Britain’s Racist Far-Right Riots, Brexit and the Shameful Responsibility of Politicians and the Mainstream Media

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Over the last week, racist far-right rioting has erupted in towns and cities across the UK, cynically engineered by provocateurs who used a horrendous homicidal attack on a children’s dance class in Southport on July 29, at which three girls were stabbed to death, to falsely suggest that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who had recently arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in a small boat.

The reality was that the attacker was an evidently severely troubled 17-year old, born in the UK, whose Christian parents came to the UK from Rwanda, but the lies had a baleful life of their own, galvanising far-right groups and individuals from across the country, committed to Islamophobic violence, and connected via the swamp of unregulated or barely regulated social media and chat groups, to descend on Southport, just a day after the stabbings, where they targeted a mosque, fought with police officers, injuring 50, set fire to a police van, and damaged cars, homes and businesses.

The day after, July 31, the rioting spread to Hartlepool, where a mosque was attacked, Manchester and Aldershot, where hotels housing asylum seekers were attacked, and London, where rioters clashed with police in Whitehall.

On August 2, the rioting spread to Sunderland, where a police station was attacked, and the Citizens Advice Centre next door was set on fire, mosques were targeted and a car was set on fire, and at the weekend numerous other towns and cities were targeted, including Liverpool, where a children’s library was burned, Hull, where looting was widespread, and a hotel housing asylum seekers was also attacked. The worst attacks, however, took place the next day, in Rotherham and Tamworth, where rioters set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, and it seemed possible that the violent intent was so extreme that someone might end up killed.

Rioting continued in the days that followed, but its impetus now seems to have subsided. In part this is because the discovery of plans to target 30 advice centres yesterday evening (August 7) was discovered in various chat groups, and was met with an inspirational response from people from all walks of life who came out on the streets to demonstrate their support for the UK as a tolerant, multi-cultural society. However, it is also because a robust police presence is now in place, and, even more importantly, because many of those involved in the rioting have already been arrested (over 400 so far), and are being charged in the courts, and some have already been given prison sentences that have punctured their sense of impunity.

It’s worth noting that rioters with any sense should have realised that Keir Starmer would not be a soft touch. As the UK’s chief prosecutor at the time of the last major bout of rioting in 2011, precipitated by the police killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, Keir Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions and the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, and had encouraged a policy of maximum arrests and prosecutions, with over 3,000 people arrested within weeks — largely via CCTV footage, but also through mobile phone and social media use — and 1,292 rioters and looters convicted and imprisoned by August 2012.

However, rioters with any sense were evidently in short supply, as they have been, and continue to be easily tracked down via social media and unencrypted chat groups, and also through being filmed and photographed widely.

Sadly, though, when I look back from now to 2011, it’s apparent that, in the intervening 13 years, Britain has developed a significant far-right white problem, and while opportunistic looting and the thrill of vandalism run through both sets of riots, often as a response to lives of dullness and deprivation, what distinguishes 2024 from 2011 above all is quite how many violent indoctrinated far-right white fascists are now present in the UK, representing a home-grown terrorist threat that, to date, has rarely been taken seriously enough.

The reason for this, to be blunt, is because, for the last ten years or more, almost the entire political class in the UK, and most of its mainstream media, has, either explicitly or implicitly, been guilty of promoting Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment to a startling degree — sometimes, cynically, to distract from the increasing inequality and poverty delivered through the dominant neoliberal economic model embraced by both the major political parties over the last 40 years, but most fundamentally through the deliberate implementation of a malignant political ideology.

The baleful influence of Brexit

The key date for all of this is, of course, June 23, 2016, when a referendum on whether or not Britain should leave the EU, after 43 years of membership, led to a narrow victory for the ‘Leave’ camp, by 17.4 million to 16.1 million votes, which, when those who didn’t vote were taken into account, constituted just 37.4% of the eligible voters.

David Cameron’s decision to promise a referendum came about as a result of his truly idiotic and cowardly capitulation to an already rising far-right threat, and to Euro-scepticism within his own Party, which, ironically, Margaret Thatcher had always worked hard to suppress, as a champion of the Single Market.

