Chris Kaba killing, far-right riots & why we must organise & fight all racism

This August, far-right riots swept across 17 cities in the UK. We witnessed pogroms against migrants and Muslim communities in Bradford, the setting ablaze of hotels housing asylum seekers in Rotherham, and the targeting of mosques in Liverpool. Right-wing violence has not been seen on this scale in the UK since the 1970s.

This did not happen in a vacuum. Racism and racist violence have defined Britain’s political, social, and economic landscape through its colonial and imperial history and intensified domestically since the first wave of migrants arrived on its shores. This violence manifests as riots on our streets but also through extrajudicial killings of Black men like Chris Kaba, the drowning of people crossing borders to seek safety in our waters, and the vast inequalities faced by people of colour in employment, housing, and healthcare.

As anti-racists, we know that our fight against racism must occur on multiple fronts. The racist violence we periodically witness on our streets is intimately tied to institutionalised and structural forms of racism we experience every day.

Scapegoating migrants

Just before the riots, the general election saw politicians competing with one another in performative cruelty towards those navigating the asylum system. Far-right figures like Nigel Farage and his party quickly rose to prominence, commanding newspaper attention on the issue of migration. Farage claimed that the 2024 general election “should be the immigration election” – ignoring the ongoing genocide in Gaza, impending climate collapse, and the devastating impacts of the cost of living, and once again scapegoating migrant communities for the crisis of harm in society caused by neoliberal governance.

Despite this clear causality between the policy positions and vitriol of politicians, and the enactment of racist violence on our streets, political leaders such as Keir Starmer continue to seek to differentiate between “good” and “bad” racism. At the Labour party conference in September, Starmer claimed that “I will never accept the argument made [...] that millions of people concerned about immigration are one and the same thing as the people who smashed up businesses”. Seeking to couch racism in the more palatable terms of a “concern about immigration” (and, tellingly, a concern about “businesses”), instead of setting a wheelie bin on fire in front of a hotel where people seeking asylum are living, does not make it any less of a green light to demonise, harass, exploit and abuse people who come to the UK. We must be unafraid to call racism by its name.

Unsurprisingly, in a period of economic downturn and political polarisation, the right made its move, taking advantage of the multiple crises we face to push narratives that further its reactionary agenda. While Labour won on a platform not distinct from those of Reform UK, the far-right entrenched itself electorally by securing four seats in Parliament. It is not a coincidence that the legitimisation of Islamophobic and anti-migrant politics in Parliament translated into far-right riots across the UK only a month later. And with that, all artifice of racial progress was shattered; no amount of ‘Equality and Diversity’ training, quotas, or Black squares could obscure the racial hierarchies that continue to exist in Britain.

Black Lives Matter

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement provided a moment of reckoning with racist institutions and more specifically, the expendability of Black life after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in the US. The stories of racist state violence transcended borders, reminding us of the lives lost to police violence, including Joy Gardner, Sarah Reed, Smiley Culture, and Mark Duggan.

Four years later, the story remains the same. Just this week, firearms officer Martyn Blake was acquitted for the murder of a Black man named Chris Kaba. The verdict accompanied a familiar wave of hurt and pain for the Black community. Since 1990, 1,906 people have died in custody or following police contact. Only one police officer has been found guilty of murder or manslaughter – PC Benjamin Monk, who was convicted of manslaughter for the manslaughter of former football player Dalian Atkinson in 2021. The officer tasered and kicked Atkinson in the head, and he later died of cardiac arrest. It took five years for Monk to be held accountable.

As anti-racists, we must demystify the relationship between the far-right violence we witness on our streets and the racist violence meted out by the state. If we cannot confront the racist dehumanising policies of the state – one that protects police from enacting extrajudicial killings of Black people, that pushes people into poverty through austerity and hostile environment policies, and that forcibly encloses migrants in barges and hostels that are then set alight - we will fail to confront the root causes of far-right violence on our streets and we will fail to address their recomposition in political life.

A history of anti-racism

Since the 1950’s migrant and working-class communities have pushed back far-right activity through collective action. In 1958, fascist groups like the White Defence League led five nights of rioting in Black Communities in Notting Hill and Nottingham. Racial tensions were further heightened by the murder of Kelso Cochrane and in the wake of his murder, the Inter-Racial Friendship Co-ordinating Council was established, providing financial support towards the funeral and organising silent protests in Whitehall.

In the 1970s, Black and Asian youth fought back against the organised violence of the National Front. In 1977, people of colour engaged in community defence, and joined with other parts of the Left to defeat Nazis on the streets of Wood Green. Later that year, the National Front planned to march from New Cross to Lewisham, telling the press: “We believe that the multi-racial society is wrong, is evil and we want to destroy it”. But thousands of anti-fascists gathered in opposition, outnumbering them. A number descended on their meeting point, leading to clashes and police violence. The official literature of the National Front confirms that the Battle of Lewisham was extremely damaging to them.

Resistance to racism, identical to the struggles of previous generations, beckons once again. This Saturday on 26 October, anti-racists will take to the streets in Central London to push back an increasingly emboldened far right, led by Tommy Robinson. This anti-fascist march also coincides with the United Families and Friends Campaign annual procession, which sees the coalition of families impacted by state violence demand accountability from the state.

These two fights are one and the same. It is a fight against racism and the various avatars of racism, whether that’s Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley or Tommy Robinson. In uniform or not, both inflict harm on Black communities.

As anti-racists, we must make these connections, laying bare the multi-layered and textured afflictions of racism, to produce a coherent anti-racist movement that is not rudderless. Instead, we must lead a path that recognises the continuity and interconnectedness of our struggles. We must ensure our safety, dignity and rights, and communicate clearly, as the British Asian youth movements of the 1970s said: “we are here to stay, and here to fight”.

Black Lives Matter UK is a national, member-led, anti-racist organisation fighting to end systemic racism.

Follow them on X: @ukblm

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.