If the British hard right are known for anything, other than trying to kick out migrants and ranting about “woke”, it’s promoting a justice system that throws as many lawbreakers as possible into a cell, preferably indefinitely, in as gruesome circumstances as possible. Yet when it comes to far-right extremists who rampaged in English and Northern Irish towns and cities this summer, attempting to burn refugees alive, smashing up homes and businesses believed to be owned by migrants, and physically attacking people of colour in the streets, a different approach is now being sung.
Take the Reform party MP Richard Tice. When Just Stop Oil protesters who peacefully blocked the M25 were handed prison sentences, Tice posted “GREAT NEWS” in jubilant capitals, followed by two clapping emojis, adding his wish that “they serve full 4 and 5 year jail terms”. When riots broke out in Leeds in July after Roma children were taken into care, Tice demanded “the full force of the law must be applied” with British citizens “punished” and non-Britons “deported never to be allowed to return”. But during August’s far-right insurgency, while Tice was careful to condemn “the riots and violence”, he demanded the mayhem should trigger a debate on “mass immigration and two tier policing”.
Which brings us to Peter Lynch, a 61-year-old unemployed packing worker sentenced to two years and eight months for participating in a riot outside a Rotherham Holiday Inn. Inside, 240 asylum seekers were trapped, fearing for their lives as windows were smashed, objects were hurled and rioters attempted to burn the hotel down. Lynch held a placard while screaming that the police were “protecting people who are killing our kids and raping them”. Earlier this month, Lynch tragically died in prison. Tice now calls him a “political prisoner” who was killed by “two tier justice”.
For those of us who believe prison is a barbaric and ineffective solution to social harm, Lynch is an important test. So you know I walk the walk here: in 2019, I was attacked by a far-right extremist who lived in a house stuffed with Nazi paraphernalia. He was sentenced to two years and eight months – the same as Lynch – but in my victim impact statement, I opposed his incarceration. Not as an act of mercy, but because I did not believe prison would deradicalise a far-right football hooligan whose previous stints behind bars had achieved nothing. This was, I believed, a political problem requiring a political solution.
The recent riots underlined this, despite attempts to retrofit a narrative that they were neutralised by a law-and-order crackdown. Keir Starmer claimed a predicted far-right explosion on 7 August never materialised “because we had police deployed in numbers in the right place”, but the more plausible explanation was the mass anti-fascist counter-protests around the country that reclaimed the streets. As the sociologist Aaron Winter puts it to me: “The far right does get criminalised and securitised by the state and white mainstream selectively when it suits them.” Because, he believes, there is a wilful determination to strip away the broader societal context: a heady mix of systemic racism and social insecurity.
Note how Lynch was imprisoned after labelling those terrified asylum seekers, as they cowered in their hotel rooms, child killers and rapists. Clearly, in that context, this was understood as incitement. Yet mainstream media outlets and politicians have repeatedly linked asylum seekers – as well as British minorities – to such crimes. Last April, the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman, penned a Mail on Sunday column that portrayed grooming gangs as a phenomenon specific to British-Pakistani men because of “cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values”, which even our normally toothless press regulator ruled as false, given that Home Office research shows child sexual abuse gangs are mostly white. Braverman had previously described asylum seekers arriving in small boats in Kent as an “invasion”, conjuring up imagery of a threatening violent force. Such context received minimal interrogation, because Labour and most of the British media itself would prefer to indulge base prejudices about minorities and migrants.
Just make an example of a few hundred who posted inflammatory comments, ignore how they arrived at this grim destination, and declare job done: this is the official approach. Anyone who believes that a justice system itself defined by racism will cure the perpetrators’ racist attitudes is, however, profoundly naive. The government surely know this: after all, the now foreign secretary, David Lammy, commissioned a report in 2017 that found the proportion of young inmates who were black, Asian and minority ethnic had risen from 25% to 41% in the preceding decade. And if, say, preventing social harm is what you want from a justice system, bad news: 75% of ex-inmates reoffend within nine years of release. Take 58-year-old Derek Drummond, jailed after punching a police officer in the riots: his 14 previous convictions clearly offered no deterrence.
With hate crimes in England and Wales more than trebling in the last decade, a reckoning is clearly needed. In our structurally racist society, one where the rhetoric of politicians and media outlets has demonstrable real-world consequences, locking up a relatively select few hardened racists as though this were a law and order problem and moving on is not that. So what is the answer to the likes of Peter Lynch? An education programme would have seemed more appropriate, but surely pointless unless our society actually addressed its entire respectable, establishment-level racism. What point trying to educate Lynch about his bigotry if he could listen to a frontline politician or read a front page confirming all his worst prejudices the next day? Prison offers few meaningful solutions to most social ills: the idea this inherently racist institution will solve what British elites have incited is an absurd utopian daydream.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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