The far-right threat emerged most noticeably in the UK’s council elections in May 2013, when the Euro-sceptic UKIP (the UK Independence Party), led by the irritating Middle England bigot Nigel Farage, who had been an MEP since 1999, took 20% of the vote and secured 147 councillors, up from just seven in 2009. The following year, in the European Parliament election, UKIP secured more votes than any other party (4.3 million), and also secured more seats than any of their rivals (24 in total), and although they only won one seat in the 2015 General Election, the threat they were perceived to pose was such that Cameron fulfilled the manifesto pledge to hold a referendum, introducing the European Union Referendum Act 2015, which came into force on February 1, 2016.

At this point, the spectre of racism, largely hidden to date in the machinations of those seeking to leave the EU, went mainstream. While the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign, led by the opportunistic Boris Johnson, focused largely on notions of ‘sovereignty’ and on false promises like the one emblazoned on a battle bus, which promised that the NHS would be £350m a week better off if we left the EU, the Leave.EU campaign, established by two prominent UKIP supporters, the dubious businessmen Arron Banks and Richard Tice, provided a prominent platform for Nigel Farage’s increasingly racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant messages.

The week before the referendum, this culminated in the unveiling of a billboard poster that showed Syrian refugees in eastern Europe in October 2015 (during the vast Europe-wide refugee crisis that provided so much fuel for Farage’s racism), under the prominent heading, ‘Breaking Point’, with additional text claiming that “the EU has failed us all”, and that “we must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.”

Farage was widely condemned for the poster, but it was already too late — and it was the media that were largely responsible.

Long before the campaigning for the EU referendum began, Britain’s increasingly unhinged right-wing media (the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express and the Telegraph) had been devoting more and more headlines to the alleged perils of immigration, and, in the years before the referendum, the supposed ‘liberal’ media also began to focus on immigration, based, it seems to me, on a belief that it was somehow zeitgeist-y to focus on rising racism and xenophobia, and as though doing so was ‘objective’ and damage-free, and with, apparently all caution jettisoned that platforming racists has an unerring tendency to amplify their message.

I’m not joking when I say that my memories of the months running up to the referendum involve all the major broadcasters featuring Farage so frequently that a visitor would have concluded that he was the Prime Minister, rather than a dangerous provocateur who wasn’t even an MP.

In a further dereliction of duty, the entire media class also decided that it was appropriate to describe people like Farage — and, later, Donald Trump, as he began his startling rise to become the US president, as “populists”, a choice or words that instinctively suggested that anyone who didn’t express unacceptable far-right views was somehow unpopular, and with a complete contempt for history. In this revisionist world, no one seemed to consider that, according to their criteria, history should rewritten so that a notable genocidal racist like Adolf Hitler should have his reputation revised, and should be redefined as a “populist.”

The post-Brexit rise of racism and xenophobia

After the referendum, racism and xenophobia increased to an alarming degree in the UK. For about a year afterwards, I asked everyone I met from an EU country if they had faced abuse, and never met a single one who hadn’t publicly been told to “go home” at some point, even in London, which was one of the bastions of the ‘Remain’ vote.

In politics, too, the referendum unleashed a torrent of division and negativity, which was increasingly focused on immigration. While Theresa May replaced David Cameron, and tried to make Brexit work, despite it being a fundamentally impossible task, she came to the job with a long history of racism and Islamophobia behind her, as the home secretary for the previous six years, as I wrote about in an article entitled, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration, and revisited, in March last year, in another article entitled, How Brexit Gave Us Vile, Broken Politicians Who Despise Human Rights and Seek to Criminalise Refugees: Part One, looking at her 2012 promise to create “a really hostile environment for illegal migration”, the Windrush scandal, and her obsession with repatriating a Jordanian-born radical preacher, Abu Qatada, which involved her developing an unhealthy obsession with withdrawing the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights.

Much worse, however, was to come when May eventually succumbed to failure, to be replaced by Boris Johnson, an especially self-obsessed opportunist with a penchant for saying whatever would make him popular. Johnson took over from May in July 2019, and in December won a resounding General Election victory by promising to ‘Get Brexit Done’ — an empty soundbite calculated to secure electoral success from an electorate with Brexit fatigue, just as he also secured disenchanted northern working class traditional Labour voters by emptily promising to “level up” the north, despite having no intention of actually doing so.

