The Skinheads Aren’t Coming (2024)

When I was a kid - late primary school age, what would now be Year 5 or 6 - about once a term, a rumour went round the playground that skinheads were coming to beat us all up tomorrow. Or this afternoon. They’d already ‘done’ one of the schools on the other side of town. Put the teachers in hospital, killed a kid. Chased him off a roof, he broke his back.

I had an anxious time the first occasion this nonsense went round, but it soon started to lose its potency. Any parent or adult that heard about it burst out laughing, for one thing. And then there was the curious lack of publicity about the death and mayhem at a nearby primary school, which hadn’t even made the local paper (which was famed for its front page scoops about late library books, potholes and mislaid bicycle pumps).

Similarly, I was rather sceptical about the recent repeated claims that there is a large and coordinated ‘far right’ in the UK. The far right of my 1980s teens were neither of those things - very nasty if you had the bad luck to run into them, or for them to run into you, as I did once or twice, but at a macro-level not a big problem. It seemed very unlikely that there were now *more* of them. The groups seemed to have vanished, and the loners that surfaced were just that - solitary.

But the media, and the sensible class, still seemed to be behaving like they were in the playground at my primary. TV drama is full of white riots, tinderbox ‘Tommeh’s, and the news is so squeamish about reporting race, treating the white working class as a box of sweaty gelignite - ‘careful, or they’ll go off!’ This seemed ludicrous to me, a fantasy of the white middle class left.

But then the recent riots occurred. I began to wonder if I’d been wrong. Maybe there *were* millions of powder keg gammons out there, about to chase us all off rooftops.

But hang on. A week and a bit later, and this seems to have fizzled out. (I’m making myself a ‘that aged well’ hostage to fortune here, but so what.) The newspapers and broadcasters worked themselves up into a masturbatory froth yesterday about ‘100 FAR RIGHT RIOTS’ planned for last night - the source for this intelligence remains very unclear. Thousands of counter protesters took them at their word and showed up to fight back.

But … far-right came there none. Walthamstow and Brentford were among the extremely unlikely venues for anyone hoping to spark race riots. The Telegraph ran a live update commentary on the night of horror, reporting that ‘The largest far-Right demonstration appears to be in Portsmouth’ - next to a picture of said demonstration which consisted of ten sad hoodies and an upside-down Union Jack.

We are now being told that the counter-protesters ‘faced down the far-right’ and prevented more riots. How exactly can you face down people that weren’t present, and prevent something that wasn’t going to happen?

Similarly the details of the very swiftly prosecuted and jailed white rioters of the previous weekend suggest pretty standard underclass court fodder. A sophisticated web of organised doctrinal fascism … not so much. In fact, so far as we can tell at this point, not at all.

I approve of people making an affray having the book thrown at them, no excuses, and I hope that this remarkably efficient process will set a precedent for all creeds and classes of such offenders (Harry Hill look to camera gif).

A large and active ‘far right’ reacting to ‘disinformation’ on the socials is the wet dream of the sensible political class, and also of the very very nasty - and actually organised and influential - pro-Hamas left. It makes them the good guys.

But it is nonsense. A mirage. A few hundred co*ked-up thugs who are already being banged up are not the rise of fascism. They are a cause for alarm. But only for proportionate alarm. Our problems are far bigger and more deeply rooted. The skinheads are probably not coming to get us tomorrow.