The legacy of Empire that led to the violence in Belfast and beyond
JVL Introduction
“Before a single brick is thrown, before a single car is set alight, the ideological work has already been done. The mob in Glasgow, the mob in Belfast, are not improvising. They are executing a script written for them by people, nay puppetmasters, dressed in suits they will never be able to afford.” (Franz Fanon)
Here the writers cite not only Fanon but also bell hooks and Edward Said to remind us that it is the legacy of empire that led to pogroms in Belfast and riots in Glasgow last week and other race riots before. While Farage called for “cold rage” to “respond” to the attacks on white people by people of colour he said nothing about the Black and Brown families made homeless by the violence in Belfast and the terror brought to the street. Nor did he call for “cold rage” about the many women killed by their partners or when a Black or Brown person is attacked by a White person.
But it is not just the far right: most politicians feed the rhetoric that immigration is a problem if not the problem and constantly feed into the idea that Black people, This is the most important message from this article, that the far right rhetoric and the violence it provokes is the system working, not the system failing. The mainstream politicians and media legitimise the reasons for protest, share the desire to reduce immigration and “control our broders” even while they express shock at the violence.
This article was originally published by Bella Caledonia on Fri 12 Jun 2026. Read the original here.
The Empire Comes Home: Race, Power, and the Violence on Scottish Streets
The Union Jack draped over a pram made me pause and look twice. The incongruence of a white, Scottish grandmother pushing a pram emblazoned with the Union Jack in Glasgow city centre only began to make sense a few hours later as I began to head home around 8pm. I planned to take public transport and headed towards my usual bus stop, only to encounter a convoy of buses blocked by a dozen or more police cars which appeared to be haphazardly abandoned on Jamaica St.
There was confusion and a palpable tension on the street. I saw a woman of colour outside Lidl and asked her if she knew what was happening. She shook her head bewildered. I didn’t know it at that time but directly behind us, at the Enoch Centre gangs of white youth dressed in black and wearing balaclavas were attacking people of colour, including children.
Realising that the buses were stalled, no taxis in sight and with a rising sense of dread in my body, I decided to walk home across the river. Above me, police helicopters looped the city. I had just passed Bridge Street station and was nearing Cumberland Street when I saw them coming in from the direction of the Gorbals, flooding absurdly into the street like a sudden wave of black oil: a gang of masked white youths in black on electric scooters and on foot, being propelled by some unseen force, some of them tripping over themselves like dyspraxic clowns, heading manically in my direction.
Frantz Fanon taught us that colonialism does not merely occupy land. It colonises the mind. It creates a world divided into two zones — the settler and the native — and sustains itself by teaching the former to fear and despise the latter. That psychology does not vanish when the last shot is fired. It calcifies into the architecture of the state, into the language of politicians, into the gestural grammar of a mob marching through a city that was itself built on the profits of slavery, colonisation and imperial trade.
When Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson et al tell their followers that immigrants are “culturally smashing” Glasgow, they are not speaking a new language. They are fluent in a very old one. This is the same vocabulary used to describe the Irish in the nineteenth century, the same words deployed to justify the Amritsar massacre, the same logic that turned Kenyan land into British property and Irish lives into imperial expenditure. The “stranger” — the word Reform UK’s Scottish deputy leader Thomas Kerr deploys with such cold deliberateness at Holyrood — is a figure invented by power to make dispossession feel like self-defence.
Edward Said showed us that the Orient — and by extension the entire non-Western world — was not discovered by the West but produced by it: as backward, as threatening, as requiring management, correction, containment. Today’s Sudanese refugee, today’s asylum seeker sleeping in a hotel in Greenock, is heir to that same imaginative (and literal) violence. Before a single brick is thrown, before a single car is set alight, the ideological work has already been done. The mob in Glasgow, the mob in Belfast, are not improvising. They are executing a script written for them by people, nay puppetmasters, dressed in suits they will never be able to afford.
bell hooks was insistent on this: that domination works through culture, through the stories we tell about who belongs and who does not, about whose pain counts and whose does not. The pedagogy of provocation — the sustained, systematic teaching of racial fear — is not incidental to political projects like Reform UK. It is the project.
Consider the architecture of this week’s violence. On Monday, a stabbing in Belfast. By Tuesday, right-wing and neo-Nazi groups were circulating footage on private social media channels. A Restore Party activist was posting mobilisation posters within hours. By Tuesday evening, young men dressed in black were marching through Glasgow singing imperial anthems, invoking the memory of a murdered white teenager as a banner for white nationalist grievance, attacking people because of the colour of their skin — as confirmed by Police Scotland. By Wednesday, Reform MSP Thomas Kerr was on the BBC urging people to “go out and make your voice heard.” The pipeline from incitement to violence to parliamentary normalisation ran in less than 48 hours.
