They Shall Not Pass: Racism, Flags, and the Politics of Scapegoating in Britain

From Cable Street barricades to the Windrush scandal, Britain’s fight against racism has always been led by communities, while politicians turned prejudice into policy.

Wearing our national flag, whether the St George’s cross or the Union Jack, should, for many, be a proud moment, a simple statement of belonging. Yet the recent explosion of St George’s crosses across towns and cities has been sold as harmless pride, a nation rediscovering itself. But symbols don’t rise in a vacuum. This wave comes in lockstep with the rhetoric of “small boat crossings,” headlines about “illegal migrants,” and a drumbeat of warnings that Britain is being “overrun.” The flag has become the backdrop for a narrative in which migration is cast as the cause of every national ill. Hospitals in crisis? Blame migrants. Housing shortages? Blame migrants. Stagnant wages, crumbling services, and economic decline after years of austerity and Brexit? Blame migrants again. The flag becomes the shorthand for a politics of deflection: wrapping deep structural failures in a simple scapegoat. To understand this cycle, and why it feels familiar, we need to set the present against the longer history of how racism in Britain has been engineered from above, resisted from below, and repeatedly revived in times of economic and political weakness.

Racism in Britain has never been a passive undercurrent. It has been engineered, weaponised, resisted, and reshaped, sometimes erupting in the streets, at other times quietly drip-fed into law by politicians. Its persistence reveals a cycle: permission granted from above, resistance fought from below. Grassroots communities and cultural movements have repeatedly dragged Britain forward, while political parties have just as consistently pulled it back.

The most striking example of ordinary people defeating organised racism came on 4 October 1936 in London’s East End. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists planned to march thousands of uniformed Blackshirts through an area home to tens of thousands of Jewish migrants who had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe. It was not an innocent route; it was chosen precisely to intimidate and provoke. Mosley had cultivated support by blaming immigrants for unemployment among dock workers, and his followers openly preached violence against Jews. The state was not neutral. The Metropolitan Police, far from banning the march, mobilised six thousand officers to protect it, prepared to clear a path through Jewish neighbourhoods.

Yet the community refused. Under the banner “They shall not pass,” Jewish workers, Irish dockers, communists, anarchists and anti-fascist groups joined forces. Over one hundred thousand people filled the narrow streets, constructing barricades from carts and paving stones, ripping up cobbles to block the mounted police. Women leaned out of windows, hurling vegetables, flour and worse at the officers. The clashes were brutal, with truncheons and charges against demonstrators, but the barricades held. Overwhelmed by the scale of resistance, Mosley was forced to turn back. The Battle of Cable Street became a defining moment: fascism was not stopped by parliamentary decree but by a coalition of ordinary people who refused to surrender their streets. The state’s response was revealing. Within weeks, the Public Order Act of 1936 restricted political uniforms and marches, but it also curtailed anti-fascist mobilisation. The government was less interested in defeating fascism than in containing dissent.

In the years that followed, Mosley’s movement withered, but fascism did not disappear. The Second World War saw the British Union of Fascists banned in 1940, and Mosley was interned under Defence Regulation 18B. However, many of his supporters resurfaced after the war in rebranded organisations, such as the Union Movement. Antisemitism remained strong in parts of East London. In 1947, Jewish ex-servicemen returning from the war organised the “43 Group,” a militant anti-fascist network that broke up fascist meetings by force, exposing how little the police or government were prepared to do to tackle organised hate. By the early 1950s, the 43 Group had disbanded, but the struggle set the template: fascists regrouped, the state looked the other way, and communities once again had to defend themselves.

Meanwhile, Britain itself was changing. The devastation of the war left labour shortages, and the government actively recruited workers from across the Commonwealth. The Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in 1948, carrying hundreds of Caribbean migrants who would symbolise a new era of Black British life. Yet their arrival was met with as much hostility as it was with hope. Landlords hung “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” signs in windows. Colour bars kept Black workers out of trades. Riots and racist attacks flared in Liverpool, Birmingham and Nottingham during the 1940s and 50s, showing how racism shifted from antisemitic street violence to broader hostility against new Black and Asian communities.

