Tinderbox Britain: How conservatives ended up praying for violence

These aren't warnings. They're threats.

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

"All it might take is one spark," Frank Furedi wrote in the Mail recently, his fingers hovering excitedly over the keyboard, barely able to contain his excitement. "An online rumour, a viral video clip, perhaps a single inflammatory post on social media - and Tinderbox Britain will go up in flames."

If you've lived sensibly, you'll have no idea who Furedi is. If you've lived foolishly, as I have, you'll be aware that he's one of the cranks who made the journey from Living Marxism to Spiked Online, leaving unreformed communism for primitivist libertarianism and thereby travelling from one embarrassment to another without stopping in the land of reason on the way. But don't let his exotic intellectual background fool you. There is nothing interesting about his argument. It is ubiquitous.

Over the course of the last month, 'tinderbox' went from being a contentious metaphor to a truism and from a truism to a cliche. Robert Jenrick - an experiment in what national socialism would look like if it was designed by Laura Ashley - helped spread it with a Today programme interview in which he insisted "the country is like a tinderbox right now".

The right wing commentators went to work, shuffling obligingly down a path carved by political leaders. "Britain currently feels like a tinderbox that's set to explode," Carole Malone wrote in the Express. "If they fail to realise that ordinary families are fed-up and fearful, they are striking a match on the tinderbox," Sam Lister wrote in the Express. "Britain is lurching towards civil war, and nobody knows how to stop it," Tim Stanley wrote in the Telegraph.

What we're seeing here is a threat dressed up as a warning. The right-wing press used to abhor street violence, or at least say it did. Now it seems to yearn for it.

The form of argument has a long political history. In the 1930s, the economist John Maynard Keynes reacted with indignation to the poverty and unemployment in Britain as a result of the Great Depression. He believed that the solution lay in state intervention, but the Treasury and business leaders were utterly opposed. Finally, he was forced to offer a warning to the City of London. "I prophesy that unless they embrace wisdom in good time," he said, "the system upon which they live will work so very ill that they will be overwhelmed by irresistible things which they will hate much more than the mild and limited remedies offered them now."

Keynes' warnings were sincere. They were modestly expressed. They made the entirely legitimate point that when a system is broken you have a moral obligation to fix the parts of it which don't work before people start suggesting that you dismantle it altogether. But his point ultimately had a similar form to the ones in the press today: reform, or face an unpredictable groundswell of public anger. Reform, or face the wrath of the mob.

A decade later, a similar argument was put forward by Harold Laski, chairman of the Labour party. He was a reformist Marxist. He wanted peaceful parliamentary socialism, not the terror of the Bolshevik, so he would insist that peaceful socialist reform must be enacted or face violent socialist revolution in its place.

As the years passed, however, the nuance of this position deserted him. He issued the warning so often that perhaps he became sloppy - in terms of his verbal utterances and maybe his inner thoughts. It's not really clear. Was he still really warning people about what the nasty Bolsheviks would do, or was it something else? Was he actually encouraging Bolshevik radicalism, inviting the dread throb of violence?

Towards the end, he stumbled badly. "If we cannot get reforms we desire," he was reported as saying in 1945, "we shall not hesitate to use violence, even if it means revolution." The result was calamitous. He sued the Daily Express for libel. The resulting court case ruined him. Up on the witness stand, Laski was basically disemboweled. The jury took less than an hour to decide against him. "Harold bore up well until he got home," his wife wrote to a friend, "and wept as I have never seen a man weep."

Laski was a tragic figure. He was genuinely concerned with preventing violence and maintaining peace. He was just an unreliable and easily-flustered man who let circumstances get the better of him.

Something had changed between the Keynes argument and the one reported to have come from Laski. What is it exactly? Well first of all, Keynes genuinely did not want the radical revolutionary change, whereas Laski increasingly seemed like he did. You cannot credibly warn about something if you look like you secretly want it to happen. Secondly, Keynes thought of himself as distinct from the group which presented a threat of revolution, whereas Laski increasingly lost that distinction. He started to talk of 'we', not 'they'. And finally, Keynes was not creating the conditions in which violence was more likely. But by talking in that inflammatory way, Laski arguably was.