This is not a failure of the system. It is the system functioning. The concentration of media power, the platforming of manufactured consent, the way in which a single act of violence by one individual becomes a referendum on the legitimacy of an entire group of people — these are not accidents of democratic culture. They are products of it. When Farage calls for “pure, cold rage” in response to one death, while remaining silent as dozens of Black and brown families in Belfast are made homeless — a two-month-old baby among the youngest displaced — he is not failing in his responsibilities as a public figure. He is fulfilling them, on behalf of interests that profit from division.
The slow initial response of Police Scotland, the institutional hesitation that the far right exploited to amplify their narrative, was not merely an operational failure. As one Scottish Labour MSP observed, the delay in correcting the facts around the disorder benefited those who traffic in disinformation. Power — and its protective silences — is never neutral.
Said wrote of the “geography of empire” — the way in which the colonial relationship reshapes not just the colonised territory but the colonising society, leaving deposits of racism, institutional contempt, and defensive nationalism that outlast the formal end of empire by centuries. Glasgow was enriched by tobacco and sugar produced by enslaved Africans and Indians. Its architecture, its civic wealth, its very urban character bear the imprint of that extraction. When a mob marches through its streets screaming at Black and brown children, they are standing inside that history, even as they claim to be defending against it.
hooks was also clear that we must be honest about love — and about its absence. The mob in Glasgow were not moving from a love of community or a righteous love for Henry Novak or Stephen Ogilvie. What was on display in Glasgow this week was not grief, not even anger in the ordinary sense. It was something more systematic: a performance of white victimhood riled up and systemically engineered to justify the targeting of the innocent.
The banner reading “Henry Nowak: white lives matter” weaponised the death of an eighteen-year-old boy — murdered, handcuffed, left bleeding — to justify assaulting people who had nothing whatsoever to do with his death. As Glasgow Labour MSP Paul Sweeney observed, members of the public were attacked simply because of the colour of their skin. The worshippers locked inside Glasgow Central Mosque had no connection to the attacker in Belfast. They would, as Anas Sarwar pointed out, have been equally horrified by the knife attack. Their faith, their appearance, their very existence in a public space was sufficient cause for the mob.
This is what Fanon means by the colonial condition in its metropolitan form: the racialised body as permanent suspect, permanent foreigner, permanently available as scapegoat for the anxieties of a society that cannot reckon with its own history. The pretext changes — a stabbing here, a death there — but the target remains the same. Brown skin. Black skin. A mosque. A Gudwara. A family fleeing war.
Many critical theorists have spent decades analysing how elite consensus is manufactured and disseminated — how the narrow range of what is “sayable” in mainstream political discourse shapes, limits, and distorts democratic possibility. Reform UK is not outside that consensus; it is its militant wing. When a sitting MSP encourages people to take to the streets the night after race riots, adding as a footnote that they should “not incite racism,” the disclaimer is not a disavowal. It is a legal prophylactic. The invitation has already been issued. With this in mind we must be precise and clear about what happened to Henry Nowak, because clarity is precisely what the far right has refused.
Henry Nowak was an eighteen-year-old Polish-British university student, stabbed and killed in Southampton in December 2025. He died in handcuffs, bleeding, his last words “Please, brother, I can’t breathe” — words addressed to the police that restrained him. Words that whatever one believes about the case, carry a devastating weight. His death was an absolute tragedy. His family’s grief is real and deserves to be honoured.
But let us be clear, honouring Henry Nowak is not what the far right has been doing. What they have been doing is far older and far uglier. His killer, Vickrum Digwa, is a British-born Sikh. Within hours of the murder conviction in May 2026, he had been transformed by online agitators, by Nigel Farage, by Elon Musk — who offered to fund a private prosecution of the police officers on the scene — into a symbol of “migrant violence,” of “two-tier policing,” of the supposed persecution of white Britons by a woke establishment. Robert Jenrick raised it in the House of Commons. J D Vance, the American Vice President, called it evidence of a migrant invasion — about a British-born man. The machinery of manufactured outrage moved with extraordinary speed and coordination.
