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August 1, 2024 - 5:00pm
Did the Southport riot symbolise a return of the English far-Right? The English Defence League has been blamed for this week’s attack on the Southport Islamic Society Mosque, during which protesters pelted police with bricks while chanting “No surrender” and “English ’til I die”. In response, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has threatened to declare the EDL a terrorist organisation.
It is odd, however, that an EDL riot would break out in Liverpool. For one thing, the city has a strong anti-fascist tradition: on several recent occasions, visiting fascist groups have been chased out of town or prevented from leaving the train station. And while Liverpool is not immune to far-Right influences, the city’s extremists tend to have their own ways of doing things. Their style of “cosmic nationalism” — with socialist and countercultural elements — differs greatly from the English nationalism of Tommy Robinson and the EDL.
And yet many Liverpudlians appeared to turn up to the riot. Few people from Southport itself were involved in the violence, but it appears that many protesters had not travelled very far. In footage of the riot, you can hear a few Wools, and the odd Southerner bussed in for the occasion, but audio from the evening suggests that a large number of rioters were from Liverpool and its environs. Of the five arrests made so far, the addresses of four have been released, all of whom were from Merseyside: two from Southport, one from Liverpool, and one from St Helens.
We do not know whether these individuals are themselves “cosmic extremists”, but cosmic extremism has some key commonalities with the language and priorities of the contemporary far-Right. These include hostility to immigration, conspiratorial thinking, a focus on “nonces” and supposed threats to children, and vaccine scepticism.
But here the similarities end: whereas the mainstream far-Right embraces English or British patriotism, cosmic extremism often rejects both, with an anti-nationalist “Scouse not English” attitude. Similarly, while the mainstream far-Right tends to hold authoritarian views on law and order and supposedly reveres British history, institutions and figures such as Winston Churchill, the cosmic extremist has always despised the police, has never trusted the system, and is more likely to tell you that Churchill sent a gunboat to the Mersey during the 1911 transport strike.
One of the X accounts that was most prominent in speculating about the identity and motive of the Southport attacker was Anthony Fowler, a former boxer from Liverpool who has now become a prominent online conspiracist, combining anti-immigrant rhetoric with a promotion of New Age remedies. Fowler pushes the same line of CBD products as former footballer Matt Le Tissier, and there are shops in Liverpool which bear the two athlete’s grids in the windows, side by side.
More prominent than Fowler is UFC fighter Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett — currently the star of his own BBC series — who displays both sides of the cosmic extremist mindset. He’s known for leading chants of “Fuck the Tories” at his fights and claims to be a socialist, yet at the same time reportedly told Dagestani-born Muhammad Mokaev that he wasn’t really British, and called Georgian-Spanish fighter Ilia Topuria a mongrel while demanding he speak proper English.
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