Racist, colonial ideas are woven into the fabric of the UK

I want to say I am surprised by the racist and Islamophobic terror being reigned down across these islands at the behest of the absolute loser that is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and those of similarly terrible character, but truthfully, I am not.

This did not happen in a vacuum, it happened following decades of dehumanising language about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, Muslims, people of colour – anyone, in fact, that is not pale or suitably gender-binaried according to the right-wing of recent years.

It happened because of irresponsible reporting that put sensationalism ahead of truth and politicians that put election soundbites ahead of human decency. When this is all over and we are scrambling to assign blame, we need look no further than the ruling class.

What isn’t at all lost on me is that this is happening on the back of 10 months of the state-sponsored brutalisation of Muslim and Arab people across the Gaza Strip. We should make no mistake – the normalised dehumanisation of the Palestinian people is an acute contributor to the rise in racist and Islamophobic violence we are witnessing across the UK.

We have watched a genocide against the very same communities now under immediate threat in the UK – livestreamed across social media. We’ve watched governments, including our own, not only cheer it on but fund it with our taxes.

Tying themselves in knots to justify it. And let’s be explicit about what we mean – we have seen kids with their limbs blown to shreds, men being sexually assaulted so brutally they have organ damage, women murdered as their children watched. Live in HD – and the powers that be have done nothing to stop it.

What do you think it has done to a United Kingdom that already had racist, colonial ideals woven into its very fabric – besides legitimise those ideals? It is not normal human nature to want to brutalise each other, it’s taught and it’s moulded by circumstance, and it begins with the dehumanisation of certain groups, versus the misguided superiority complex of another.

And if there is one certainty about the United Kingdom, it’s that our superiority complex is and always has been alive and well.

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Some of the things I have seen on social media from on the ground in Gaza are so evil that there are no words to accurately convey the strength of my use of that word. The perpetrators not only allowed to walk freely despite being internationally wanted war criminals – but pitied and platformed. Their inhumanity celebrated via standing ovation and permission continually granted for their mass-slaughter to press ahead.

I used to find it so difficult to comprehend how a mass tragedy like the Holocaust, for example, could ever have come to be. I no longer find it difficult, I have watched in real time how collective gaslighting works and how, particularly in times of instability, vulnerability among the masses can be so easily manipulated into line. And whipped up against minority groups. It isn’t exclusively that dehumanisation  that got us to this point either, it works in tandem with other systems of destabilisation.

We are dealing with the collective psyche of a United Kingdom – purposefully worn into the ground by successive years of Tory cruelty – that is looking for someone to blame. Skyrocketing levels of poverty and inequality have taken a grasp of these islands over the past decade in particular, to the point of complete and utter misery.

The poor are poorer, the rich are astronomically so, and quality of life in the United Kingdom is embarrassingly poor. We should be angry. We should be so angry that the grifting lunatics who got us here should never know peace again.

Instead, those who have stood to benefit from the decimation of our communities have employed an age-old get-out-of-jail-free card – anti-migrant rhetoric – and are sitting pretty among their accumulated wealth while the working classes fight each other.

(Image: PA)

Rishi Sunak emblazoned his little podium with the phrase “STOP THE BOATS”, Lee Anderson called them “animals”, Suella Braverman (above) spoke of an “invasion”. All of it was intentional.

Along the way, the ruling classes have managed to convince the working class that the deterioration in their quality of life can be exclusively laid at the door of migration. Rather than the truth – that bad governance and austerity has obliterated British communities on purpose. This is, among other things, a class war orchestrated by the wealthy.

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Refugees and asylum seekers didn’t handcraft the cost of living crisis that resulted in your energy prices soaring and your wages failing to make ends meet and neither did Muslims – the Tories and their cronies did.

And they did it for the benefit of themselves and their elitist pals. If you eject yourself from the mass hysteria, it becomes so painfully obvious why it might suit that bunch of lying toerags to place the blame at the door of marginalised communities. It’s a shameful, time-old political tradition, but it is nonetheless twisted.

The most twisted aspect of it is that oftentimes, the very communities they encourage us to punch down on are communities worse-off or on an equal footing to ourselves. People fleeing persecution and war, for example, only to be made a pariah in the country they came to for safety.

The average person in Britain has far more in common with a refugee than they do with a pompous git like Nigel Farage (above). Separated in reality only by sheer luck and the privilege of circumstance.

Instead of the masses vs the elite, they have orchestrated the masses vs each other – while they sit back and hoard our collective wealth and hope that we don’t notice. Taking to the streets to brutalise each other and vandalise our towns and cities serves no-one besides those at the top who are giddy for the distraction from their own deceitfulness.

That’s the thing with fascism. When the inconvenience of cold hard fact comes along, it falls on its arse pretty quickly. Its success depends exclusively on collective suffering, shared anger and the dehumanisation of vulnerable people with little power or defence. A perfect storm of deceit and the weaponisation of power that has been under way in the UK for decades.

What’s happening on our streets  as I write this is happening because the ruling classes made sure of it, and may their reckoning follow closely behind.