All of these changes have overtaken the British right. They are plainly keen on violence taking place. They patently think of those protestors outside migrant hotels as part of their tribe. And they help create the conditions in which violence is more likely.

Unlike Laski, Nigel Farage is not a tragic figure. He's just a nasty little man, a stubborn stain on the vessel of human progress. But he has built a core part of his political career on the same argument the Labour chairman espoused.

During the EU referendum campaign in summer 2016, Farage said: "I think it's legitimate to say that if people feel they've lost control completely - and we have lost control of our borders completely as members of the European Union - and if people feel that voting doesn't change anything, then violence is the next step."

A few months later, Brexit now secured, the threat of violence changed. Now it had nothing to do with free movement. It was about parliament's vote on the Article 50 process. "Believe you me," he said, "if the people in this country think they're going to be cheated, they're going to be betrayed, then we will see political anger the likes of which none of us in our lifetimes have ever witnessed in this country."

Last year, when there really were far-right riots, Farage said: "What you’ve seen on the streets of Hartlepool, of London, of Southport is nothing to what could happen over the course of the next few weeks." This year, slightly more plaintively, he said: "Goodness knows what may happen over the course of the summer."

Like Jenrick and the others he'll always caveat it - "we would encourage people to protest quietly and sensibly" - but he straddles that vague line between warning and encouragement. He has spent years associating immigrants with crime - initially to smear Romanians and now refugees. He initiated the anxiety around small boats. Last summer he spread innuendo about the Southport attack just as the riots were starting.

The thing that has really changed in the years between Laski's court case and this summer is that the right-wing press has switched sides. It used to be against street violence, or at least purport to be. Now it is a de-facto cheerleader for it. It sits and wishes for it, day after day, night after night, edition after edition.

Once upon a time, the BBC would have been better than this. They'd have covered events with a dispassionate careful eye. But those days are gone now too. "'People are angry': Behind the wave of asylum hotel protests," a recent headline read. Inside, there were plenty of caveats. There were good interviews with the asylum seekers affected. But there was also inflation of the events. An earlier version of the article - later updated with a more defensible set of numbers - stated: "In the last month, a series of protests, usually several hundred people at a time but sometimes thousands, have taken place against the use of hotels for asylum seekers."

In fact, as Sunder Katwala has repeatedly demonstrated online, hardly any protests have managed to secure 100 attendees. One or two may have reached 1,500 - 2,000. Only one has been stated by police to have reached 2,000. Most get a few dozen.¹ The Gaza protests that have taken place in London and other cities every week for the last year and a half have many times that, and yet they are not treated as great groundswells of national sentiment.

Objectively, we're looking at a small-scale event encouraged by disparate far-right elements and some local groups. What's telling is the enthusiasm with which the right-wing press seized on it and the complete absence of any countervailing narrative.

The Labour party is unwilling to challenge any of this. Very quietly, behind the scenes, it is carrying out largely sensible policy decisions which are required to deal with the hotel issue. It is processing the claims and negotiating broadly sensible international agreements. But publicly, it has decided to vindicate the anti-refugee message in its entirety.

Angela Rayner spoke in Cabinet last month about people's "real concerns". On X, the prime minister's account has become virtually indistinguishable from GB News - an embarrassment for the man himself, the people running his office, and anyone who still holds out hope for the better aspects of this administration.

The Tory party obviously won't challenge the narrative. The days when it could be relied upon to renounce violence are long gone. It is now just as extreme as Reform - in fact is not really distinguishable in any meaningful way. The BBC won't do it. Most producers are still stuck on X, seeing content which is specifically prioritised by virtue of its far-right character. Outside of a modest community of journalists, politicians and think tankers on BlueSky, the British political class is basically strapped to a website which has been designed to encourage radicalisation.

