A young girl clutching a teddy bear pulled into the back of a PSNI van.
The image appeared yesterday while racist violence continued to spread across the North following Monday night’s horrific attack in North Belfast. Little speaks to the bankruptcy of contemporary anti-immigration (or, as it is sometimes disguised, ‘immigration sceptical’) politics more than a frightened child being evacuated from her home under police protection while politicians, commentators and self-appointed defenders of women and girls continue to insist that violence towards migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and anyone else deemed ‘too foreign’ is motivated by concerns about safety.
The appeal to women’s safety has become one of the defining political manoeuvres of the contemporary far right. Across Europe and North America, anti-migrant politics are increasingly presented not as opposition to immigration but as a defence of vulnerable women and children. The argument is politically useful because it allows racism to be articulated through the language of protection, and often targets vulnerable and traumatised communities. Rather than speaking openly about ethnic or cultural hierarchies, though open racist vitriol inevitably rears its head eventually, migrants and anyone considered an ‘outsider’ are cast as a threat from which society must be defended. The focus shifts away from the actual conditions that produce violence, and towards a permanent suspicion opportunistically directed at particular populations. Some years ago it was the Irish abroad; now it is people who come here looking to make a home.
Selective Outrage
But not every murder, or violent attack, is equal. What makes this argument so cynical is the selectivity with which concern is expressed. Violence against women is not an occasional phenomenon in our society. It is a structural one. By definition, it is more difficult to whip up people into a frenzy over a structural analysis of this issue rather than pointing at individual scapegoats. Furthermore, it is often not the most emotionally gratifying line. Nevertheless, we cannot hope to challenge violence at the root, whether targeted towards women and girls or other groups, without tackling this issue at its root. Women continue to be murdered by partners, former partners and family members with alarming regularity. According to Women’s Aid, 87% of women (in resolved cases) were killed by a man known to them, and 13% of women were killed by a stranger. 63% of femicides occurred in the home of the victim. Domestic abuse remains endemic, all while services remain underfunded where they exist at all. The people who have suddenly discovered a passionate concern for women’s safety are remarkably difficult to locate when these conversations arise.
There has been a disturbing increase in the brutality shown in the murders of women across Ireland in recent years. Natalie McNally was stabbed to death in her own home in Lurgan, Co. Armagh, by her boyfriend Stephen McCullagh – her injuries were so brutal and so extensive that it took the pathologist forty minutes to list them. Natalie was deliberately left lying face down in a dog bowl as a final act of humiliation and cruelty. She was one of the thirty-two women murdered in the North since COVID, joined by another thirty-seven in the South. Natalie’s family have unequivocally condemned the violent pogroms in Belfast of the past days, much like the family of the victim of North Belfast attack, Stephen Ogilvie. Women refugees and asylum seekers are also especially vulnerable to violence. When Masuma Sohrabi, a woman living in an IPAS centre in Clifden, was murdered there was no comparable outpouring of political concern. She reported her murderer to the Gardaí, did everything she was supposed to. Her children are now without a mother. Masuma came to Ireland seeking safety and was murdered. There was no sudden insistence that society confront the conditions which produce male violence. There was no attempt by those now rioting to mobilise against these murders on a similar scale. No statements of condemnation from the government or billionaires like Elon Musk. Concern appears and disappears according to the identity of the alleged perpetrator, which tells us a great deal about the real purpose of these arguments.
Racist Pogroms
The events of the last two days have exposed this contradiction with unusual clarity. A violent crime was committed. Almost immediately, responsibility began to expand outwards from the individual accused of carrying it out towards an entire category of people. Online networks that have spent years cultivating anti-migrant sentiment moved rapidly to transform an individual act into evidence of a collective threat, extending to anyone deemed too ‘foreign’. The result has been entirely predictable, though the rapid escalation in the scale of violence, impunity and destruction to people’s homes is shocking. Families who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack have found themselves targeted, driven out onto the streets into the arms of masked men. Fake ‘Immigrant checkpoints’ run by far-right agitators were seen to be formed on main roads in and out of Belfast. Children have been removed from their homes for their own safety, forced into PSNI vans away from their parents. All this in the interest of ‘safety’.
A family being rescued from their home while neighbouring properties burned was broadcast live on Sky News. The fire had already spread along the row and several houses’ windows had been smashed. The family remained inside because they were more frightened of the crowd waiting outside than they were of the fire itself. Only when firefighters arrived did they feel safe enough to leave. This image should strip away every and any justification offered for the violence. The family had not attacked anyone nor had they threatened anyone. They had not committed any crime. Their only connection to the original incident was that they belonged to a group that had been designated collectively responsible for it.
This process is neither new nor particularly mysterious, disturbing as it is. Periods of economic and social crisis have repeatedly produced attempts by far-right agitators to redirect popular anger away from those who exercise power and towards those who do not. Many people who participate in this violent spectacle are not conscious of this dynamic; some even feel a false sense of empowerment from taking part in a racist pogrom. Along this line, migrants (or whichever group is being scapegoated) become responsible for housing shortages created by decades of deliberate political choices made to benefit landlords and multinational corporations by the government. They become responsible for collapsing public services produced by austerity and underinvestment. They become responsible for poverty, inequality and social fragmentation despite occupying some of the most precarious positions within society themselves, and simultaneously carrying out some of the most essential work, especially in our hospitals. Despite the contradictions, the attraction of this politics is obvious. It allows attention to be diverted away from landlords, employers, governments and concentrations of wealth and towards people with very little power to shape the conditions under which they live.
