The phrase 'All Lives Matter' was used frequently in the latter part of the 2010s decade in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, which opposed violence towards black communities particularly by the police. The phrase seems to have largely fallen out of usage now, it's been a little while since I've heard it, but the suggestion behind it was that in saying 'Black Lives Matter' that people were saying that only black lives matter. This was one of the most cynical misinterpretations of a political slogan I have ever seen, because that was not what was meant by the slogan and nor did anyone associated with it ever insinuate that this was what was meant by it. Black lives were (and, unfortunately, still are) treated as though they did not matter, and therefore stressing that black lives do matter was necessary in calling out institutional racism. Saying that one thing matters does not mean that something else does not.
Truthfully I think most of the people saying 'All Lives Matter' weren't really especially concerned about racism and were doing it just to undermine legitimate protest. Nevertheless, I can see why someone who hasn't put much thought into it or wasn't aware of the scale of institutional racism in society might think that 'All Lives Matter' is a better phrase. After all, it sounds inclusive, right? But in 2024, it's quite laughable to see the UK's reaction to a brutal murder of three children by someone who happens to be of Rwandan heritage, and think that the right-wing of society ever, ever, ever believed that all lives matter.
This is the first time I've written about the Southport murders and the racism riots which have followed it. Truthfully, the reason I haven't written about it before now is because I've struggled to think of anything original to say about it. There have been so many articles published, many of which have great insight into the mindset of the rioters and the sociopolitical circumstances that led here (I particularly recommend Inferiority and an absence of genuine politics behind UK race riots, by Steve Hall, James Treadwell and Simon Winslow in Transforming Society) but I've struggled to think what I can say myself that will add to this. I've been horrified by the level of animosity people have towards their fellow human beings, and I'd like politicians of all colours to take some accountability for this. But I think what I can say is where my own personal experience takes me on this.
I was born in Bristol in the early 1990s. Bristol is a city that became wealthy off the back of the slave trade. It's a very multi-ethnic city, and many of the residents are descended from slaves. I lived very near where the statue of Edward Colston was pulled down a couple of years ago, and I found it really curious to suddenly hear people who weren't from Bristol and didn't understand the local culture talking about this as though it was at all controversial. That statue had been very deeply unpopular. There had been frequent campaigns to remove it legally since before I was even born. You'll find very few Bristolians who miss it at all. Everyone in Bristol has heard of Edward Colston because there are huge numbers of things that are named after him (including three different schools). Since the removal of the statue, they've pretty much all changed their names. It's a matter of great shame that they waited until then to do so, but regardless, I think it says something about the strength of feeling about the matter that they all acquiesced following the statue's removal.
So this culture, that was uniquely aware of its history in the slave trade and wanted to make amends for that, is one that I grew up in. (Having said that, I'm sure it could still be better - Bristol is quite gentrified, I don't want it to sound like a beacon of anti-racism in all aspects.) But more than this, I spend pretty much my entire childhood living with foreign nationals. At any given point, there were usually two lodgers in my home, usually students and most often from overseas. Predominantly I lived with people from European countries, but there was a fairly high number of Chinese people, and at different times this included people from Malaysia, Palestine, South Korea and India, to name a few. I grew up becoming close to these people and treating them like family. Often, they stayed in touch when they moved out. Whenever I've been on foreign holidays, it's most often been to visit people I once lived with. And of course, from going to friends' houses I quickly understood that most people didn't live like this, but it's only been fairly recently that I've come to realise how much of a different viewpoint on life it's given me.
My earliest understanding of any immigration issues were when I was living with people who were trying to extend their visas for whatever reason. I remember being very confused about this when I was a child, not understanding why it would matter to anyone else whether they were in the UK for a bit longer or not. I didn't have to prove my right to live somewhere or access public services, so why should someone else? As an adult, truthfully I still don't quite see how immigration concerns benefit anyone. All it strikes me as is a lot of unnecessary paperwork just to have more control over people's lives. But I understand more now why it looks different to other people to how it does to me. It's because to most people, particularly if they live in an area where there aren't many immigrants, it's easy to avoid seeing the human side of this. If you're struggling with money and opportunities, it's straightforward logic to think, 'There's only a certain amount to go around, and someone else has come and taken what's rightfully mine.' But for someone like me, having actually lived with these people, I can see how it's not like that. When these people were in my home, their presence in my life and in my home was benefitting me - I enjoyed their company, they became family members and it was educational to learn about their lives and their cultures. I believe that this is actually true of everyone - the more immigrants we have, the more we can learn from them and the more we grow as human beings. I think there are very few things more beneficial, both for yourself as an individual and for society at large, than going to live in a different country, sharing your values with the people there and learning new values from them. I'd like to actively increase immigration, not just in the UK but all over the world.