While Johnson was a disaster on every front — his response to the Covid epidemic being a prime example — it was his empowerment of a vile racist home secretary, Priti Patel, that contributed most significantly to the far-right riots currently plaguing Britain.

Although Patel was born in Britain to Indian parents who had come to the UK in the 1960s from Uganda, where her grandparents had emigrated and had run a convenience store, her embrace of what she malignantly regarded as the key policy endorsed by the Brexit vote — eliminating most forms of immigration to the UK — led to her dreaming up the notorious plan to send asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda, as I explained in my follow-up to my article about Theresa May, How Brexit Gave Us Vile, Broken Politicians Who Despise Human Rights and Seek to Criminalise Refugees: Part Two.

Patel also began the process of criminalising the very basis of being a refugee, tolerating those who arrive by ‘legal routes’, even though hardly any ‘legal routes’ exist (just a handful of schemes for Afghans and Ukrainians), while criminalising everyone else, largely arriving on perilous journeys on small boats across the Channel. In Patel’s UK, all small boat arrivals — whether legitimate refugees, or economic migrants — would, as I described it at the time, “be treated as criminals, facing up to four years’ imprisonment and a revocation of their ability to ever claim asylum in the UK”. And even if any of these irregular asylum seekers managed to successfully claim asylum, they would only receive a new ‘temporary protection status’ rather than the right to settle”, and would “also have limited family reunion rights and reduced access to benefits.”

As a backlog of asylum applications mounted up, in a dysfunctional Home Office in which Patel required claims to be unprocessed as a deterrent to future asylum seekers, under-used hotels, often in poorer parts of the country, were also called into service — at great expense — to keep those who had already managed to make it onto the soil of an increasingly unwelcoming Britain in penury and confinement, forbidden to work, even though that is, generally, all that immigrants want to do, and fundamentally treated as, and regarded as pariahs.

When Boris Johnson finally fell from grace, Patel was replaced by Suella Braverman, who managed to be even more of a monstrous racist than her predecessor. Born in London to Indian parents who had emigrated to Britain in the 1960s from Mauritius and Kenya, Braverman, although trained as a barrister, was a fanatic when it came to suppressing immigration and criminalising refugees.

Soon after her appointment, she gleefully described sending refugees on a one-way trip to Rwanda as “my dream” and “my obsession”, and soon after she enthused about stopping what she shamefully called “the invasion on our southern coast.”

There was worse to come, however, when she took a malignant description of asylum seekers having to arrive by irregular routes — the vile and non-existent concept of “illegal migration” — and turned it into a Parliamentary bill, the ‘Illegal Migration Bill’, unveiled in March 2023, which sought to “prevent and deter unlawful migration, and in particular migration by unsafe and illegal routes, by requiring the removal from the United Kingdom of certain persons who enter or arrive in the United Kingdom in breach of immigration control”, which, she was forced to concede, were possibly incompatible with the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was so appalled that it urgently issued a press release decrying how the legislation, if passed, “would amount to an asylum ban — extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the United Kingdom for those who arrive irregularly, no matter how genuine and compelling their claim may be, and with no consideration of their individual circumstances.”

UNHCR also noted how, based on Home Office data, the effect of the bill would be to disregard how the “vast majority of those arriving to the UK in small boats over the Channel would be accepted as refugees were their claims to be determined” — on average, 70% of asylum claims are successful. As UNHCR added, “Branding refugees as undeserving based on mode of arrival distorts these fundamental facts.”

When challenged, however, Braverman became hysterical, writing a column for the Daily Mail in which she shrieked, “In the face of today’s global migration crisis, yesterday’s laws are simply not fit for purpose. There are 100 million people displaced around the world, and likely billions more eager to come here if possible.” She added, “They are already coming here in their tens of thousands. And they will not stop until we’ve made it crystal clear: Arrive illegally and you will be liable for detention and swiftly removed — to your home country or to a safe third country like Rwanda. That is precisely what the Illegal Migration Bill will do. That is how we will stop the boats.”

