Making England ‘Abdul Free’: Flags and the Far Right

England this last month has been a tale of two nations: a seething tide of fury and desperation splitting into two very different protesting crowds. The reactions that each have garnered tell the story of two Englands, the political systems and global power structures that coalesce into the lives of ordinary people and the opportunity of British Muslims.

On Saturday 13th September, 110,000 people answered the call of far right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, for the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London, the largest of its kind in British history. In the lead up, a fervent summer of #OperationRaiseTheColours saw a guerrilla campaign of St. George’s flags hoisted on lampposts, red crosses painted onto roundabouts (sometimes amusingly resembling Swiss flags) and banners strung across white-majority neighbourhoods. The flags reached a fever pitch at the London march as men, women and children bore placards and shouted chants of proud racist vitriol. Between clashes with the police and counter-protesters, a mere 22 arrests were made in this nakedly bigoted rally.

Just a week earlier, however, more than 890 people were arrested for simply holding signs that read: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. Doctors, retirees, and disabled citizens were charged with terrorist offences following the UK government’s ban of the non-violent, direct-action group. The proscription and its enforcement were a hysterical, disproportionate, and hypocritical response to Palestine Action’s break-in at an RAF base to protest the use of British planes in Israel’s genocide of Gaza.

This, then, is the tale of two Englands.

In the England of the far-right, the country is portrayed as being destroyed by immigrants. It is an England wherein white women and girls are raped by the shadowy, elusive mass of Asian men; where jobs are stolen from white men. In this England, the traumatised asylum seekers locked arbitrarily in hotels are to blame for the nation’s decline, rather than the hastily concocted policies of successive governments on both sides of the aisle. Rising housing costs, crippling NHS waiting times, and mounting energy costs are the fault of those fleeing war, the Commonwealth immigrants of the 1950s and 60s, their children and grandchildren, and, always, the fault of the Muslims.

But the Palestine Action protests expose another England; a state which aids the apartheid, genocidal regime of Israel. Through Gaza – a litmus test for the world – the public has witnessed in bloody detail how the military industrial complex, from BAE to Elbit Systems, alongside a bloated defence budget funded through tax rises, obliterates a people in order to uphold elite global power and wealth structures. The genocide has shaken off the veneer of Western exceptionalism and façade of Britain’s democracy. Palestinians have paid a harrowing price for us to realise that our freedoms were never guaranteed, but privileges that pariah states like Israel can easily lobby to have removed. This, we will call True England.

When the former MP Douglas Carswell hijacked the revolutionary pro-Palestinian chant and odiously tweeted: ‘From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free’, there was an implicit recognition that these two Englands are connected. In many ways, far right England is, as Naomi Klein coined, ‘a trip into the mirror world’ – a distorted doppelgänger of True England, manufactured to provoke outrage. Elite interests and their political allies have leveraged racism and white supremacy to redirect the rage ‘coursing through our culture’ away from those who profit from our poverty. Instead, they convinced disenfranchised and deprived white communities to channel their anger downwards: at the black and brown people who were the first and most direct victims of their policies.

Where, then, does this leave the Muslim community?

In decades past, the immediate response would have been fear and incredulous anger at neighbours so easily misled into the ‘Mirror World’. This time, however, with the pain of Gaza seared onto our perspectives, settled Muslim citizens have a duty to assert – loudly and resolutely – that this country is ours too. And if it is, it is also ours to save.

The parts of our community that have prospered, those that have built businesses and livelihoods, who possess an arsenal of skills and expertise, cannot turn inwards, raising barricades around our comfortable lives. How many of our own are already shivering outside? How many refugees, immigrants, and impoverished families have we overlooked in mistaking safety for insularity?

This is not a call to embrace the ‘Good Immigrant’ trope nor to dismiss the real hatred of the far right. Rather, it is a recognition that the very root causes of this rage – wealth inequality, unaffordability and insecurity – are already permeating our own communities. Lobbying and organising to solve these issues raises all sinking ships. As former banker turned activist Gary Stevenson recently put it, “You will spend your time fighting each other, and the rich will take everything”.

In truth, the values of Islam are universal and meant for all. Our obligation of generosity and our commitment to excellence should extend to every citizen. Allah says in the Qur’an: ‘You are the best community ever raised for humanity – you encourage good, forbid evil, and believe in Allah’ (3:110). As Mufti Muhammad Shafi Uthmani explains in his Ma’ariful Qur’an, this verse is both a praise for the Ummah of Muhammad ﷺ and a charge to remain ‘concerned with spiritual and moral reformation’ of all humanity.

Crucially, this means awakening more of our fellow citizens to True England, exposing the injustices of this state at home and abroad. As the theory of the ‘imperial boomerang’ has proven time and time again, the violence inflicted in the far-flung borders of this neo-colonial empire, always find their way home. From Palantir’s Gaza kill-lists and sinister NHS contracts to the tax evasion of corporations, like Microsoft and Google complicit in genocide, True England is a creation of the very architects of the brutal post-war, neo-liberal order.There were undoubtedly committed racists who marched at the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally. But there were also ordinary citizens who had been deceived by charlatans. If we can expose the real sources of their anger (and ours) and work to resolve them, we may yet find, just as at the Palestine Action protest the week earlier, unexpected allies in truly uniting the Kingdom.

---

Disclaimer: Material published by Traversing Tradition is meant to foster scholarly inquiry and rich discussion. The views, opinions, beliefs, or strategies represented in published articles and subsequent comments do not necessarily represent the views of Traversing Tradition or any employee thereof.