Left concessions: A dead end
This is also why socialists should be deeply concerned by the increasing tendency of some organisations on the left to accommodate rather than challenge anti-migrant narratives. When groups begin by acknowledging supposedly ‘legitimate’ concerns about immigration, they often imagine they are engaging with popular anxieties in a pragmatic way. They think they will win people to progressive struggles by giving time and oxygen to the narrow end of the divide and conquer wedge. In reality these groups are conceding the central premise of the far right’s argument, namely that migrants themselves constitute a social problem requiring political management. Once that premise is accepted, even partially, debate shifts from whether migrants are responsible for social crises towards the extent of their responsibility. The terrain has already been surrendered, and the parameter for debate set by the far right and tech billionaires. We don’t win people by falling into this racist trap; we win people by fighting for housing in our communities for all who live there, by fighting for funding of community services, by standing on the picket lines alongside working people fighting for better pay and conditions, and opposing racism wherever it rears its ugly head.
The history of the North offers more than enough examples of where this ‘divide and rule’ kind of politics leads. For decades Catholics were demonised. They were portrayed as an internal threat to security and safety, blamed for wider social tensions and treated as a population whose presence generated violence. The pogroms that accompanied the partition period in the early 1920s saw thousands of Catholics driven from their homes and workplaces, particularly in Belfast, while sectarian violence was routinely justified through claims that the Catholic population represented a threat to the state. Similar patterns re-emerged during the civil rights era and the violence of the late 1960s, when Catholic neighbourhoods came under sustained attack, families were forced to flee their homes and entire communities were collectively treated as suspect. This particularly calls to mind the Bombay Street burnings of 1969 when loyalist mobs threw incendiary devices into the homes of Catholic families. The comparison is not identical and it should not be forced beyond its limits. Nevertheless, there is an obvious similarity in the underlying logic. A minority population becomes associated with disorder, often on the back of decades of dehumanisation and being subject to substantially worse housing and social conditions. Structural problems are attributed to the very existence of this group. Measures directed against that population are justified as necessary responses to public concern. The target changes but this story remains remarkably familiar.
What has emerged over the last two days is therefore not simply a local response to a horrific crime. It is part of a much wider political phenomenon.
The reality of sectarianism has also shaped how that phenomenon has expressed itself in the North. Much of the violence has emerged from predominantly loyalist areas, though anti-migrant mobilisations have by no means been confined to them. Racism is not unique to any one community. Nevertheless, the geography of these attacks points towards the enduring legacy of sectarian politics. For generations, sections of the unionist and loyalist establishment encouraged working-class Protestants to understand structural issues through the lens of communal threat rather than shared class interests.
A global hate movement
This development has not taken place in isolation. Over recent years, sections of loyalism have increasingly found common ground with far-right currents in Britain and the South of Ireland. Anti-migrant rhetoric, conspiracy theories about demographic change and appeals to defend a supposedly threatened national culture have created new points of connection between political traditions that once viewed one another with hostility, alongside a plethora of strange AI-generated images of Union Jacks and tricolours melting together. While the symbols may differ, the political function is often the same: directing anger over poverty, housing shortages and social decline away from governments, landlords and employers, and towards vulnerable minorities.
From Belfast to Dublin, from Britain to the United States, a network of politicians, media personalities and billionaires have invested enormous resources in cultivating hostility towards migrants (and, notably, other marginalised groups like the trans community) while presenting themselves as the defender of ordinary people. Figures such as Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, JD Vance and Elon Musk differ in important respects, but they all benefit from a politics which directs public anger away from concentrations of wealth and power and towards vulnerable communities. However, their influence should not be measured simply by the statements they make but by the political common sense they help create. The responsibility for what has happened over the last several days does not rest solely with those who carried out the attacks. Political leaders and public figures helped create the atmosphere in which they became possible. The spectacle of DUP Education Minister Paul Givan appearing alongside protests that quickly escalated into attacks on the homes of migrant families and workers only deepened the impression that those responsible for the violence enjoyed a degree of impunity. This was a repeat of last week, where the DUP’s Carla Lockhart was seen standing among masked loyalist protesters, some of whom were reported to have thrown stones at a peaceful Palestine march. Even where violence is not explicitly endorsed, rhetoric which treats entire communities as a problem to be managed can help create the conditions in which such violence becomes easier to justify.
A challenge for the trade union movement
The response to these events has also highlighted an important challenge for the trade union movement. Anti-racist mobilisations are planned across Belfast and Derry and deserve support, and to be followed with solidarity rallies across the country. The speed with which racist networks have been able to organise stands in sharp contrast to the slower and often more cautious response of the trade union bureaucracy. Trade unions remain the largest organised force within working-class communities and have both the responsibility and the capacity to provide a different answer to division and scapegoating. That means not only issuing statements after the fact but being prepared to act quickly, mobilise members, support anti-racist demonstrations and make the case that the real causes of housing shortages, strained public services and declining living standards lie not with migrants but with decades of political choices made in the interests of wealth and power. We have seen that they can do this when pressured by members. When the far right is organising in working-class communities, the trade unions cannot afford to arrive late.
That image of a little girl holding a teddy bear while being pulled into a PSNI van embodies that distance between the reality and the myth conjured by the far right. If the political project currently advancing across much of the Western world were genuinely concerned with the safety of women and children, one would expect its first instinct to be solidarity with those forced from their homes and terrorised by racist violence. Instead, those families are treated as an unfortunate side effect of a supposedly ‘necessary’ conversation. The contradiction could hardly be clearer. The people who claim most loudly to be defending women and children have spent the last two days creating a situation in which women and children are being violently driven from their homes.