Some people say that we can't take new immigrants because 'we're full'. This is not true. There is no evidence whatsoever that the UK cannot take more people. If there were, we'd have to do something about UK nationals having babies as well. And I suppose you could say that isn't it at least theoretically possible that there might not be enough space at some point if we keep letting in more people? Well, yes. But that doesn't take into account the number of UK nationals who decide to go and live in other countries. If there was serious evidence that there just wasn't the space anymore, we could have that conversation, but that clearly isn't true (the number of empty houses is a testament to that) and the conversation is motivated more by a tendency to justify a pre-determined conclusion than anything else.
This thing about being 'full' also doesn't take into account the fallacy of the 'perpetual foreigner'. The 'perpetual foreigner' fallacy is based around the notion that if someone is an immigrant, their children and grandchildren and further descendants will continue to be perceived as being foreign, even if they've been born here and grown up in this culture. A couple of years ago, Lady Susan Hussey got into quite a lot of trouble by repeatedly asking Ngozi Fulani, a charity executive and the daughter of Windrush immigrants from the Caribbean, where she was 'really from', the suggestion being that because of her dark skin she couldn't be originally from the UK. The perpetual foreigner fallacy is crucial in the current discussion about the race riots. The 17-year-old who murdered three children is British. He was born in Wales, grew up in the UK and there is no suggestion that his Rwandan heritage had any bearing on his decision to commit the acts that he did. If he was white, these riots would not be happening, just as they didn't happen when Ian Huntley killed Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, or when Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering babies on the Special Care Baby Unit where she worked as a nurse. It's inevitable that in a society composed of people with all kinds of different heritage, that sometimes a murderer will happen to be dark-skinned. It is not a result of having immigration. And yet, when it happens, dark-skinned people who have also been here throughout their lives feel compelled to justify their presence.
Although I'll admit that this is often how I think of them, it's important to me not to just decry the people doing the rioting as 'racist thugs'. These things don't just happen in a vacuum. It's very easy to get swept up by strong emotion, and particularly if you haven't had good access to education or been taught to think critically, it's easy to assign the blame for your own circumstances in the wrong place. It's very interesting to me that we had riots in 2011 shortly after the Tories came to power, and now we're getting them again shortly after Labour has come to power. This to me says that it's a reflection of the inherent problems in society - the fact that we're pretty much all getting poorer, with no prospects and no immediately accessible way of improving our circumstances. However, the one major difference between these riots and the ones in 2011 is that I really don't believe the 2011 ones were motivated particularly by racism (on the contrary, a major provocation for them was the murder by the police of Mark Duggan). The change in attitude from then to now is, I believe, a reflection of the constant anti-immigration sentiment which has been drip-fed over and over again by mainstream politicians, commentators and newspapers. They created a collective enemy in Schrodinger's immigrant, and there is almost no one who I do not believe needs to take some degree of accountability for this. It was only a few weeks ago that the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced big immigration raids of small businesses searching for people from countries like Bangladesh. If you say that kind of thing, you cannot be surprised when people from Bangladesh are targeted in circumstances like these.
I am an optimist, and I'm hopeful that this will make us all realise just how toxic our 'legitimate concerns' around immigration have become, to the extent that a lot of it has turned into plain racism quite a lot of the time. I've also been really heartened by how many people have come out to defend our streets, our public services and the most vulnerable people in our communities, particularly in my home city of Bristol. I also think this has started to cause some of the most virulent far-right commentators to start turning on one another and tying themselves in knots, and I really hope we can rise to the occasion and use it to become a more accepting and peaceful society. Otherwise it's just going to continue to be like Lord of the Flies, and no one wants that. If a few years ago you were telling us that you think all lives matter, it's time to put that into action.
NOTE: This blog was edited on 13th August to make a correction. It previously stated that the man who killed the girls in Southport had been born in England, whereas in fact he was born in Wales.
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