In response to the immediate racial riots by white men on the streets of northern towns in the UK, there is the usual recourse to preserving a ‘law and order’ society. Of course, the roots of the question – racism and white ethnonationalism – are far deeper, touching questions of poverty, industrial and urban decay, and the globalization of production and finance that have led to discarding sectors of the population as ‘waste’. These are the results of the undoing of the post-1945 compact between capital and social democracy and the agenda of political responsibility for social welfare. In a world where everyone has been taught to be individually responsible for themselves, from health to education, the previous social web has come undone. Championed across the institutional political spectrum by both the Conservatives and Labour parties since the 1980s, the neoliberal economy of stripping public assets for private profit has become gospel. As much as Margaret Thatcher, the New Labour of Tony Blair was equally enthusiastic about installing this political and economic order. Margaret considered Tony her best pupil.

Back in the 1970s under Mrs Thatcher, black youth had been publicly identified by the press and right-wing politicians as the source of Britain’s economic decline. The migrant (although the black youth were largely British-born) was the scapegoat, the totem for ‘policing the crisis’, to quote the title of a noted collective study of the time coordinated by the Jamaican intellectual and founder of cultural studies, Stuart Hall. Race was the lens through which to read the threat to Britishness and a parochial white world apparently under siege from foreigners and their un-English manners (all that curry, reggae and ganja). Sounds familiar. And, of course, one of the tributaries of that populist ideology leads us down the road to Brexit.

But, the story, as usual, is more complex and draws on deeper structures and currents. Accompanying the creolisation on display in shaven-headed skinheads dancing to reggae while eating Asian food and beating up Pakistanis was the seduction of the political order by neoliberal economic ‘reform’ that established the conditions in which the rich were going to get richer, the middle classes squeezed, and the poor discarded. This was ‘Cool Britannia’ in its superficial multiculturalism and violent restructuring of a post-industrial society.

Everything became an opportunity for making money. Industry was denationalised. Energy, the railways and water were privatised. If that meant increased waste and inefficiency, then money could also be milked from their repair and maintenance while ensuring increasing dividends for their shareholders. An almost punk ideology – Cash from Chaos – was installed. The train service is simultaneously the most expensive and the slowest in Europe. Britain’s rivers and seas are awash with untreated sewage. Energy bills have sky-rocketed, and poverty is publicly evident in the thousands of food banks around the country, suggesting a society on the brink of social breakdown. But then, as Mrs Thatcher famously quipped, society does not exist. It’s just your fault if you’re poor, unemployed and without sustenance or aid.

The installation of the self-serving individual as the epitome of the modern political subject is hardly a British exclusive. It has matured over many decades in the anglophone world and has become a global mantra today. True, it was essentially thanks to the British that it entered the political lexicon of the EU. But then they left without taking responsibility, just like their earlier politics in the Middle East. What is specific and characterises the British scene, both accompanying and fuelling the rabid racism we are today witnessing, is a dysfunctional democracy that cloaks a more profound political crisis that has little to do with migrants (most of whom are native-born British citizens) or religion, and much to do with the political incapacity of the privileged political class to propose distinctive alternatives.

Weighed down by a hereditary monarchy, a non-elected House of Lords and a House of Commons (listen to the language: the King, the Lords, the Commons, as though we are still in a medieval polity) elected by a non-representative system, means that all the UK governments are minority governments in terms of the popular vote. The far-right Reform UK, with over 14% of the vote in the recent election, would have won almost 100 MPs in a proportional voting system and not the actual 5. Thank God, you might say. But it is only a further cloaking of the structural malaise.

Those angry white bodies on the streets, brandishing fire and Union Jacks (better the English flag of Saint George; these days, the Union Jack is too inclusive), announcing the populist solutions of ethnonationalism, were not produced by migrants (or ‘foreigners’ from Europe) but by the British state itself. When you hollow out politics and remove the substance, it is quickly filled by populist fascism. Encouraged in their newsworthiness by the media and recruited by political opportunism, populist politics has broken the leash. In the ruins of imperial illusions still evoked by its privileged political class, it has taken to the streets. You won’t meet Boris Johnson or Keir Starmer there, but from behind the curtains of their multi-million houses, they will peep at the rage against the fading light of the spectacle they have scripted and installed.

An Italian version of this text was previously published at Il Manifesto: https://ilmanifesto.it/ancora-grazie-signora-thatcher

Iain Chambers is a writer and independent scholar. He previously taught Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the Oriental University in Naples, where he was director of the doctoral programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies in the Anglophone world. His research work is in different fields, including migration, music and the phenomena of identity in the Mediterranean. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Media & Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies and he is author, inter alia, of the books Mediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008) and with Marta Cariello of the forthcoming The Mediterranean Question (Punctum Books 2025)