All of a sudden this country seems to have reached a very dangerous impasse. Every morning for the last three or four days, we have woken to news of far right thugs tearing up town and city centres across the country, fuelled by deliberate misinformation. How we got here we can only speculate, of course. I suspect it has a connection to the far right gathering I’m ashamed to admit I was witness to a few weeks ago. There, I got to hear speakers like Tommy Robinson spew all kinds of xenophobic nonsense, manipulating people’s fears and prejudices in order to whip them into a frenzy of victimhood: they were told there were two tier systems in place, and that people who were native to the country were being disadvantaged in favour of immigrants.

Such rhetoric is, of course, as baseless as it is repugnant; but online it spreads like wildfire, especially between those who already feel left behind by modern culture. It preys upon feelings of oppression, misdirecting them towards minorities who are just as oppressed. By grouping together and demonstrating, these far right rioters seem to think they are exerting a form of cultural power which they think should be theirs but which they have been robbed of, when in fact they are simply laying bare their ability to understand modern multicultural society. These are people who have been left behind by the education system, and who now resent those they see as ‘elites’ telling them what to do and how to behave. Thus these riots have more to do with frustration and confusion than anything: a type of social bitterness which, when misdirected onto those they perceive as ‘other’ by charlatans like Robinson, becomes something very ugly indeed.