Things have changed so quickly that we barely realise it's happening. Last year, there was at least shock over the riots. There was at least a sense of opposition. After 12 months of X-led radicalisation, the position of the political class is basically to defend and encourage people outside migrant hotels, no matter how few in number they are, how unrepresentative they are, or how pernicious their rhetoric is. The association of asylum seekers with sex offenders is now made so frequently, at such a high political level, and with such little stigma, that you forget it is a far-right proposition. The very idea that we might feel compassion or human empathy for these people is borderline unthinkable. It is simply never mentioned.

The warning-as-threat story has dominated the summer. And that is not just because of the tabloids or the far-right. It's because decent-minded people in politics and broadcasting, who know how pernicious and dangerous it is, failed to stand up to it.

And yet, for all that, this is a moment of tentative, guarded satisfaction. Because the basic reality is this: the people didn't come. The threat did not work. The crowds did not arrive. For all the might that was exerted in encouraging them - by national newspapers, leading politicians, government ministers and broadcasters - they have so far come to nothing.

The biggest crowds we saw this summer were the tens of thousands of people who flooded the Mall to celebrate the victory of the Lionesses in the Euros. And there, we saw a very different country to the one the newspapers presented, one that was relaxed, at ease with itself, plural, funny, generous, good-natured and supportive. There was no tinderbox to be found, just a pent-up sense of belonging and joy that deserves a better narrative than the horror show bullshit we're forced to consume every day.

When Sarina Wiegman, the Dutch manager of the England side, was asked about fans replacing the word 'Tequila' in the Champs song with her name, she smiled and replied: "Very innovative and funny, the English." Yes, they are. And far, far better than politicians and journalists make them out to be.

Perhaps it's time for a progressive warning, directed to conservatives across the country. A warning-as-threat.

The mainstream right is morphing into the far-right. It is forsaking basic values. It is alienating itself from the true character of the country. It has begun to actively desire and yearn for violence. If you don't fix that, goodness knows what might happen next.

Odds and sods

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is giving me an awful lot of joy at the moment. For those that don't know, it's a fantasy game where you cook, buy clothes and catch tree spirits. I'm sure there's more to it than that but I'm fucked if I know what it is. I just like doing that shit really - pottering about like I'm in some kind of Hobbit version of the Sims.

I find it tremendously relaxing. I see a mountain in the distance and trek to it. I walk, or I ride a horse I spotted in a field, or I construct a small vehicle. On the way, I get into several little adventures. I get attacked by some goblins. I help some bloke find his sheep. I go looking for treasure in a lake. I have to scale canyons to go around broken bridges. I climb up to isolated clifftops and end up lurking around in the grass so I can catch butterflies, which I turn into a magic soup. I honestly have no idea what I'm doing or what the purpose of this all is but I enjoy it immensely.

Hours are passed in this way. The delight I think is somehow about the pacing. Even if you play for five minutes, you can achieve something. And if you play for an afternoon you can achieve much more. There is always something to do which offers you a small but meaningful improvement in your abilities. And yet you could easily play this game for hundreds of hours and not finish it, if you chose to adopt a leisurely approach, which I very much have. There is a reassuring sense of glacier-like progress. It's a real delight: uncomplicated, blissful.

I've no doubt that this is all an escape from the dystopia we see on the news - it fits with this year's Superman and the Fantastic Four as part of a cultural yearning for something simpler and reassuring when events outside have become so troubling. But let's not read too much into it. I need to spare up all the mental capacity I have for elixir recipes.

See you next week.

1. This is a correction of the previous copy. As Sunder pointed out to me online, the paragraph I originally quoted was in fact a much more defensible statement than the one that had originally appeared in the article. Also, one protest has been confirmed by police at the 2,000 mark. The original copy is pasted below for the record.

"In the last month a series of protests, sometimes totalling several hundred people from both sides - and on one occasion up to 2,000 according to Essex Police - have taken place over the use of hotels for asylum seekers," it read.

In fact, as Sunder Katwala has repeatedly demonstrated online, hardly any protests have managed to secure 100 attendees. None has secured 2,000.