The state’s legislative response was piecemeal. The British Nationality Act of 1948 created the legal category of “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies,” confirming the right of Commonwealth citizens to settle in Britain. But that right quickly became a political football. Both Labour and Conservative governments debated how to stem migration while avoiding the charge of racism, and in practice did little to protect those already here. The contradiction was stark: Britain invited workers to rebuild the nation, then subjected them to racism in housing, policing and the workplace.

By the mid-1950s, Mosley was campaigning again, this time targeting Caribbean migrants rather than Jews. Far-right propaganda in West London mixed with resentment over housing shortages and economic decline. Newspapers stoked fears of “mixed marriages” and “coloured immigration.” In this atmosphere of official neglect, media hostility and street-corner agitation, the tinderbox of Notting Hill was lit in 1958.

That summer, white gangs, often described as “Teddy Boys”, organised night-time attacks on Black residents. Armed with knives, iron bars and petrol bombs, they hunted men through the streets, beat women, smashed windows and invaded homes. The violence raged for nearly a week. Police were slow to intervene, often framing events as mutual “racial clashes” rather than racist assaults. Press coverage was equally distorted, treating the attackers as frustrated locals and the victims as troublesome outsiders.

The response, however, was defiance. Community leaders, among them Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born communist and journalist, recognised the need for cultural resistance. In January 1959, she organised an indoor Caribbean carnival in St Pancras Town Hall, a celebration of music, food and dance. What began as a means of survival evolved into the Notting Hill Carnival, which, decades later, became Europe’s largest street festival. It turned the memory of racist mobs into a permanent cultural statement: Black Britons would not be driven out. Carnival embodied the same principle as Cable Street, where the state refused to protect, communities defended themselves through solidarity and culture.

Yet while the streets and stages were sites of resistance, Parliament remained a factory of retreat. The Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976 outlawed discrimination, but only after pressure made inaction impossible, and even then, enforcement was weak. Wilson’s Labour government rammed through the 1968 Immigration Act in days to exclude Kenyan Asians, stripping thousands of British passport holders of the right to enter.

That Act marked a turning point. It revealed that citizenship in Britain was not a matter of legal right but of political convenience, always vulnerable to being rewritten when it no longer suited Westminster’s anxieties or the prejudices of the press. It demonstrated how racism could be laundered through the parliamentary process, cloaked not in the crude language of street fascists but in the sober rhetoric of “managing migration.” What followed was not a retreat from that logic but its entrenchment.

Edward Heath’s Conservative government codified it further with the 1971 Immigration Act, embedding the principle of “patriality” in law. From then on, only those with close ancestral ties to Britain, overwhelmingly white citizens from Australia, Canada or New Zealand, retained the automatic right of entry. Black and Asian Commonwealth citizens were stripped of that same privilege. Citizenship itself was racialised, turned into a hierarchy where paper rights depended on bloodlines.

The 1970s were marked by economic decline, characterised by high unemployment, industrial strife, and the oil crisis. Politicians of both parties used immigration as a pressure valve. Enoch Powell, sacked from the Conservative front bench after “Rivers of Blood,” remained a powerful agitator, dragging the debate further right. The National Front marched openly, drawing thousands onto the streets. Attacks on Asian families in Southall, Brick Lane and elsewhere escalated. Communities resisted with organisation and solidarity through the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism, and trade-union-backed campaigns, but Parliament lagged.