The bill became law in July 2023, despite being so incoherent in its cruelty that, as I described it, “it can only lead to a situation in which the government is required to hold tens of thousands of asylum seekers in detention centres, at a cost of billions of pounds, because it has no way of sending anyone back anywhere”, not just because of the non-refoulement requirement of the ECHR (which prevents the return of anyone to a country where they may face torture), but also because, when Britain left the EU, it left the Dublin Regulation, which allowed the return of failed asylum seekers to 57 countries, including all of the EU member states, and, incredibly, put no new arrangements in place that would practically enable the transfer of asylum seekers to safe third countries.

After the long years of Tory misrule, and, in particular, the last five years, when Britain’s immigration policy became indistinguishable from that of a openly far-right, and fascist-leaning government — and all under the direction of three people of colour who would have been hard-pressed to have got away with such vile racism had they been white — no one involved in the Johnson, Truss and Sunak government should be allowed to make any kind of comment about the riots without being confronted unflinchingly about their colossal and unprecedented responsibility for this unrest.

To provide just one compelling reason why this is the case, one of the most prominent slogans used by the rioters is “Stop the boats”, the very slogan that formed one of Rishi Sunak’s five key policies throughout his premiership, and which was frequently emblazoned on a podium at his press conferences, even though, without any ‘safe routes’ for asylum seekers, it might as well have read, “Why don’t you all drown?”

Interestingly, another prominent slogan used by the rioters is “Save the children”, which reveals the extent to which some on the far-right have been infected by absurd conspiracy theories, originating in the US via the risible Pizzagate claim, alleging that US Democrats were running a secret paedophile ring. During the Covid lockdowns, as I realised when I spent a chilling and thoroughly dispiriting day watching anti-lockdown conspiracy theorists marching through central London, “Save the children” continued to be used as a campaigning slogan, as the conspiracy theories expanded to include notions that Covid was a hoax, and was part of a ‘New World Order’ envisaged by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to stifle our fundamental freedoms.

In the years since — as the conspiracy theories have also continued to swallow up many on the political left, who seem largely not to have noticed that they’re now consorting with neo-Nazis — they have also been deliberately infected by climate change denial, and with the notion that any effort to restrict car use to reach our legally required greenhouse gas emissions targets is part of the same plan to stifle our fundamental freedoms, along with antipathy towards the notion of ’15-minute cities’, embraced in enlightened cities as a bold effort to reduce commuting distances for sound environmental reasons, but perceived by the conspiracy world as — and I kid you not — an attempt to imprison us in our homes.

Although the Rwanda plan was ditched after the Tories were finally removed from power in the General Election on July 4 this year, when the Labour Party, under Keir Starmer, secured a landslide victory, racism and Islamophobia have not been banished from mainstream politics.

Starmer’s Labour Party has, shamefully, persistently refused to embrace Muslims as part of an equal society, whether by demeaning them (when Muslim councillors began resigning over Starmer’s stance on Gaza, one unnamed official apparently told Lee Harpin, the political editor of Jewish News, that Labour was “shaking off the fleas”) or by deselecting a prominent Muslim candidate before the General Election, or through casual remarks Starmer made in the run-up to the election about returning failed asylum seekers to Bangladesh.

Labour’s biggest problem, however, concerns its position regarding Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, which, as noted above, led to a massive resignation of Labour Muslim councillors throughout the country. As an ardent supporter of Israel’s “right to defend itself”, Starmer crossed a line in October by suggesting that Israel had the right to cut off food, water and fuel from Gaza, even though he must have known, as a human rights lawyer, that that is a war crime. Overall, shamefully, the Labour Party, under Starmer’s leadership, occupies the same genocidal space as its Tory predecessors, endorsing — or not intervening to stop — a slaughter that is not only unconscionable, but that reinforces, at some level, whether consciously or not, the perception of Muslims not only as a threat, but as a threat to be erased.

