When the racist white riots broke out in Belfast, you’d have thought the sky had fallen in — or at least that a small army of migrants had turned up unannounced and started stealing everyone’s jobs, houses, and sense of “identity”, whatever that means.
That’s the story the pernicious far-right and their cheerleaders in certain corners of the corporate media were peddling, anyway. It’s a narrative as old as it is ridiculous. Whenever things feel tough, blame the person who just arrived, the one who has less, the one who’s already vulnerable.
Let’s be absolutely clear from the start: these were not protests or community unrest — they were racist violence, stoked by white people who have spent years perfecting the art of distracting from the real issues.
Unsurprisingly, the response from those in power has been equal parts useless, hypocritical, and designed to avoid saying the blatantly obvious. The problem isn’t migration; it’s the broken system that lets the right exploit fear while doing less than nothing to help ordinary people.
The far-right would have you believe that Belfast is suddenly being swamped. They want you to believe migrants are getting priority housing, free everything, and living a life of luxury while local families sleep on the streets.
It’s a great story if you don’t care about truth — and let’s be honest, the far-right couldn’t care less for the truth.
The white riots: based on supremacist lies
In reality (the bit the hateful knuckle-draggers don’t bother with), Northern Ireland receives a tiny fraction of the UK’s migrant population.
Housing is in crisis not because of new arrivals, but because successive governments — both Tory and the predecessors they love to pretend are different — have systematically underfunded social housing for as long as I have been alive.
Wages remain stagnant, public services are still on their knees, and young people can’t afford to put a roof over their heads. But why talk about that when you can point at someone with a different accent and yell “bloody foreigners, they’re taking it all”?
It’s almost impressive, in a depressing sort of way. The very same people who have spent years cheering on austerity, who told us there’s no magic money tree when it came to fair pay for nurses or repairing schools, suddenly find endless resources to complain about refugees. Suddenly, there is a pot of gold, but apparently it’s all being handed out to people fleeing war and persecution.
Spoiler alert: it’s not. It’s still in the pockets of the billionaires and corporations who’ve been let off the hook for decades.
Ask yourself, who is really pulling the strings?
We need to be honest about who benefits from this chaos. The far-right racist groups organising these disturbances couldn’t give a shit about Belfast, or about working-class people. They care about power. They care about dividing communities so that no one notices that the people at the top are still getting grotesquely richer while everyone else lives from one pay day to the next.
Who benefits?
These are the same people who, not that long ago, were telling us that the EU was the root of all evil. Now that we’ve left, and it didn’t get rid of the Black and Brown faces like they hoped, they’ve had to find a new bogeyman — and migrants are the oldest, easiest target in the book.
It’s a classic trick that the gullible, racist British people never fail to fall for. If you can make enough people angry at each other, they’ll never get angry at the system that actually keeps them down.
Frustration is an understandable feeling. It’s completely valid to be angry about the state of things. But anger should be directed at those who caused it — not at the person who arrived last week looking for safety. We are supposed to better than that, right?
The Labour government’s response has been a masterclass in double-speak and cowardice. Ministers have issued statements saying they condemn all violence — which sounds nice, if somewhat meaningless — but have been strangely quiet about the racism that fuels it.
Labour are terrified of saying the word “racist” out loud, in case they upset a handful of voters who’ve been fed lie after lie for years.
They’ll happily use migrants to fill labour shortages one minute, and then let them be scapegoated the next. Labour wants the benefits of migration — of which there are plenty — without having the courage to stand up for the people who move here.
There is a better way than riots – not that the racists realise
There is a better way. Justice and solidarity matter so much more than fear and division. We really don’t have to choose between supporting local people and supporting migrants.
In fact, we can’t have one without the other.
When we fight for decent housing for everyone, we fight for local families *and* for people who’ve just arrived.
When we demand fair wages and good public services, we’re standing up for every worker, regardless of where they were born.
The far-right wants you to believe there’s a limited amount of good things to go around — that if someone else gets a home or a job, you lose out. That’s a filthy lie. The truth is, there’s more than enough for everyone, it’s just been hoarded by the few for far too long.
Honestly, migrants are not the problem. Migrants are our neighbours, our colleagues, our friends. Migrants bring culture, energy, and a willingness to work hard, and they also bring stories of survival that should make us open our hearts, not close our doors.
Solidarity isn’t just a nice fluffy word but the most powerful weapon we have against those who want to keep us apart.
Remember, change does not happen by waiting for others to act. It begins when we stop looking away.
The white riots in Belfast were never really about migration. They were about fear stoked by those like Farage, Rupert Lowe and Tommy-ten-names who profit from division, enabled by a political class that would rather look the other way than challenge the status quo.
The far-right’s fantasy of a pure society, untouched by change, is not just wrong — it’s utterly impossible. Migration is a natural part of our history, and it will continue to be part of our future.
Featured image via the Canary
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