Bonfire of the hotdog suits

The media is doing everything it can to make sure it doesn't shoulder any of the blame for the culture that fostered the race riots.

Previously: The 'Talent'
Huw Edwards' conviction leaves the BBC with another set of serious questions to answer and allows The Sun to cry vindication.

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This morning The Times published a “rogues’ gallery” of those it says are responsible for “fanning the flames of violence”. It includes Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage and Lawrence Fox. All of them deserve their share of the blame but others are conspicuous in their absence.

Where’s The Sun and Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle who ‘joked’ that elections should be held on Islamic holy days to prevent Muslims from voting and has written countless columns demonising immigrants, not least in the run-up to this year’s general election? Where’s Times columnist Melanie Phillips who’s turned denying that Islamophobia exists into one of her regular party pieces? The list could be a lot longer.

On Good Morning Britain yesterday, the panel laughed and sneered at Labour MP Zarah Sultana when she suggested politicians and pundits have played a major role in creating the environment which fostered the race riots. “Me?!” Ed Balls spluttered when she pointed to an article he wrote about immigration, before booming a couple of sentences later: “If you fail to control and manage immigration properly, things go wrong.” Once again there was a ‘mainstream’ voice accepting the far right’s framing of the world. Balls then interviewed his wife, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, about the government’s response, which added to the spectacle's grim ridiculousness. Was there no other presenter they could have stuck in his seat?

Today, the Mail’s Andrew ‘Tory Boy’ Pierce appeared on the programme to complain about Sultana saying his newspaper had played a part in stoking up violent anti-immigrant feelings. “She had absolutely no evidence to sustain that,” he said. A carousel of past Daily Mail headlines should have been projected behind him:

Fury Over Plot To Let 1.5m Turks Into Britain

Migrants: How Many More Can We Take?

4,000 Foreign Murders And Rapists We Can’t Throw Out

True Toll Of Mass Migration On UK Life

Calais: Send In The Army

That’s just a handful of the many scaremongering, fact-light, fear-heavy lines peddled by the Mail on its front page over the years. Memes that spread in far-right Telegram channels are sanded down and resold by right-wing newspapers as respectable, a reflection of those “reasonable concerns” we hear about so often.

Where titles like The Times and The Daily Mail correctly reject ‘Tommy Robinson’ as a thug and agitator, they’re happy to give plenty of space to figures who offer the same ideology but expressed in a more refined accent and wrapped in the thinnest possible layer of ‘sophistication’. Figures like Professor Matthew Goodwin and Douglas Murray traffic in the same talking points as those who hide in the darker corners of encrypted chats. Speaking to ‘Iron’ Mike Graham on TalkTV, Goodwin explained that the reason that people are taking to the streets, looting shops, burning down hotels and libraries, and attacking people of colour is because “they don’t feel safe in their own country”.

What better way to “feel safe” in your country than to set it on fire?

In the latest Substack post, Goodwin writes over and over again about “the elite class” — his catchall term for anyone who doesn’t agree with him — and frames himself as a “counter-cultural writer” who is constantly at risk of being silenced and shut down. That barely a day goes by when he is not on the airwaves doesn’t matter a jot. The role he’s created for himself is to recast every event as the fault of the ‘woke’ and an all-powerful Left that exists purely in the recesses of his fevered imagination.

Of course, the notion of “two-tier policing” makes an appearance in Goodwin’s piece. The notion that the far-right gets a harder deal than protestors on the Left was first propagated by figures like ‘Robinson’ and was then injected into the general discourse by Nigel Farage. Now it’s been picked up by newspapers and broadcasters who’ve laundered it into an accepted debating point, the subject of questions to the Prime Minister and other members of the government.

While TV debates and newspaper columns keep insisting that we should still be focused on the children who were killed and injured in Southport, the rioters have achieved what the instigators intended: The conversation is now focused on immigration, a debate about “legitimate concerns” even as those engaging in it admit that the catalyst for it was a lie.

Like Tim Robinson’s hotdog suit-wearing character in I Think You Should Leave, who crashes his hotdog-shaped car through the front of a store and then claims “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this”, the right-wing press is pointing wildly at social media as though the climate of British public debate only started demonising immigrants after Facebook was founded.

At The Daily Telegraph, many of its columnists are positively horny for dystopia. The latest example of that tendency comes from Sherelle Jacobs in a column that begins:

Britain has fallen into the abyss. Law and order is collapsing and some feel the country seems to be almost on the brink of civil war. The dystopian nightmare is Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon meets Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” – a society not only embittered by technocratic mendacity but also reeking with hatred and hypocrisy and mutilated by viral algorithms. Nuanced discourse in the public sphere is fading away. Fiction and fact have dissolved into each other.

That’s a call for nuanced discourse that begins with a declaration that the nation has “fallen into the abyss”. The final sentence of that paragraph describes all the words that come before it. Among the “some” who feel that “the country seems to be almost on the brink of civil war” is Elon Musk, a man whose areas of expertise didn’t stretch to British politics until this week. It’s being taken as a truism that it’s “algorithms” that drive racists onto the street to commit violence as though the National Front didn’t achieve the same effect in the ‘70s with leaflets and the “too many right-wing meetings” that The Jam sang about in Down In The Tube Station At Midnight.

Having a ‘debate’ about immigration in which the anti side of the motion get most of the speaking time is right in the heart of the British media’s comfort zone. A Leeds man was charged today with intending to stir up racial hatred via posts on Facebook. Meanwhile newspaper columnists and commentators on talk radio and news channels can do much the same thing as long its cloaked as simply asking questions or reflecting the public mood.

For all the handwringing and professions of disgust at the violence, there’s a large contingent in the British media that aches to say that Enoch was right and to conclude that there really are rather too many of them around these days. It’s why Farage, that fifth-rate Roderick Spode cosplayer, was given so much airtime long before he made it into parliament. It’s partly why days passed with the rioters still described as “protestors” by right-wing newspapers and the BBC alike. There are also too many people who are afraid of saying that ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration are the product of lies and distortions peddled by politicians who benefit from them.

When the unrest starts to subside, the hotdog suit-wearers will once again fill their airtime and column inches with arguments that demonise immigrants and shift the blame for our society’s failings squarely upon them. The riots, like the limited notion of the white working class that columnists reach for when it suits them, will become just another tool in their rhetorical arsenal, proof that “the people” agree.

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