The recent riots in various UK cities sparked by the tragic stabbings of little children in Southport have highlighted two social narratives, which are primarily based upon narrow ideological understandings rather than on factual ones. This symptom of narrative selection is further demonstrated by the evidence that the actual stabbings have been quickly neglected and the focus directed exclusively upon the issue of immigration. It is here that the two partially correct narratives have been counter-posed to each other as alternative truths. It is being asserted within one narrative, emerging from within the indigenous working class communities, that the already much depleted social resources once available to them are being further reduced and redirected to immigrant communities. Once the facts are examined, this viewpoint cannot be denied so its relative truth has been deliberately ignored or neglected by those in government and media.

The amount of financial and fixed resources directed to support immigrants has been expanded astronomically during the same period as a decline in previous indigenous community resources have been reduced and replaced by austerity reductions, food banks and charity shop purchases. The descendents of the indigenous working classes have had their mid 20th century relative security gained from secure employment and social distress relief reduced by unemployment and cuts to education, health and other social services. Consequently, many UK citizens have been angry, frustrated and relatively powerless for decades and are now joined by a new generation also experiencing deteriorating circumstances.

Yet these facts are missing from within the narratives championed by the right and left leaning political classes. Frustration and anger have therefore, increased exponentially. What is currently happening is that the cause of this relative decline in life experiences and future life chances of current indigenous working people in the UK and Europe, is being attached to the existence of those human beings displaced from other countries who have now become immigrants to Europe.

One set of victims of the current global crisis of the neo-liberal capitalist system – the indigenous victims – are being told by the right wing extremists that this is the fault of another set of external victims – the immigrants!. The additional reality missing from the narrative of the right wing and liberal wings of the political and media ‘establishment’ in the UK is the following. During the same decades that were used by the governing elites to reduce wages and benefits for working people, the resources going toward the rich, super rich and moderately well off were increased either moderately in some cases or astronomically in others. Tax cuts, cheap labour costs and reduced industry and financial restrictions in the UK and Europe have enabled the class of millionnare and billionaire capitalist exploiters to expand their wealth, their numbers and their influence within all countries – including the UK.

Consequently, the reality is that in the 21st century, there are not less socially produced resources to go around, for indigenous and foreign victims of the global system, but far more than there was in the 20th. It is the social distribution of these resources which has been manipulated and altered by successive governments of all political complexions. This unequal social distribution of resources has become part of the problem which lies behind many of the current riots and civil disobedience and is conveniently being ignored.

The right wing organisers of these demonstrations and riots know these basic facts, but for various reasons, are choosing to ignore or neglecting to mention them. This undoubtedly is in order to continue to promote the one-sided blame game of picking on the immigrants rather than on the rich elites who control how disproportionately the global economic system functions. So the various figures in the political establishment are asserting an opposite, also partially correct and valid point, in their narrative of justification for the existing inequality by asserting that immigration benefits some people and the country in general. Whilst it undoubtedly does to some extent, they also choose to ignore or downplay the above noted dispossessed reality for the indigenous working classes. The fact is in 21st century UK and Europe there are enough social resources to adequately feed, house and educate all indigenous working people together with those immigrants terrorised or victimised by their own governments who are now seeking sanctuary.

What ultimately stands in the way of re-distributing these resources to all those who need them is the current hierarchical mass society system governed and controlled as it is by a relatively small class of greedy, overprivileged, inhumane elite individuals, who for decades have shaped the social, economic and financial systems to benefit themselves. These elite minority sectors of hierarchical mass societies are so dehumanised by their privileged life-styles, that in summer 2024, in the background of the riots, they have preferred to financially support the exclusive elite focussed Olympic Games, and a continuing Genocide in Gaza, rather than financially, supporting the schools, hospitals, care homes and local councils of their own struggling communities.

