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Hundreds of far-right activists are currently threatening to attack hotels full of vulnerable refugees, at events which have been attended and endorsed by opposition politicians.
These events, which have been partly organised by far-right and Neo-Nazi groups, have been repeatedly defended by prominent mainstream senior politicians, some of whom suggest that the inhabitants of the hotels pose a threat to their daughters.
Meanwhile an entirely innocent British black man and his family are living in fear of their lives after being falsely labelled a paedophile on a far-right website still used by Government ministers.
The above is not the storyline from a futuristic dystopian novel, but the current reality of life in Britain, where the rise of a new well-organised violent far-right is facing little serious opposition from mainstream politicians and media organisations.
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In Downing Street, which is currently occupied by former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, questions about this movement have so far been met with only mild opposition at best and outright complicity at worst. Pushed to condemn the mobs seeking to intimidate and target those placed inside asylum hotels, a spokesman for the Prime Minister insisted that people were “right to protest” in order to express their “legitimate concerns” about migration. Meanwhile an order issued by the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper instructed police officers to reveal the ethnicity and nationality of suspects, saying she wanted “more transparency” about those accused of serious crimes.
To see where this is all leading you only need to look at the case of the British musician Olajuwon Ayeni, who is currently living in fear for his life after being falsely labeled a paedophile.
A video of Ayeni playing with his white granddaughters, was shared with millions of people by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, alongside the caption “Wtf is even going on here? Where are the parents?!”
Amid the uproar, Ayeni was suspended by his artist management company and then forced to retire to his home after facing violent threats on the street near his home in Redcar.
“We haven’t gone outside at home, we just can’t,” Ayeni’s partner Natalie told the Guardian.
“We were walking home from shops just streets from our house, and two lads passed us, spun round and said ‘I hope you’re not them off that video or we’re coming back to slash you up’. It’s just horrendous.
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“Someone was shouting ‘paedophile’ outside the house the other night, so I rang the police again but they say there’s little they can do. It feels a matter of time before something bad happens. We tried to go out yesterday and had to come home.”
That this kind of thing is now happening is not a coincidence. Over the past year there has been a concerted attempt by far-right activists and politicians to encourage what Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has described as “civil disobedience on a vast scale” across the country.
Yet what Farage describes as “civil disobedience” is in reality an extreme movement designed to deliberately whip up violence against not just asylum seekers and migrants, but anyone who is not white or British.
So far we have yet to see the return of the sort of widespread street violence that spread across the UK last year, yet in many ways what we are now seeing is far more pervasive and dangerous than anything we saw last summer.
In particular, the attempts by senior politicians like the Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick to personally associate themselves with these protests, risk turning what are the isolated actions of fringe groups into a mainstream movement.
The potential impact on the lives of non-white and non-British people living in the UK is stark, yet Jenrick has yet to face any serious opposition to his actions from either his political opponents, or the media. The BBC, whose royal charter instructs them to “help people understand and engage with the world around them” recently issued a grovelling apology to Jenrick after one of their contributors correctly labeled his comments as being xenophobic. The BBC has since removed any such reference to Jenrick from their original programme.
Yet while the media’s reluctance to openly criticise what is happening may be unsurprising, the relative inaction of Keir Starmer and his Government is far more alarming. In the wake of last summer’s riots, the Prime Minister was commendably decisive in cracking down on those seeking to foment division on our street. Yet the rise of Farage’s party, combined with those inside Downing Street pushing for him to adopt a so-called ‘Blue Labour’ anti-migration agenda, have left Starmer largely mute in the face of what we are now seeing.
The consequences of that silence risk being very grave indeed.
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