The 1981 British Nationality Act, passed under Thatcher, re-drew the map of belonging. It ended the automatic right of citizenship for those born in the UK unless one parent already held settled status in the UK. Commonwealth citizens who had fought for Britain or helped rebuild its economy now found their children legally precarious. This was not administrative tidying: it was the rolling back of multi-racial citizenship under the cover of “clarification.” The Brixton uprisings that same year, triggered by relentless police harassment under “sus laws,” forced the state to confront the anger created by these exclusions. Lord Scarman’s report acknowledged discrimination but dodged the phrase “institutional racism,” giving the police cover to continue.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, legislation reinforced the pattern. Thatcher’s governments tightened asylum rules, portraying refugees as “bogus.” John Major’s ministers maintained the same framing. By the time New Labour came to power in 1997, “managing migration” was the common sense of Westminster.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown inherited this architecture and chose to expand it. Detention centres, deportation fast-tracks, and the mantra of being “tough on asylum” became routine. At the same time, the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson Inquiry of 1999 finally forced the state to admit that the police were institutionally racist. Yet even as Labour adopted the language of equality, it doubled down on exclusion. Asylum seekers were dispersed into deprived towns, stripped of the right to work, and made to live on humiliating voucher systems. Blair’s government built new detention centres and imposed carrier sanctions on airlines and ferries. The official refrain was “tough but fair,” but the toughness always outweighed the fairness.

After 2001, the contradictions deepened. Labour claimed to have learned the lessons of Lawrence, but its counter-terrorism strategy entrenched new prejudices. The Prevent programme, launched in 2003, cast Muslim communities as perpetual suspects. Teachers, doctors and social workers became informants, obliged to monitor children and neighbours for “extremism.” Mosques were surveilled, young Muslims questioned over religious expression, and whole communities were treated less as citizens than as populations to be policed. Prevent entrenched the very institutional bias Macpherson had condemned only a few years earlier.

By the time Blair left and Brown took over, detention centres and counter-radicalisation schemes were already in place. When the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, they inherited not a blank slate but a ready-made framework of suspicion. Cameron’s government tightened visa regimes, introduced caps on non-EU migration, and railed against “benefit tourism.” In 2011, Cameron declared that “state multiculturalism has failed,” preparing the ground for Theresa May’s hostile environment at the Home Office.

What Labour had normalised, May expanded into every corner of daily life, deputising landlords, employers, doctors and even teachers as border guards. The frontier was no longer just at Dover; it was in the workplace, the hospital, the classroom. The policy soon became a spectacle: in 2013, the Home Office drove vans through London telling migrants to “Go Home or Face Arrest.” Immigration raids were staged for cameras, indefinite detention became routine, and cruelty was rebranded as governance.

By the time May became Prime Minister, deportations, deprivation of citizenship and restrictions on family reunification were standard tools of government. This was the climate in which Suella Braverman could propose a Rwanda deportation scheme and dismiss multiculturalism as a “failed experiment.” These were not aberrations but the culmination of decades in which race had been weaponised for electoral gain.

Even the Liberal Democrats, who styled themselves as the conscience of British politics, demonstrated the hollow nature of their liberalism when they accepted ministerial cars. In coalition from 2010, they voted through austerity budgets that gutted the very communities they claimed to defend and nodded along to May’s hostile environment. A party that campaigned on fairness ended up legitimising the bureaucratisation of cruelty. When the vans rolled through London, Nick Clegg and his colleagues were not powerless bystanders; they were co-signatories to the agreement. Their pretence of being a moderating hand was exposed as camouflage for a government sharpening racism while cutting services to the bone.

Meanwhile, UKIP and the Brexit Party proved that extremism did not need office to win. Nigel Farage never ran a government, but he didn’t need to. His entire project was to drag the political centre into the gutter. His “Breaking Point” poster during the 2016 referendum, depicting desperate Syrian refugees as an invading horde, was lifted from the propaganda of the 1930s. Farage posed as the straight-talking outsider, pint in hand, but he was a demagogue in pub landlord clothing. He sold nationalism as common sense and racism as patriotism, and the Conservatives swallowed it whole. By the time Brexit was won, Farage had achieved what Mosley never could: racism laundered through a ballot box and stamped with the authority of the state.