This has undoubtedly fed into the far-right’s current and violent manifestation of anti-Muslim violence, and while Starmer and the Labour Party have chosen to frame their approach to the rioters in terms of violent disorder, he and his ministers should also spell out clearly and definitively how they embrace the contributions that immigrants make to the UK, and how they are fundamentally opposed to any and all forms of Islamophobia.

The blunt truth, so rarely documented or championed, is that immigrants, whether refugees fleeing death and horror, or economic migrants, seeking work opportunities, contribute massively to Britain’s economy, working in many sectors that would collapse without them, and that, although anyone who has been obliged to leave the country of their birth will most probably continue to identify with that country to some extent, most immigrants end up assimilated, their children, in particular, tending to do so effortlessly through the melting pot of Britain’s schools. 

In addition, Britain’s Muslims, demonised since the 9/11 attacks and the “war on terror”, which has seen an entire global community of two billion people tarred as terrorists, are often deeply involved in their local communities — as has been seen in the positive community responses to the riots — and want nothing more than a recognition that, despite the differences between different faith groups and different nationalities, we can all get along, in a spirit of tolerance that, despite Britain’s long history of racism, both at home and abroad, has always formed a strong counter-narrative. 

A brief history of online provocateurs and the problems of social media

As the police and the intelligence services pursue those responsible for the riots, it is also hugely important that the government works out how to finally tackle the online provocateurs who, in common with most governments in the west, they have largely refrained from pursuing, in the Wild West world of social media and messaging services.

The roll-call of unaccountable provocateurs, who are largely given free rein to spread dangerous misinformation, and who have millions, or hundreds of thousands of followers, is genuinely quite shocking. Amongst the most prominent are the dangerous misogynist Andrew Tate, whose post on X (formerly Twitter) after the Southport attack, wrongly claiming, “illegal migrant stabs 6 little girls”, received nearly ten million views, and the individual known as ’Tommy Robinson’, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, an Islamophobic provocateur who co-founded and ran the Islamophobic English Defence League (EDL) from 2009 to 2013, and who wrongly posted that the Southport attacker was an “asylum seeker.”

Although Yaxley-Lennon isn’t even in the country, having flown to Ayia Napa, in Cyprus, on a luxury holiday no doubt paid for by his undisclosed backers (who seem to include various Zionists, using him to launder their genocide by tarnishing all Muslims as terrorists and extremists), he has continued to pump out misinformation, and the riot in London — the only one to date to sully the largely tolerant capital — was, noticeably, held in his name.

These individuals — and countless others — have, over the years, been subjected to various bans by various social media companies, but, as well as evading scrutiny by, in Tate’s case, moving to fundamentally unaccountable social media outlets, like the video platform Rumble, they have also had their voices amplified considerably since Elon Musk took over Twitter in November 2022. Yaxley-Lennon, banned from Twitter in March 2018 for violating its rules on “hateful conduct”, had his account reinstated by Musk in November 2023, and currently has over 900,000 followers. Tate, meanwhile, whose Twitter account was banned in 2021 (and who was banned from Facebook and Instagram in 2022) had his account reinstated by Musk when he took over Twitter, and he currently has 9.8 million followers.

In recent days, Musk himself has waded into the controversy surrounding unregulated social media, launching a tirade of posts aimed at Keir Starmer after Downing Street criticised a post by Musk, showing rioters in Liverpool along with the inflammatory caption, “civil war is inevitable.” In a follow-up post, Musk called Starmer “two-tier Keir”, a reference to the far-right’s absurd declaration that policing in the UK is disproportionately hostile towards white people than it is towards people of colour, despite demonstrable evidence of widespread racism in the UK towards people of colour, and an equally demonstrable leniency towards white, far-right unrest.

When it comes to free speech, however, the irony is that, under Musk, reporting about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has been much more open than it would have been under its previous owners, when, in deference to Israel, and no doubt through both subtle and not-so-subtle pressure, Palestinian accounts were regularly banned. The same problem also afflicts Meta, where, as I can personally verify, new rule changes regarding Israel, implemented a month ago, have meant that I now find it almost impossible to share articles from my website that are critical of Israel and its appalling genocidal activities.

