Eleven gallows rose up on the skyline of Tudor-era London, at Newgate, St. Martin le Grand, Leadenhall and Blanchappleton, put up by the thousands of soldiers to stamp out the rebellion against King Henry VIII. Fifteen leaders of the mob, perhaps 20, were tried for their crime, then hung from the scaffold until hear-dead. Then, their bowels were removed through a small hole cut in their still-breathing bodies, and set on fire. Finally, mercy was delivered by the executioner’s sword that severed their heads and limbs, which were parboiled before being put on public display.
For months before what came to be known as the Evil May Day riots, tensions had been building, with London’s English residents complaining that foreigners were taking their jobs, stealing their business, and committing crimes with impunity. Foreign labourers, artisans merchants and the King’s French secretary were brutally attacked.
Keir Starmer, the United Kingdom’s PM, has vowed that the leaders of White Nationalist mobs that have attacked immigrants in recent days will be punished with the “full force of law”. Laws have become somewhat gentler than they were in 1517, but even then, England’s rulers were to discover that state terror was insufficient to extinguish the primal power of xenophobia.
The London riots
Two centuries, almost, before teenager Axel Rudakubana stabbed several children at a Taylor Swift-themed party, setting off the riots now tearing through England and Northern Ireland, the town of Stockport had first encountered anti-immigrant violence. English cotton mill workers, hard-pressed by declining wages, had become increasingly enraged by the masses of Irish immigrants packed into the port town’s slums. Anglican clerics, historian Pauline Millward recounts in her study of the 1852 riots, stoked the hatred, railing against the immigrants’ Catholic faith.
Like all great centres of industry and trade, London had long attracted large numbers of workers, merchants and even refugees from violence. The competition for jobs and opportunity, historian Brodie Waddell reminds us, often exploded into collective violence.
In 1381, an English mob killed dozens of Flemings, driven by a dispute over the weaving trade. There was violence against Flemish and Dutch workers in 1435-1436 as well as in 1470. The city’s Italian merchants were attacked in 1457, and the Steelyard, an enclave for Hanseatic traders, was stormed in 1493.
There is, scholars of ethnic violence in India know, nothing inevitable about xenophobia: The work of political scientist Ajay Verghese, among others, points to an infinitely complex interplay between pre-colonial religious tensions, relationships formed through commerce, and the workings of state policy.
Foreigners, of course, weren’t always victims. Karl Marx, among others, roused English workers from his soapbox in Hyde Park in 1855, urging them to set up barricades in response to restrictions imposed on the operations of pubs and shops on Sundays.
The end of World War I placed extraordinary strains on communal relations in the United Kingdom. For the working class, service in the war had been something of a bargain with the State: The sacrifice of blood for better housing, more job opportunities and higher wages. That promise was never realised, though. Instead, the post-war demobilisation of troops threw millions into an unregulated job market. The strains were sharpest in sectors like shipping, which went into a post-war decline.
Even small local issues flared into ethnic violence. In the summer of 1919, historian Jacqueline Jekinson records, a Chinese immigrant and his white British wife were accused of renting a home in the Poplar area at inflated prices because of which it was denied to a demobilised soldier. There was rioting, and the home was attacked.
The worst violence came from the white working class in the port cities of Glasgow, South Shields, Salford, London, Hull, Newport, Barry, Liverpool and Cardiff, which had long been home to significant numbers of sailors from the UK’s colonies as well as other foreign countries. The resentment wasn’t just economic, Jenkinson writes. In some cases, the immigrant sailors sometimes dated or married local women, sparking off deep cultural neurosis. Local newspapers record some riots degenerating into free-ranging firefights.
There was, historian Edgar Schuler reminds us, similar violence in the United States, where black soldiers returning from the killing fields of Europe asserted their right to lives of dignity. The white rioters, often backed by police, used violence to ensure the continued subjugation of blacks.
The failure of multiculturalism
Efforts to end the violence of 1919 by repatriating immigrant workers proved a dismal failure—and fuelled new resentments in the colonies. Economics, moreover, meant foreign workers simply couldn’t be evicted en masse. Through the 1930s, there was continued violence in the ports, a testament to the failure of political parties and the administration to resolve ethnic strains. Then, following World War II, large numbers of immigrant workers were needed to power reconstruction—setting the stage for deeper conflict.
The first signs of trouble became evident in 1958. The black residents of the London neighbourhood now known as Notting Hill had long been denied housing, forcing them to rent overpriced slum housing. They were denied entry to local pubs and clubs. Even worse, neo-fascist organisations like the White Defence League and the League of Empire Loyalists—represented on the streets by gangs of so-called ‘Teddy Boys’—had begun carrying out violent attacks.
Even though the riots claimed no lives, it was clear something new was needed: “The customary norms that formerly guided British attitudes and behaviour toward the coloured as colonial wards,” American scholar James Holton wrote after Notting Hill, “are no longer tenable”. “To this feeling of strangeness must be added the traditional fear of the coloured male as a sexual threat.”
Finding new norms, though, proved impossible—and white nationalists cashed in. Enoch Powell, the most visible face of the new right, told his constituents the rising numbers of immigrants would inexorably allow them to “consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens and to overawe and dominate the rest”. “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time,” he prophesied, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s rise to office, political scientist Simon Peplow has written, saw the intensification of racial violence. The summer of 1981 saw violence in Bristol, followed by London’s Brixton, and then Southall, Bradford, Toxteth and Moss Side. Thatcher adroitly used the opportunity to crush her critics on the right, casting herself as the defender of Englishness.
To address the violence, though, Thatcher directed a flow of funding for the appeasement of identities. This, the Institute of Race Relations expert Jenny Bourne writes, spelt the rise of a new class of ethnic contractors who used the mosque, temple or community centre as instruments to keep the peace.
Kenan Malik, a prominent philosopher, argued that official multiculturalism sought “to manage diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes, defining individual needs and rights by virtue of the boxes into which people are put, and using those boxes to shape public policy. It is a case, not for open borders and minds, but for the policing of borders, whether physical, cultural or imaginative”.
The relationship between the empire and colony had replicated itself inside the UK—but events would show no number of police could hold the borders forever.
The challenge of the new Right
Figures like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—who now calls himself ‘Tommy Robinson’—emerged as the white equivalents of the ethnic contractors who emerged from the ranks of England’s minorities. The son, ironically, of Irish migrants, Lennon, cut his teeth brawling with Muslim street gangs in Luton and participating in football hooliganism. Even though his association with the white-nationalist English Defence League was short-lived, political scientist Robert May notes, he adroitly rode the Europe-wide tide of anti-Muslim politics unleashed after 9/11.
Like Lennon, a generation of young white people—hard-hit by poor education, shrinking low-skills jobs, and the shrinkage of public sector housing—turned their rage against minorities who seemed to have greater state support. Though groups like the EDL had negligible political heft, their ideas continued to resonate with the white underclass.
The riots tearing apart England show that the underclass is growing—as is its deep anger at a nation that seems to have abandoned it. To address the problem, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party will have to do more than send hooligans to jail. It needs to roll out a programme that will address decades of deficits in social services, housing and education.
England’s long needed an honest conversation on immigration and how its many cultures and peoples can engage and entwine. This has happened organically in many parts of the country, but in others, young Asians and blacks can have only passing contact with White England. Instead of a grudging tolerance, the country needs genuine pluralism.
Fascism’s progress in Europe and the US means the UK’s handling of the violence it now faces will be watched carefully across the world.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)