In their recent exchange on Sidecar, Richard Seymour and Anton Jäger discussed how the left should understand the racist riots that erupted across the UK this summer. For Seymour, the spate of attacks on immigrants were not driven by the material deprivation of Britain’s ‘white working class’. They were, rather, symptoms of an insidious neo-nationalism that is increasingly obsessed with borders, boundaries and fortifications – seen as necessary safeguards against the erosion of traditional gender and ethnic divisions. Jäger agrees that it would be wrong to interpret the riots as ‘wrongly sublimated left-wing energy’ or read into them some emancipatory content. But he criticizes Seymour for elevating ‘mass psychology’ over ‘political economy’, arguing that the misery wrought by Britain’s uneven growth model – a low-wage service sector dependent upon migrant labour – is the ultimate cause of its social crisis.

Both writers adeptly capture the combustible atmosphere of contemporary Britain. Yet their debate risks lapsing into a zero-sum contest. Just as economic analysis can elide complex individual impulses, psychological analysis can erase their social context. What is needed instead is a concrete psychosocial assessment: one that adequately captures how the vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.

When images of the riots began to circulate, they looked all too familiar to those engaged in anti-racist activism. Many had seen them coming. On 23 May, a small group of protestors gathered outside the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley after it agreed to host an Israeli state-funded film festival. They were immediately surrounded by hundreds of far-right counter-protesters, who hurled glass bottles and chanted racial abuse. ‘They are going to kill us’, a friend texted me from the demonstration, before a handful of police officers escorted her and her comrades to the nearest underground station. That night, the extremists went home emboldened. The following weekend the pro-Palestine encampment at University College London was attacked. It was hardly surprising that as the Gaza genocide – backed and funded by Western governments – was broadcast by every major media outlet, some Britons should seek to emulate this anti-Muslim violence on a smaller scale. Echoing the bloodlust of the IDF, online platforms thrummed with calls to burn down mosques.

Meanwhile, the political establishment had turbocharged its racism in the runup to the general election. Rishi Sunak tirelessly reiterated his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ and ‘control our borders’ by imprisoning asylum seekers and banishing them to Rwanda. Keir Starmer tried to outdo him by demanding the accelerated deportation of Bangladeshis. One of Yvette Cooper’s first moves as Home Secretary was to draw a direct link between immigration and rising crime, launching a new Border Security Command and ramping up ‘illegal working raids’. When the rioters took to the streets, they were not merely repeating the slogans of these politicians. They were taking matters into their own hands, enacting the violent policies they had been promised. If creating a ‘robust deterrent’ means marking out migrants for persecution and death, it is only a small step to set fire to hotels where they are housed. Both Labour and the Tories described the riots as ‘thuggery’ and ‘mindless violence’, but neither was willing to discuss the establishment racism that galvanized them. Liberal democracies generally prefer to obscure such murderous impulses, dressing them up as ‘law-enforcement’ or cloaking them in national mythology.

Though Seymour and Jäger are right to argue that the riots lack a moral or emancipatory core, they nonetheless promote an avowed moral claim that warrants our attention. In both establishment and street discourse, what we see is the juxtaposition of the criminal outsider with some innocent or virtuous insider that requires protection. Sunak claimed that the ‘stop the boats’ policy was about saving lives at sea by breaking the model of people smugglers and punishing imaginary ‘queue jumpers’. Those that gathered outside mosques held signs that read ‘save our children’. It reflects the phantasy of ridding society of its rotten elements. When leaders fail to fulfil this desire, street violence is an alternative.

According to Klein, persecution and punishment are an infant’s psychic defence against ‘depressive’ realizations: the acknowledgement that a perceived aggressor is a complex and ambiguous whole, which in turn enables acceptance of the child’s own complexity and ambiguity. Infants experience their primary caregiver as split into two figures, one good (present and responsive) and one bad (absent and rejecting). Their rage at the latter distorts their sense of reality, which becomes populated by threatening figures who must be attacked and destroyed. Ideally, this condition is eventually supplanted by a more ambivalent outlook, in which the external object is seen as neither wholly one nor the other. But when the child fails to make that transition, it remains trapped in a cycle of fear and aggression.

In Britain, this process of ‘splitting’ serves to excise from national consciousness the role of colonial and neo-colonial violence in producing the ‘illegal migrant’. While Seymour writes that a ‘utopian horizon of an interwar fascism based on colonial expansion’ has now given way to a far-right fixation on borders, it would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.

The 1981 British Nationality Act defined the concept of British citizenship via ‘patriality’, or blood ties. This legislation sought to erase Britain’s imperial history from memory and reestablish the country as a hermetically sealed white nation state. William Whitelaw, the then Conservative Home Secretary, remarked that ‘it is time to dispose of the lingering notion that Britain is somehow a haven for all those whose countries we used to rule’. Today, those directly or indirectly affected by colonization are branded unlawful intruders with no claim to what was stolen from them. The racist violence of the 2020s is a means of repressing its historical antecedent. Splitting enables self-absolution and claims to moral righteousness in the face of this blood-stained lineage. And racialized people are emptied of their humanity. Palestinians are blown to pieces abroad; at home racist lynch mobs roam the streets. As James Baldwin wrote, ‘You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves’.

Read on: Tom Nairn, ‘Enoch Powell: The New Right’, NLR I/61.