And did those feet in ancient time……

Brian YS Wong August 08, 2024 22:10

“And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen?”

One of my favourite hymns of all time is “Jerusalem” – a glorious, triumphant tune set to music composed by Sir Hubert Parry, with its original text sourced from none other than William Blake’s preface to his epic “Milton: A Poem in Two Books”. The poem’s text refers to the apocryphal story that Joseph of Arimathea travelled to Britain to preach, upon Jesus’ death.

Since its inception, the hymn has become a de facto, unofficial national anthem to Britain – in many ways, it is even more venerated than “God Save the Queen/King” as a song embodying the splendour of the British countryside, the resilience of the British people, and their undying devotion to striving amidst adversity - the very same sentiments that Gary Oldman channeled in his ferocious and unrivalled portrayal of Winston Churchill in the movie “Darkest Hour”.

Yet the original poem also warned of the existence of “Dark Satanic Mills”. Some posit that these mills are an allusion to the large-scale manufacturing factories the presence and rise of which Blake lamented personally as signs of the degenerate destruction wrought upon the environment by Britain’s industrialisation. Others read the imagery as signifying the more general regress and decline in social unity and a pristine moral cold, in an era where valour was no longer valourised. Mass production and accruing of returns to capital became the dominant zeitgeist, in place of individuals taking ownership over and earning dividends for their own produce and hard work. With the emergence of the industrialist-worker cleavage came the disintegration of Britain’s long-standing social fabric.

It's now year 2024. Millions of ethnic minorities in Britain face a country that is increasingly foreign, alienating to, and alienated from them. The past ten days have witnessed an almost unprecedented swell in arson, vandalism, and other forms of violence targetting asylum seekers and refugees at hotels in which they have sought refuge. What had begun as a misinformation-fueled outrage at the murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance in Southport, has now morphed into some of the worst and most devastating episodes of mass violence in recent British history.

How did we get here? What went wrong?

An instinctive explanation often invoked by individuals on the progressive end of the political spectrum, is that Britain is a structurally racist society. From the colonial history of the British Empire to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) ethic permeating its ruling classes all the way up until perhaps the mid-20th century, some hold there remains a distinctly hierarchal undertone to inter-race and inter-faith relations in the UK. As a UN Working Group statement in 2023 noted, experts had “serious concerns about impunity and the failure to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, deaths in police custody, ‘joint enterprise’ convictions and the dehumanising nature of the stop and (strip) search”. Per this cynical reading of the British state, politicians across the far left and far right, as well as select bureaucrats, academics, and media influencers, cite national security as the dog-whistling foundation for their prosecution of an ethnically and racially driven agenda – one that indefinitely kept many persons of colour, especially those of African or British-African origin, perennially stuck in the limbo of cyclical incarceration and detention. When read through this lens, then, the riots – as the intended products of the advocacy of far-right activists – are hence a manifestation of unbridled racism and intolerance towards religious and ethnic minorities.

Indeed, further evidence for this explanation can be found in the results of the Brexit referendum, where scaremongering concerning the impacts of the European Union on Britain’s immigration, when it came to the importing of so-called ideological “extremism”, proved to be a highly successful tactic in nudging undecided voters to vote “Leave”. To “take back control from Brussels”, the crowds were promised during the referendum campaign – by none other than the then-MEP and recently elected MP Nigel Farage. I will go out on a limb here.

I will suggest that whilst not all Brexit voters were racist, but most racist voters – so utterly convinced of their own ethnicity and religion’s superiority – were by far more predisposed towards Brexit than Remain. This explanation alone can help account for why the UK is by no means the best place to be for an ethnic minority on the ground – whether that be Indian, Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese – especially in regions outside the conventional pockets of liberalism, e.g. London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Brighton.

Yet this explanation – even if valid and substantiated – does not sufficiently address the underlying question: why now? Why did the riots occur days into Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership, as the first Labour Prime Minister in 14 years? This is a good question, to which I can only provide two somewhat speculative but reasonably credible hypotheses.

The first, is that the past fourteen years of Tory rule – especially from 2016 onwards – have seen the British economy stagnate and sink into further, greater socioeconomic divisions. Britain’s GDP per capita has not materially improved over the past 17 years – it stood at over 50,000USD per capita as of 2007; today, that figure has dropped to around 46,000USD. The pandemic amplified the disparities between the ‘Havers’ and the ‘Have Nots’ – with many in the latter group themselves ethnic minority members of the British society, with school closures disproportionately harming students from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. A dearth of reasonable, well-paying jobs, coupled with an ill-equipped and over-strained higher education sector, has produced a large surplus of college graduates who are straining to find jobs. The Northwest and the Midlands remain heavily underdeveloped. These economic issues fomented at atmosphere where politicians and citizens alike were all too keen in looking for scapegoats. This is not an excuse or justification for the appalling violence that we have witnessed but is instead important background information enabling us to make sense of where the mass psyche stands today.

The second, and perhaps more contemporary, reason, is that the far-right political machine went into overdrive in the run-up to the recently held General Elections. The unprecedented gains by the Reform Party in its share of the total vote epitomise the vengeful embitterment experienced and espoused by a sizeable segment of the British population – towards migrants whom they view to be “outsiders”, as well as descendants of migrants who “look different”. The erstwhile champion of the Brexit farce, Nigel Farage, effectively rallied his troops in “dismantle” the so-called cartel of “DEI warriors”. In conflating political correctness with basic human decency, the far-right in Britain successfully instilled in ordinary citizens the thought – and the fear – that Britain would soon cease to be “theirs”.

The First-Past-the-Post system and the mutual cannibalisation between the Reform Party and Tories left many constituencies open for Labour to capture, and so they did. Yet such rationale could not be easily explained to diehard Farage backers – both for ideological and political reasons – many of whom saw the election results as fundamentally skewed and prejudiced against their favoured politicians.

For many sympathetic towards the anti-immigration bandwagon, then, these protests presented them with a seeming and critical opening, for them to exercise their political liberties of contesting and challenging the state. Yet one should always remember the basic given: a sound government should be prepared to stand by each and every one of its constituents, regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and beyond.

Brian YS Wong

Assistant Professor, HKU