That said, Musk now seems to be sidelining Palestinian voices and aggressively amplifying those on the violent far-right, perhaps because of Israeli influence (whereby the genocidal aggressor is actively promoting violent Islamophobia in an effort to justify its actions in Gaza and beyond, and as it may also be doing through its alleged financial support for ’Tommy Robinson’), but also, I suspect, to foment discord in the run-up to the coming Presidential Election, in which he has already declared his support for Donald Trump, In this context, championing and promoting violent racist and Islamophobic rioting by the far-right in the UK can be seen as helping to solidify the deranged notion that, everywhere, white people (including Israel’s European-born colonisers) are under threat from people of colour.

As always, however, it’s worth noting that one of the key problems with social media — all social media, not just X — is that their founding was so law-free that how they operate — the algorithms that dictate who sees what, and the AI programs established to police these platforms — are so opaque that a handful of individuals, fundamentally without any kind of democratic oversight, are dictating what information people in vast numbers are allowed to see.

Moreover, as can also be appreciated in the UK, this lack of oversight also extends to the mainstream media. While the US has long suffered from the disproportionate influence of broadcasters who have contempt for the ‘impartial’ and ‘balanced’ reporting on which the ‘liberal’ media prides itself (as Murdoch’s Fox News demonstrates so horribly), the UK has only comparatively recently embarked on this path, allowing two far-right news channels, GB News and Murdoch’s Talk TV, to poison the airwaves with largely unregulated far-right propaganda and conspiracy theories.

Talk TV recently went online only, after mounting financial losses, but GB News, while also struggling financially, continues to broadcast on terrestrial TV, with presenters including Nigel Farage, who continues to host a show despite being elected as an MP for Clacton-on-Sea in the recent General Election. This is just the latest example of lax enforcement of the rules by the regulator, Ofcom, which are supposed to prohibit politicians from acting as newsreaders, interviewers or reporters  “unless, exceptionally, it is editorially justified.”

Farage, who has played such a key role in promoting anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK throughout the entire darkness of the last decade, continues to be a troubling figure not only because of his GB News role, but also because of the apparent illegitimacy of Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party), the alleged political party that he leads, who gained five seats in total in the General Election, and secured over four million votes nationally, despite not being a political party, with a recognisable and accountable structure, and being, instead, a limited company, with Farage as the majority shareholder.

Fundamentally, Farage remains a potent and troubling provocateur, although he is more careful with his words than other more obviously inflammatory provocateurs like Andrew Tate, ’Tommy Robinson’, and countless others like the failed actor Laurence Fox (who declared on August 4, in a post with 1m views, that “Islam needs to be removed from Britain. Completely and entirely”), the genuinely repulsive Etonian fascist Douglas Murray, and numerous other dregs of humanity that have mainly washed up at GB News.

The day after the Southport attack, for example, Farage posted a widely-shared video asking “whether the truth is being withheld from us” in connection with the attack — despite very obviously knowing that, because the attacker had already been revealed as a 17-year old, it was a legal requirement not to reveal his identity. In response, Neil Basu, a former senior Scotland Yard officer who was in charge of counter-terrorism from 2018 to 2021, pointed out that there are “real world consequences” when public figures fail to “keep their mouth shut”, adding that he was “giving the EDL succour, undermining the police, creating conspiracy theories, and giving a false basis for the attacks on the police.”

While Farage, as an MP, can and should be investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and must also be compelled, as required, to disclose any external funding he receives, holding the outlaws of the social media world to account still looks like an extraordinary uphill struggle, in which bad actors can post whatever they want, delete it if it causes too much of a backlash (but only after it has gone viral and inflicted maximum damage), and rarely risk censure, while genuinely decent commentators are all too often either sidelined or banned.

Far from being any kind of Brave New World, the tech companies’ biased and unaccountable actions have made the world of 2024 more dangerous and divided than ever before, aided by cynical politicians and a corrupt, or just as cynical mainstream media.

We — the decent people who oppose, by a majority, apologists for genocide and the facilitated presence of far-right thugs on our streets — deserve better, and not for any kinds of woolly, airy-fairy reasons, but because our shared humanity very fundamentally depends on it.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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