No one wants to lead these riots

Joe/Jeff Marsh wants to make it clear that he did not, like people keep saying, start the riots in Southport. He wasn’t at the riots. He doesn’t like riots. He’s a white nationalist, fine, but he’s also a busy, self-employed builder from Swansea. And Swansea is nowhere near Southport. All he did was share a picture of a poster about a protest to 2,000 people who subscribe to his channel on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app. A few people reposted the poster, shared his share elsewhere, then the protest just… became a riot.

Joe’s trying to explain this on the phone, and I’m getting him up on Google Images while he talks. (Joe is his real name. Jeff is a decoy to give him anonymity.) In the pictures he has a big bald head and wears a camouflage cagoule. ‘A tweet saying that it was my demo has had like 1.9 million views’, he says down the line. ‘I’ve had a barrage of abuse from lefties. I’ve had loads of people tagging the police, saying “this man ought to be arrested”. I literally did not organise that demo, you know?’

None of the big names in far-right British politics want to lead the protests. (‘Far-right’ isn’t the perfect descriptor, but you have to group them in some way.) At the hour of revolution, Tommy Robinson, who started the English Defence League, was unwinding at a five-star hotel in Ayia Napa, in Cyprus. Where was Mark Collett, the leader of Patriotic Alternative, Britain’s largest far-right group? At home posting on Telegram about the need for non-violence. 

Joe is a serious character in Britain’s white nationalist scene. He was in the British National party, then the EDL, and now runs the Welsh ‘branch’ of Patriotic Alternative. His home has been raided by anti-terrorism police, and he claims his phone and computer are bugged. Joe honed his disorderly behaviour a few decades ago when he was a football hooligan, a member of Cardiff City’s ‘Soul Crew’. On the back of his book, The Trouble With Taffies, he says he had ‘a few spells in prison including one for stabbing two Man Utd fans’. The director Irvine Welsh considered making a film about the Soul Crew. Joe might’ve been the new Billy Bright. 

Nowadays, Joe says he splits his time between managing his online persona, ‘The Welsh Nationalist’, and organising and attending peaceful rallies to advance the supremacy of the white race. Along with the 2,000 subscribers on Telegram, Joe has another 35,000 subscribers on YouTube. In the past week, he’s posted a video of the ‘Muslim Defence League Marching Through Stoke With Samurai Swords & Other Weapons’, and a 96-minute ‘Welsh Invasion Update’.

Joe is rough, but even he thinks these riots have gone too far. Looting and torching and fighting are bad ways to make nationalism popular. ‘I’m not interested in that sort of thing now. I don’t think that these big demos where they end up fighting with the police, you know, they don’t do us any favours at all because I want the general public to support us, and they’re not going to support violence, are they?’

Joe has tried to intellectualise his views. The protestors are burning hotels; he is waging an epochal battle for the future of his kind. Outlaws want to fight; Patriotic Alternative wants to see British descendants of immigrants offered ‘generous financial incentives’ to return to their ‘ancestral homelands’. When Joe left prison after the stabbing incident, he did a degree in Criminal Justice at the University of Glamorgan. 

Looting and torching and lynching are bad ways to make nationalism popular

If you want to trace it back, today’s ungovernable mob formed in Luton, in Bedfordshire, in 2009. On 10 March, on St George’s Square in the centre of Luton, Islamists protested a battalion of British troops returning from the Iraq war. They called the soldiers the ‘butchers of Basra’ and ‘baby killers’. Counter-protesters shouted ‘we pay your benefits’. A couple of months later, Tommy Robinson – then just an angry townie – created the EDL. Football hooligans joined and Muslims were attacked at rallies. People called the EDL far-right. To try and prove otherwise, Robinson arranged a special press conference in October 2009: in a disused office block in Luton, EDL members doused a Nazi flag in petrol and set it alight.

Robinson quit the group in 2013. ‘Though street demonstrations have bought us to this point, they are no longer productive’, he said. ‘I acknowledge the dangers of far-right extremism and the ongoing need to counter Islamist ideology not with violence but with better, democratic ideas.’ He was speaking like a politician, too moderate for the EDL. The group disbanded not long after he quit. ‘New groups have just formed up from everywhere’, Joe says. Ex-members have joined more extreme football firms, or WhatsApp groups that share the date and location of protests. They offer the hooligan violence, removed from politics. 

Protestors last week chanted Robinson’s name, like they were calling him back from Ayia Napa. He remains a kind of spiritual leader for them. In some other world, St George’s Square might’ve become the… Mecca… for EDL-types. But Robinson won’t lead the mob, and neither will intellectuals like Joe. Last Friday evening on St George’s Square, people were taking photos of a new 20-foot sculpture of an angel made of knives confiscated by police. No protests.