoary parlance they have largely lost all that.
I have seen zero evidence that the rioters were either (a) ‘Far-right’ or (b) EDL. ‘Far-right’ is, as I say, meaningless and unless frustration with a immigration policy can be characterised as ‘far-right’ I am not sure the label sticks. As for the EDL claims, well, how would you know? EDL is a largely defunct loose organisation with virtually no branding, uniform or logos. The only identifiable mark may be the St. George’s cross, but in this circumstance the antagonism comes from a people who increasingly feel that the nations immigration policy is failing them and eroding their homeland, so it hardly surprising you would see symbols associated with said homeland, so I don’t think the EDL claims fly. I would imagine if you was to actually pick apart the beliefs of these rioters, as individuals, you would actually find a largely economically socialist belief system grounded in a great deal of social conservative which is in essence the average low-income person. But a revelation would be greatly inconvenient to the neo-bourgeois rhetoric commonly found among the Labour ranks and Guardian columnists. The Owen Jones’ of the world are neither intellectually or morally capable of handling such a troubling contradiction to their entire, and rather cartoonish, view of left-right (good-bad) politics.
Of course all this rational based approach is lost in the wind because it’s beyond the pale. The purpose of such labels is to justify subsequent retaliation – if progressives (or more specifically, Labour) admitted it was a group of justifiably upset people who feel ignored and alienated they wouldn’t be able to justify exercising anti-terror legislation or expanding the police and its use of face-recognition technology. It’s a convenience label, nothing more and the label is infinitely flexible so that actions supported in one minute can be denounced in the next. Four years ago rioting was the ‘voice of the unheard’, now it’s the actions of far-right thuggery.
Such a label also comes with the added bonus of viewing world events wholly in a vacuum. Instead of dealing with the much more complex issue of 25 years of uncapped immigration largely against the wishes of those most effected who have necessarily been denigrated and dismissed when they have peacefully expressed their frustrations only to see it all come to ahead in a boiling rage you can simply dismiss all that tiresomely complex garble and declare the riot as some impulsive reflex of the white reptilian brain. Nobody has got time for inquiries or a serious impact assessment of a generation long immigration policy, there are tweets to be sent, gammons to denigrate and skinny-lattés to be sipped don’t you know.
Interesting comment. Get drunk, join a mob, throw bricks at police protecting a mosque, all the while singing ‘Allah, Allah, who is the f— is Allah?’. If that is not far right, what is?
Atracking mosques is symbolically to attack a fantastically retrograde, misogynistic violent creed that seems to be privileged above any other in Britain. This is the religon that has killed dozens of priests and fired numerous churches in France( something hardly worth bothering doing in England).
An amazing piece of analysis and writing. Thank you!
Are you trying to burn down your local mosque Allan? If not, why not?
Far right or not, at least this riot had an understandable cause. Here in Bristol, the leftists had a riot because Tescos wanted to open an Express branch on Stokes Croft. The police even discovered a cache of Molotov cocktails in a nearby squat. Any rhetoric about the far-left or Antifa in the media afterwards?
You know the answer.
Understandable to be deeply shocked and horrified by the murders.
To riot before you know more details and can have those confirmed is not. It’s just plain stupid because it means you are easily played.
Maybe it’s prompted by a visceral understanding amongst these people that, along with the conversion of their social assets into property wealth for someone else, immigration is one of the principal weapons used in the brutal class war that is being waged against them by politicians like Starmer who are supposed to be on their side.
‘Westminster or Davos?’
‘Davos’. Every time.
I suspects the numbskulls who rioted might have some trouble understanding ‘Social assets’ and Davos location for a start. Half of them appear to have been intoxicated
However between us the issue is you are still trying to justify mindless violence and falling straight into the trap laid by the FSB and the perpetrators of conspiracy theories. Picked up the likes of Tate and Robison weren’t slow to see the chance to monetise the incident through more social media clicks too. Alot of daft folks getting grifted again.
Lovely. In a single sentence you call me a conspiracy theorist and, at the same time, insist, with no evidence at all, that a protest arising from the brutal murder of three children is yet another Russian plot. Yawn.
My real fear is that you won’t begin to understand any of this stuff until it arrives in Surbiton. At which point it will be too late.
I’m impressed if the author can accurately differentiate between ‘wool’ and scouse accents, especially on YouTube footage of a riot.