It has also been clear for some time that they would also prefer to financially support the war in Ukraine and continue to despoil and pollute nature rather than relinquish the smallest fraction of their wealth in taxes. Incidentally taxing the rich and super rich would at least ease some of the current burdens upon ordinary people, the environment or the other essential species necessary for the existence of life on earth. With this obnoxious 21st century reality in mind, is it any wonder, that there is widespread discontent, even if some of it is currently confused, misguided and counterproductive?

What also stands in the way of solving the many problems that the current hierarchical mass society systems have created are those who have only managed to grasp partial truths and regurgitate them along with promoting other mythical fabrications. Among those are those fabricators and defenders of the ideologies of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, who also ignore the fact that these ideologies openly justify and condone patriarchal exploitation, state orchestrated oppression and revenge killings in the name of their imaginary god. Marx’s characterisation of religion as the ‘opium of the people’ only scratches the surface of the alienating circumstances attached to living within the past and present hierarchical mass societies. Incidentally, being a childhood victim of religious indoctrination adds to the difficulty many adults have now in deciding how to act collectively together to change the oppressive and exploitative reality of their societies.

Let’s summarise what is currently happening to the low, paid, hard working, precariously employed working classes of the UK, Europe and elsewhere. Many are reduced to living in shop doorways, others on park benches. Others, are just surviving by having multiple part-time low paid jobs, to feed themselves and their children. The exhaustion, stress and mental turmoil this kind of existence brings leads to drug taking, alcohol abuse, self-harming and mental illnesses of various kinds. Others are drawn into the internet world of interconnected and intensified anger, frustration and distorted fantasies of revenge (games and chat rooms) against the half understood processes and actions occuring around them. How can these thousands of mistreated, rejects of the modern hierarchical mass society system be expected to make calm rational sense of a system in which its educated elite are themselves in a constant state of denial concerning the corruption, the injustice, the low and high-level violence and neglect caused by  the socio-economic system they govern?

Far too many citizens have been rendered by the current socio-economic system of neo-liberal capitalism, completely unfit for rational thinking and calm reflection. Within any humane paradigm of understanding of social realities, the blame for the existence of a section of modern societies who are, mad for revenge, full of erratic rage and distorted perceptions cannot be laid entirely on the heads of those citizen victims displaying these symptoms. The system which at a governmental level bombs people into oblivion, starves others to death, builds prisons rather than community centres and homes, and falsely imprisons its critics, is producing on a small scale – in some of its citizen victims – essentially the same irrational and self-centered characteristics which define it at an elite level and on global scale.

Yet typically, it is the neglected, mistreated and misled working class victims who are to feel the full weight of the law at the urging of Labour and Conservative politicians, who stay silent or complicit when in the presence of those responsible for mass killings and genocide.  To use an agricultural metaphor, the system is reaping what it has sown as it did in the 20th century in which two world wars, resolved its many contradictions by removing at least six million of those earlier victims who potentially personified them.

The modern versions of these alienated citizens’ of the system, are among those victims of the present system who are currently being recruited by the right, in the UK and elsewhere, to target the weak and defenceless immigrant victims and to riot and destroy objects in various towns and cities during August 2024. Of course, it is much easier to classify those who the present system currently renders ‘unfit for rational thinking and reflection‘ as ‘fascists’ and condemn them outright rather than trying to provide them with a more accurate view of what is wrong with our global societies.

Explaining to them that what they are being misled into fighting for, will ultimately turn on them and destroy them as it did to others like them in the 1930’s and 1940’s, is currently a necessary – but a completely neglected task. It was in the 20th century,  that a previous generation of angry and frustrated citizens in Europe, initially joined the then small groups of sectarian conspirators who went on to create the openly fascist mass parties headed by Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Stalin. The evidence of numerous  historical archives indicate that these organisations and their leaders turned upon everyone (high or low) who would not implement the orders they had been issued with. Then when they gained power, they unleashed total war and dragged  global humanity into a previous era of shameful episodes.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2024)