What this machinery required was the suppression of complexity and the inflation of identity. Digwa is not a migrant. He is not a refugee. The Sikh faith — one of the most peaceable and community-minded traditions in the world, a faith that has faced centuries of its own persecution — was immediately weaponised, and a reported surge in anti-Sikh hate crimes following the trial. The UK Supreme Sikh Council, seeking to demonstrate good faith, announced a review of its own practices. An entire community was placed on cultural trial for the actions of one, unhinged individual who happened to share their religion.
This is the red herring. The fact that Digwa is Sikh is, in the logic of far-right mobilisation, simply a racial identifier — a way of marking his body as other, as foreign, as representative of a threatening collective. The specifics of his faith, his citizenship, his biography are irrelevant to that project. What matters is that he is brown, that Henry Nowak was white, and that this juxtaposition can be made to do political work. As Said would have recognised immediately, the individual is erased; the racial type is summoned in his place.
But the sleight of hand is more complex and goes deeper. The story of Henry Nowak was also one of police failure — police officers who, on the night, accepted Digwa’s account that he had been racially attacked and handcuffed the dying victim. That failure is real, and deserves scrutiny. Hampshire Constabulary subsequently acknowledged that the facts heard at trial should have left no doubt about who was lying to officers. Yet the lesson the far right drew was not that police procedures around first response need reform, or that the treatment of dying people in custody demands accountability. The lesson they drew was that white people are systematically disadvantaged by the criminal justice system — a claim so breathtakingly at odds with the empirical record that it requires a significant infrastructure of media distortion to sustain.
Black and brown people in this country have known about two-tier policing for generations — not as a slogan but as a lived daily reality, in stop-and-search statistics, in deaths in custody, in the racially differential application of every power the state has ever granted its police. The Nowak case involved a single, catastrophic night of miscommunication. The experience of Black and brown communities involves a structural, systemic, decades-long pattern. These are not equivalent. The far right’s insistence on treating them as equivalent is not an error. It is a strategy.
bell hooks understood that the stories we tell about violence are inseparable from the stories we tell about who is human. And one of the most persistent, most insidious stories told in British public life is the story that violence by white men is individual, while violence by men of colour is cultural.
When a white man stabs someone in Britain — and white men commit the majority of violent crimes in this country — the conversation that follows is about mental health, about personal failure, about a troubled individual who fell through society’s cracks. The tragedy is privatised. It belongs to a family, a community perhaps, but not to a race. There is no call for white people to denounce the attacker, no demand that whiteness as a cultural category account for itself, no suggestion that the attacker’s faith — if he has one — requires reform.
Henry Nowak deserved justice. He received it: his killer was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of twenty-one years. The legal system, on this occasion, functioned as it should. What Henry Nowak did not deserve was to have his death converted into a warrant for racial terror — his name stitched onto a banner held aloft by men screaming at children of colour on Buchanan Street. That conversion is not grief. It is exploitation. And it is worth asking, with hooks’s unflinching honesty in mind, who benefits from it.
Not Henry Nowak’s family. Not the Sikh community, which is now living under the constant threat of violence. Not the worshippers locked in the Glasgow mosque. Not the nine-year-old rescued from the mob in Belfast. Not the two-month-old displaced from her home. The beneficiaries are those who need brown and Black bodies as a permanent enemy, who need white working-class people to look sideways at their neighbours rather than upward at the forces that have actually dismantled their communities, gutted their public services, and sold their futures to the highest bidder. I made it home safely that night but have lived with constant fear, anxiety and grief embedded deep in the pit of my stomach. Despite having a right to be here, nowhere feels safe. As it was in the summer of 2024, when violence against brown and Black communities was rife across the country, I cancelled all plans that involved being anywhere near the city centre or predominantly white neighbourhoods. I ensured my family were safe. I noted with sadness on the lack of support or check-in from my white, middle-class, liberal, left-leaning neighbours, acquaintances, and friends. I posted about what was happening in the city centre that night in a WhatsApp chat abrim with young, white activists who would see themselves as anti-racists – the post was not acknowledged and in fact, not one white person reached out to check if my family and I were safe or needed support in 2024 or now. Their silence speaks volumes.
The violence on the streets of Glasgow and Belfast did not emerge from a vacuum — it is the harvest of years of deliberately cultivated anti-immigration sentiment, normalised in parliament, amplified by billionaires, and laundered through the language of legitimate grievance.
Farage, Robinson et al called for “pure, cold rage” and then fell silent when the rage they summoned found its expression in burning houses, terrified and hurt children. Their silence is a statement. It should be treated as one.
What happened in Glasgow and Belfast this week is not an aberration. It is not a spontaneous eruption of grievance. The empire is not over. It is marching down Buchanan Street in a balaclava.
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