I’m impressed you know what a ‘wool’ accent sounds like. What’s a ‘wool’?
I make no concession to lack of street cred in not knowing, btw.
Due to the place of my birth, I qualify as a ‘wool’. It’s an abbreviation of woolly-back and a commonly used derogatory term in the scouse lexicon. Commonly misinterpreted as an insulting way to refer to the North Welsh by suggesting that they have a predilection for ovine intercourse, a ‘wool’ is in fact a Wirralean from the other side of the Mersey.
There are subtle differences in the accent; the lack of pronouncing the ‘ck’ at the end of woolly-back as ‘kekchhh’ and not using the nasal passages as a means of amplification being two. It takes a trained ear to spot them.
Woolyback, apparently.
The riot suggests the Police do not understand the various under currents in the area. A result of not having Police on the beat who understand the various groupings. One can have Police on the beat and they can be completely clueless as to what is happening. A force who was competent would have had large tough beat coppers on the streets talking to everyone and persuading people not to be violent.
There is an Indian saying ” What could have been stopped by 300 in the morning could not be stopped by 3000 in the afternoon “.
Interestingly, there are riots happening in many cities in the UK today, involving different ethnic groups, although the police are only showing courage towards the native British. Perhaps it’s time to ask Starmer to shut up and look in the mirror if he’s serious about finding the source of the problems?
Where and which groups were these EO?
Any substance to this beyond the 5 identified far Right riots?
Blimey. Dont you read the papers
Yes. He does. And that’s the problem.
Please stop using the term “far right”. It has become a term used by the left to attack individuals/groups with whom they don’t agree. It is now meaningless.
Yes you are correct. But of course the MSM won’t stop using it because it “dignifies” any old nonsense they care to write and “proves” that they are on the side of all that is good and wholesome (and “woke” …but we aren’t supposed to realise that..)…
One has to laugh at the irony – there you are using the term ‘Left’ in a broad-brush way to essentially catch anyone you don’t agree with whilst grumbling at the use of Far Right.
Then old MC chips in with similar labelling re: MSM and woke, about god knows who.
You guys appear to love the general labelling, just not so much when it’s reversed.
Are the Cosmics neurodivergent?
Individuals such as Yaxley-Lennon and the cohort of flag-wearers are a gift for the establishment. They can be used as an excuse to implement more restrictive laws.
Even worse, they can be used as a cypher to tar anyone with the same brush, from those who object to mass immigration to those who even object to the bureaucracy that has corrupted the official statistics on crime for decades (see for example, Real Crime, Fake Justice, by Theodore Dalrymple, City Magazine, Summer 2006 edition).
These rioters, regardless of what they call themselves or what specious designation is given them, are an embarrassment to the causes and the people they claim to care about. They are political imbeciles. If they will not restrain themselves, the government will be only too happy to do it for them. And who could say, all things considered, that Starmer is wrong to do that?
Rather than being ‘Far-right’ (how far is far-right, and who decides?), a showman like Yaxley-Lennon is as far removed from these mercilessly murdered girls innocently enjoying entertainment with the intense concentration that children have and the world they inhabited as darkness is from light. As far from them as profanity is from holiness.
These rioters demean the memory of these children. Morally, these rioters are on a par with the idiot boy who attacked the children and their parents at the Manchester Arena.
Yes, yes, yes … but. The question is: how else does a population that has been completely disenfranchised respond to the class war that is being waged against it by its own political representatives, the media and all the captured institutions of the state?
Idiot boy, you mean the terrorist that murdered children?
Some interesting profiles presented here.
I suspect that there is now a pathological British obsession with immigration.
It has become a psychological complex, from the huge net numbers (400K a year) to the smuggling and deaths in the Channel, to the economic impact and state cost of harbouring 10s of 1000s of new asylum seekers every month.
Trying too hard with the Scouse exceptionalism. “We’re cosmic anti-tories, and those other ones are far-right”
Imagine if a white man had stabbed immigrant girls? The Left would be falling over themselves to justify the rioting. In Canada a grave hoax led to dozens of churches being burned. The prime minister said it was understandable.
Sounds more alike ro the Irish rioters.
If the police hadn’t run away and abandoned the streets of Harehills to rioters the previous week, perhaps those minded to riot in Southport would have thought twice.
They probably say it was a ‘Tactical Retreat’