Race Riots in the UK

 For the past few days, I have been watching the news coming out of the UK with growing alarm. A few days after I left, the UK has errupted in race riots. Even my erstwhile home of Bristol, a famously progressive city, has not been spared. My comrades from the Palestine movement went for a march in London yesterday, and returned to join a group of counterprotestors protecting a hotel housing asylum seekers from the fash. They saw the violence at close quarters and were lucky to not have been injuried themselves. 

If I was there, I would have been with them. I would have been petrified of being arrested and endangering my immigration status, but I wouldn't have been able to look myself in the mirror if I had stayed at home. I have written before about the courage of the cautious, but in unprecedented times the cautious too have to put their bodies and their freedoms on the line.  One need not trade blows with the fash, but just being part of the crowd, holding the ground, can make a difference. Like the time a Zionist ripped a part off my comrade's prop, and I ran to them and simply stood behind her, without saying a word because I had no idea what had just happened. 

I have often said that British society, depsite being led by a heavily racist establishment, is more welcoming towards foreigners. Be that because of anit-racist campaigns led by previous generation of migrants, or the long history of immigration to the country. I definitely felt less like a foreigner there than I did in the Netherlands. I accept that as a Indian male employed in a white-collar profession, my iimigrant experience might have been very different from say a Hijabi who barely speaks English. Also, I never lived anywhere apart from Bristol, which is a pretty diverse city by UK standards.  But, in the past few months, I could sense a change in the atmosphere on the streets. On the Palestine marches, we were used to some heckling by pro-Israelis, but no Islamophobic abuse, until recently, The only time I faced racial abuse in the UK was on Palestone protests because the fash thought I was Muslim. There was also that incident with the guy who chased me in his car, which I felt had a  racial element to it.