Brexit did not just sever Britain from the European Union; it entrenched scapegoating as the default register of political speech. Racism became respectable again, not shouted on street corners but drafted into manifestos, rehearsed on Question Time panels, and echoed in ministerial briefings. It was the culmination of decades of capitulation: liberals signing off on cruelty for power, demagogues reshaping the centre by dragging it rightwards.

Today, the cycle continues. The collapse of UKIP did not end scapegoating; it rebranded as Reform UK, a party that dresses Powellism in business suits and presents polling data. Their message is blunt: migrants are to blame for every strain on the system, from NHS backlogs to housing shortages to stagnant wages. They pose as the authentic voice of the disaffected, but their politics recycle the same bile Mosley peddled in the 1930s, wrapped in graphs and press releases.

Labour under Keir Starmer has not offered an alternative. Instead, it has triangulated into the same corner, parroting Tory slogans about “smashing the gangs” and “stopping the boats.” Starmer’s calculation is clear: neutralise Conservative attacks by adopting their language. But in doing so, he has abandoned Labour’s anti-racist traditions and confirmed to voters that hostility is the consensus. When both main parties compete to sound tougher on migrants, the result is not safety but a race to the bottom.

The terrain is also new. Social media has become a great amplifier of prejudice, turning fringe conspiracy theories into viral talking points within hours. Platforms reward outrage, and provocateurs are aware of this. Figures like Elon Musk, who owns Twitter/X, posture as defenders of “free speech” while providing cover for extremists and feeding algorithms with racist content, normalised through sheer repetition. Where the old far right needed marches and leaflets, today’s agitators need only a trending hashtag and a billionaire willing to launder their narratives as “debate.”

This is the current state: a mainstream where Reform sets the tempo, Starmer echoes the tune, and online megaphones turn dog-whistles into a daily soundtrack. Racism is no longer confined to the street corner or the editorial page; it is embedded in party manifestos, broadcast across platforms, and promoted by those with both wealth and reach. The cycle continues, but at a pace and scale that makes resistance harder and more urgent.

The cost is visible. In 2024, nearly ninety-nine thousand racially motivated offences were recorded. Religious hate crimes rose by a quarter, with Islamophobia and antisemitism both surging. Islamophobic assaults rose seventy-three per cent, the highest level ever documented, while antisemitic incidents reached 3,528, the second-highest annual figure on record. Black people remain almost four times more likely to be stopped and searched, and over seven times more likely to face armed police. These are not random spikes; they are the outcome of decades of political permission.

History shows progress has only ever come when ordinary people refused to wait for ministers. In 1936, it was barricades on Cable Street, where Jewish families, Irish dockers and trade unionists stopped Mosley’s Blackshirts while the police tried to clear a path for them. In 1958, when racist gangs terrorised Caribbean families in Notting Hill, the answer was Carnival Claudia Jones, transforming fear into culture and creating a permanent statement of belonging. In the 1970s, it was Rock Against Racism, where punk, ska and reggae built mass movements that drove the National Front back into the shadows. In the 1990s, it was the Lawrence family who forced the Macpherson Inquiry to admit what communities already knew: that the police were institutionally racist. Each of these victories was won from below, not granted from above. The state moved reluctantly, often too late, and never without pressure. Meanwhile, politicians of every stripe tightened immigration law, dismantled citizenship rights, expanded detention centres, or declared multiculturalism a failure. The lesson running through this history is stark: communities win what they fight for, while governments only legislate when they have no choice.

Today, those structures are weaker. Trade unions have been hollowed out, grassroots coalitions have been fragmented, and cultural movements have been commercialised or co-opted. Activism often survives online, fast to flare but slow to disrupt. Meanwhile, parties continue to recycle racism into law and rhetoric, using it to mask economic failure and divide communities.

The truth is brutal but clear. Racism in Britain has never been dismantled from above. It has always been fought from below. If it rises again, it will not be politicians who quash it, but communities that refuse to accept it.