A group of protestors, mostly old people and teenagers, walk slowly down the centre of a road. Motorists are incensed. They will sit placidly in the permanent congestion caused by roadworks, lorries and London’s historically poor street planning. Public dissent, though, is intolerable. The blare of horns is unrelenting. From the surrounding buildings, people hurl missiles at the activists. A man charges into their midst, throwing an elderly woman to the floor. Bystanders cheer. The marchers don’t fight back. Comments on the Instagram video delight in the assault. Some regret it didn’t go further.
Throughout the UK, violence targeted at “public enemies” is rising. Assaults on trans people are up 56 per cent year on year. Mobs gather outside children’s story-time events to scream abuse at drag queens. Some try to storm hotels housing asylum seekers. Others throw petrol bombs. Hate crime is the highest in recorded history. It has more than tripled since 2015.
The victims aren’t criminals. Most just want to get on with their lives. Some are trying to highlight injustice, the urgency of climate change, or demonstrate peaceful opposition to government policies. Yet they are designated “enemies of the people”. Across hundreds of newspaper articles, social media posts, tv interviews and speeches in parliament, those with power rail against those without it, demanding we turn our anger on the weak and marginalised.
Few have the honesty to explicitly encourage violence. But the impact of their words is well documented. In 2021 Priti Patel was warned that her language around migrants and the lawyers who represent them would encourage attacks. She persisted anyway, and an armed terrorist broke into a law firm while repeating her talking points. Her successors have only stepped up her rhetoric.
Trans adults are paedophiles, lurking in bathrooms to assault women a perception based on exceptionally rare cases, magnified by the press. Asylum seekers fleeing poverty and violence are “fighting-age men” threatening (white) womanhood, or invaders set on destroying our national culture. Protestors are “selfish” and “dangerous”. These terrors are foisted on us by a conspiracy of the government’s opponents, the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati”. Disagreement with the powerful is no longer an essential part of democratic citizenship. Dissent (or just being a bit different) is now tantamount to treason.
It is, of course, naive to pretend that the discourse of yesteryear was much better. The powerful have always cast political opposition as “enemies of the people” and blamed their own incompetence on the marginalised. Ramsey McDonald was “a Communist plant”. The miners were “the enemy within”. Clement Attlee would introduce “some form of Gestapo”. Jews, West Indians, Muslims and Irish have all, at various points, been designated the existential threat du jour.
Westminster today is full of MPs and think-tankers who wring their hands about the “age of harassment” before going on television to speak in apocalyptic terms about “migrant hordes”.
Dissent (or just being a bit different) is now tantamount to treason
Hatred and division are no unfortunate accident. They are a deliberate and politically necessary. Those in power need to convince people to vote for them. Unfortunately, the economy is heading towards stagflation. The deficit is spiralling. Corruption dogs the public sector. The NHS, energy infrastructure, and trade are permanently in crisis. The government might pledge to make your life better, but polls suggest most people don’t believe it.
Instead, those in power promise to make life worse for people you hate. This has long been a winning argument. When banks caused a global financial crisis and austerity policies plunged the UK back into recession, we were told to hate “skivers” (the unemployed). When we made ourselves poorer by voting for Brexit, we were told to hate migrants. When Liz Truss’s failed gamble plunged the economy into crisis, we were told to hate trans people.
This is hardly original. Trump, Sarkozy, Orban, Duda, Netanyahu, Maduro, Bolsonaro, and countless others, have based their political success around demonising minorities and casting democratic opposition as treason. The current government has embraced that tactic. Public policy now plays out in a series of PR stunts. The “Bibby Stockholm” (so expensive it would be cheaper to send every person detained there on a round-the-world Disney cruise) and the Rwanda policy can address just 0.4 per cent of the asylum backlog. Neither is a realistic solution to the problem (assuming inward migration is a “problem”). The government could stop Channel crossings tomorrow by reopening safe and legal routes. But that’s not the point. The aim of the game is to be performatively cruel to a “public enemy”. There is little incentive for the government to actually cut migration. Without migrants there would be no one to hate.
Herein, of course, lies the rub. The victims of this tactic are real people. The Just Stop Oil protestor, beaten while lying in a foetal position on the floor, was just a kid trying to do what he thought was right. The migrants to be caged on the Bibby Stockholm are ordinary people who just want a better life. The trans people assaulted and raped, at the highest rate of any group in society, are just people trying to live their truth. For the losers, politics is more than just a game.
Sam Fowles is a barrister, Director of the ICDR, and a lecturer at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He tweets at @SamFowles
