THE scenes currently coming out of England and Northern Ireland are not protests. They are riots, fuelled by racism. They are acts of violence and terror, carried out by rioters, aimed firstly at specific people of colour, their businesses, their places of worship, their places of refuge: targeted actions as crowds roamed, rampaged and scapegoated.

This followed even more false narratives, lies and misinformation that had been spread via social media. Primarily targeted, yes, but woe betide you if you just happened to live on a street, parked your car, used a library or a community hub on a road travelled by those rioting gangs. Or what if your premises warranted looting, in the name of what? “Getting back my country”. Didn’t Brexit do that for you?

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But these are actions that some people have long lived with, the very visible manifestation of Islamophobia that has added to the overall cancer of racism evident in the UK for generations.

From generation to generation the narrative may change and the prey too will change, but the commonality is the same: the outsider, the other.

Here in Edinburgh, my father and a fellow medical student created a disturbance in a cafe that had put up a sign saying “no dogs, no Indians”. That was who he was then – an Indian, that is – since their actions were in pre-partition 1947. Years later as a very small child I remember being in Edinburgh Zoo. I leave it up to your to imagine what was said. My oldest son was shot by a teenager with an air rifle and another son had his face slashed with a blade. Many years later, in his seventies, my father casually told us about the racism he frequently experienced when travelling by bus.

Even in the last decade alone, politicians and so-called journalists have a lot to answer for. How many headlines do we remember that demonised refugees, asylum seekers, all pitted against the hand-wringing of the idea of “genuine concerns and legitimate worries” over “uncontrolled mass immigration”. But there were no challenges to mainstream politicians over the failures coming from the two major political parties as they governed. Public services underfunded to the point of crumbling. An economy neglected, ensuring in-work poverty. Hunger that has gone unacknowledged through the emergence of food banks and that which had been accepted as the norm now often regarded as unobtainable: the NHS in crisis. And in this mix, how frequently did the victims of racist violence feel the politicians, the police and the legal system were there to protect them?

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Perhaps there is some justification, since it has just been confirmed that the last Conservative government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group had actually been inactive since 2020. This was despite challenges coming from officials and communities along with a confirmed increase in hate crime. There was no strategy, just the process of displacement being established. Move the spotlight off and away from structural, societal and political failures.

Then worse was to follow, creating without substantiated fact the narrative that migrants – newly arrived and even second, third generation – were threats in general, or in particular to jobs, to various waiting lists, to women, to children. It is clear that controlling the narrative is vital. It becomes another tool and now, the emergence of “thuggery” cannot be allowed to become a new buzzword, a cover for the embedding of fascism in the UK.

We know that communities will try to do their best as ever, uniting in solidarity against that which threatens them. That they will work together to ensure a unity, a bulwark against division, but just how often will communities need to come out to clean up the failure of politicians?

Selma Rahman
Edinburgh