More police officers are never the answer. Only we can stop the far right

Though the expected far-right riots failed to materialise in much of England and Northern Ireland last night, the horrific attacks earlier this week have still left people asking what it will take for the new government to meaningfully protect people of colour from these mobs of racists.

And while Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has repeatedly made promises of tougher policing, the solution to ending the violence does not lie in increasing the number of officers on the streets. How can it, when they have long been the ones carrying out the violence against us?

In the past week, we have seen and heard reports of people of colour being attacked, including with acid. People have been dragged from their cars, mosques have been surrounded and damaged, Muslim businesses destroyed, people’s homes graffitied, smashed and attacked, and hotels housing refugees and asylum seekers set alight.

Racists have cynically justified their mobilisations as a response to the murder of three young girls in Southport, after misinformation spread about the killings being committed by a Muslim immigrant. But this ignores that the far right has long been on the rise in Britain, incubated by Conservative policies such as austerity and social decay. It will continue to grow as long as the Labour government steadfastly refuses to turn back the dial on these policies.

In recent years, we have seen several protests and attacks on hotels and other accommodation housing asylum seekers, as well as marches organised in the name of “protecting children” – a popular rhetoric the far right uses to incite fear.

Such mobilisations are an extension of political rhetoric and policy. During its election campaign last month, the Labour government prioritised a ‘law and order’ approach and stood on an anti-migrant position. Just weeks before the vote, Starmer told The Sun newspaper: “I’ll make sure we get planes going off… back to the countries where people came from.”

When the far right burns down Citizen Advice bureaus, hotels and libraries, their chants of “get them out” clearly echo the messaging of our prime minister.

The police response

The majority of the mobilisations this week have been organised on messaging platforms and on social media by well-known groups and networks. Meeting points and locations have been established and shared (including some with only tenuous links to immigration, such as law firms dealing with naturalisation or closed asylum centres).

Yet despite these attacks being openly coordinated, police officers have been slow in getting to many of the pre-determined locations, or absent altogether. At the Mercure Hotel in Bristol, for example, activists were forced to form a human shield to hold back fascist demonstrators when police initially failed to appear.

There have also been reports of anti-fascist demonstrators being threatened with arrest or kettled by police. In one case, a victim – a lone Black man who was attacked by a large group of violent fascists in Manchester – was arrested for a “breach of the peace” when police finally intervened. Journalist Nadine White later tweeted that Greater Manchester Police had said he was “immediately de-arrested” when they realised he was the wrong suspect, and four men have since been charged with his attack.

This incident should not come as a surprise given the long history of police facilitation of fascist violence, including through kettles of anti-fascist demonstrators.

In some cases, police have even praised those engaging in the race riots. Speaking about the the Dorset fascist assembly, assistant chief constable Mark Callaghan said: “The majority of people are behaving within the law and I would like to thank them for their conduct.”

Similarly, Donna Jones, the chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, has been accused of justifying the actions of racists, whom she described as “protest groups”. She said they had “the desire to protect Britain’s sovereignty, the need to uphold British values and in order to do this stop illegal immigration”.

After a backlash, Jones issued a statement saying: “The violence that has erupted across the UK this week has been criminal, unlawful and senseless.”

Call for more control

Rather than focusing on the violence against people of colour, much of the mainstream media has consistently led with reporting attacks on police, detailing bricks and other missiles being thrown at officers by far-right groups.

This has laid the groundwork for widespread calls to bolster police resources to control the violence.

Starmer has responded to these calls with a promise that a “standing army” of specialist police would be set up. And in an earlier statement, his first after the riots began, he said: “Whatever the apparent cause or motivation we make no distinction. Crime is crime.”

But this response shifts blame to abstract ‘criminality’ and ‘disorder’, rather than acknowledging that racism, xenophobia or Islamophobia are the problem. It fails to meaningfully distinguish between the fascists and the anti-fascists, telling people that all that matters is whether the action is “lawful”, not the reasons for the action.

Starmer has since promised to increase facial recognition technology, shared intelligence, and criminal behaviour orders, as well as reintroducing a measure used during riots that took place while he was the director for public prosecutions: opening courts for 24 hours a day.

This increase in surveillance and public control is less a response to the violence enacted on immigrants and people of colour across the country and more a product of acute concern about attacks on the police.

It also hands the police greater powers for the increasing crackdown on legitimate protests that we have witnessed in recent years.

Over the past 10 months alone, we have seen police use terror laws for their quasi-militarised crackdown on pro-Palestine demonstrations, harassing people wearing badges or keffiyehs or holding banners. Netpol has reported a “confused”, “racist” and “threatening” police response to these marches and demonstrations, with “unusually high” levels of surveillance and harassment.

In some cases, police have appeared to target minors, alongside an increase in the number of children referred to the Islamophobic Prevent programme. There are also accounts of police violence against older people at the protests, with a 71-year-old legal observer knocked unconscious by the police on one occasion and a 79-year-old woman allegedly having her hip fractured by the police on another.

Elsewhere, 45 people were arrested at a protest against the transfer of asylum seekers to the Bibby Stockholm asylum barge, and environmental campaigners have received shocking sentencing for organising protests.

These incidents show why these calls for more control are dangerous. They will be used against those protecting our communities from fascists by making it more dangerous to carry out anti-racist and anti-fascist organising.

The policing power that we are being told we need to keep our communities safe is the same power that has always been used against us, and will always be used against us. Our ability to protect our communities is already under attack – we should not further immobilise it by inviting in the agents of state violence.

Taking back ‘safety’

The situation is urgent: fascists have already successfully destroyed many community spaces and harmed our people, and more riots are planned. These have been dark days, but there have been some small reasons to take heart. We have seen places where fascist attacks have been thwarted when they have been outnumbered by anti-fascists, and witnessed our communities coming out to defend themselves rather than retreating.

These incidents give us hope that we can fight this not through increased policing, but through creating alternative infrastructure to support our communities. We need to work alongside and support those most directly targeted by these fascist attacks: migrants, asylum seekers, Muslims and racialised communities – particularly those living outside the heartlands and metropoles.

This is the time to utilise our pre-existing networks. The large networks of mobilisation and channels of communications we have built up in our campaigns against Israel’s genocide can become the bases of confronting fascism going forward, as can our anti-raids groups, Copwatch and tenants union networks. These can be places of solidarity and support, as well as our eyes on the ground against any local fascist movements.

We must also be prepared for police repression, including efforts to criminalise self-defence, or equate it to far-right violence. This includes equipping our communities with rights training for counter-demonstrations, as well as staying coordinated with groups that can provide legal and arrestee support if required.

The scale and speed of the far-right mobilisations of the last week have been shocking. But we should not forget how quickly the forces of progress have been able to claim the streets in truly mass numbers – for Black Lives Matter in 2020, for Palestine since October 2023 – and the layers of society we have managed to bring along in the process.

Our test now will be in our ability to consolidate those, and cohere an organised, direct response to paralyse and send Britain's far-right into retreat – and ultimately, defeat.

This is an edited version of an article which first appeared on Abolitionist Futures.