The roots of the UK's unrest lie in the warping of genuine working-class grievances | Kenan Malik

“The British soul is awakening and stirring with rage at what these people are doing,” the Spectator ’s Douglas Murray told former Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson. The comment might sound like a response to the recent riots, but was actually recorded last year (the edited clip of the old interview was uploaded on Anderson’s website last week, but has since been taken down).

By “these people”, Murray meant immigrants. “I don’t want them here,” he insisted. “I’m perfectly willing to say that, because it needs to be said.” The police, Murray argued, had lost control of the streets and “if the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves, and it’ll be very, very brutal.” The comments might sound like a prescient warning. They sound also like a dangerous apology for the violence.

It is worth recalling how the disorder began. In response to the horrific killings of three young girls in a dance class in Southport, many leapt to the conclusion that the murderer was a Muslim who had arrived on a small boat across the Channel. This bigoted speculation became the starting point for insisting the tragedy arose from “uncontrolled immigration” and from the refusal of immigrants to integrate.

The first “protest” was outside Southport mosque, windows smashed and a wall demolished. Even after the alleged killer was allowed to be named as Axel Rudakubana , born in Cardiff to devoutly Christian migrants from Rwanda, protesters continued to target mosques, set fire to migrant hostels, assault black or Asian passersby. And many commentators continued to present it as the inevitable outpouring of rage against the “liberal elite”.

Many of the critics have treated the working-class people as if they really were boneheaded and bigoted

Liberal commentators have often been chastised, correctly, for treating working-class voters who back the wrong politicians or have the wrong views about immigration as racist or ignorant. In response to the post-Southport riots, many of the critics have themselves treated working-class people as if they really were boneheaded and bigoted, conflating racism with working-class anger.

Working-class grievances in towns such as Sunderland or Stoke are real, from a lack of housing to an Uberised labour market , from an inability to find NHS dentists to a broken public transport system . But attacking mosques and migrant hotels, assaulting people possessing the wrong colour of skin or professing the wrong god, is straightforward bigotry. Or rather, it reveals how grievances can become warped within a national conversation obsessed with blaming social problems on immigrants.

For academic Matthew Goodwin, his description of the alleged killer of the three girls in Southport was simply “the son of immigrants from Rwanda”.

Even with the tiny amount of information we have, there are many ways one could describe Rudakubana. As British. As born in Cardiff. Of Christian heritage. A child actor. As diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder . We will undoubtedly learn much more about him during the course of his trial.

For Goodwin, though, only one aspect of Rudakubana’s being matters. That he was “the son of immigrants”. “Immigrant” has, for some, become the one-stop explanation for social tragedies and ills.

To grasp how we’ve arrived here, we need to understand a complex of intertwining developments. The first, paradoxically, is the growth of a more liberal society , one in which, unlike half a century ago, Britons are more comfortable with racial differences, only a tiny percentage believing that to be British you must be white.

Whether in white or minority communities, identitarianism has entrenched sectarian movements

It might seem an odd moment to talk of a more liberal Britain. The context of the current upsurge in racism is, however, distinct from the bigotry of the 1970s and 80s, to which many have drawn parallels. Britain was then viscerally racist in a way that it no longer is, despite recent events.

But liberalisation, too, has to be placed in context. Not that long ago, Britain was congratulating itself for being more relaxed about immigration than its European neighbours , and for having avoided the rise of far-right parties as seen in France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, even if Reform partly fills the gap.

Yet, if Britain has forestalled the rise of a true far-right party, there has nevertheless developed, as in Europe, a reactionary politics of identity, spawning hostility to Muslims and minorities. The current disorder is the product of that kind of hostility expressed not through organisations such as the Rassemblement National in France or the AfD in Germany but in the form of a more inchoate lashing out.

Sections of the working class have become open to identitarian arguments because of the way that much of the left – indeed much of society – has embraced politics of identity at the same time as deprecating the politics of class. For many today, the frameworks through which they make sense of their relationship to the world are less political – “liberal” or “conservative” – than cultural or ethnic – “Muslim”, “white”, “English”.

As social democratic parties have moved away from their traditional working-class constituencies, leaving many feeling abandoned and voiceless, some within those constituencies have turned to the language of identity to find a social anchor. Being “white working class” often feels as much about the whiteness as the class location.

The riots should not be treated simply as a matter of law and order, still less be exploited, as is happening now

Whether in white or minority communities, identitarianism has entrenched sectarian movements, pushing people to see those beyond the boundaries of their identity as threats. It has also allowed the far right to rebrand racism as white identity , a rebranding given legitimacy by mainstream conservatives who now casually talk of white Europeans “losing their homelands ” and “committing suicide”, of Britons “surrendering their territory”, bemoaning cities like London becoming less white .

“We are not allowed to talk of immigration,” the critics claim. We’ve barely stopped talking about immigration over the past decade. What they really mean is that we don’t talk about it sufficiently in identitarian terms. There is much to be discussed about immigration, not just about numbers but also about integration, cohesion and belonging. To frame that discussion in the language of identity would be disastrous, hindering the possibilities of rational debates around any of these issues.

At the same time, the riots should not be treated simply as a matter of law and order, still less be exploited, as is happening now, to restrict rights further, extending the province of terror laws, expanding censorship and normalising the use of facial recognition technology.

The issue of liberties is as important as that of immigration and identity and of the abandonment of working-class communities. How we deal with the tangle of all three will have long-term consequences for British politics and society.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

This column differs from the version published in the Observer on Sunday 11 August. The opening paragraphs have been changed to reflect the fact that Douglas Murray’s interview took place last year, not after the Southport riots.

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