Reply To: The right to be racist march

[SODIron]

I’d condemn it without hesitation.

No one in their right mind should be making excuses for chants about shooting someone, stabbing someone, hanging someone, or any other kind of political violence. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from the far right, the far left, religious extremists, football hooligans, or anyone else. If you’re glorifying violence, you’ve already lost the moral argument.

But condemning that doesn’t mean the original march suddenly becomes respectable. This is where these debates often go wrong. People seem desperate to turn everything into a team sport: “your extremists are worse than our extremists.” That’s not a serious moral position. It’s just tribalism with a slogan attached.

I can condemn violent rhetoric from counter-protesters and still believe far-right marches built around anti-Muslim hostility, grievance politics and intimidation are poisonous. Those two positions are not contradictory. They are consistent.

The real test is whether we apply the same standard to everyone. If someone on the left chants about violence, condemn it. If someone on the right whips up hatred against whole communities, condemn that too. If grooming gang victims were failed by police, councils and politicians, condemn that loudly as well. None of these things cancel each other out.

What worries me is that legitimate anger is constantly being hijacked by extremists. Real injustices, grooming gangs, two-tier justice, institutional cowardice, failures in policing, deserve serious attention. But the far right often takes those failures and turns them into a blanket hostility towards Muslims, immigrants, or anyone they decide is “not really British”.

That isn’t patriotism. Patriotism should mean fairness, decency, courage, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, and standing up for the vulnerable. It should not mean defending “your side” when they behave badly while demanding absolute condemnation of everyone else.

So yes, condemn the chant. Absolutely. But don’t use it as a get-out clause for the march. Political violence, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred and mob intimidation are all ugly, whoever is doing it. The answer is not to pick a mob. The answer is to reject the lot of them.