Hello and welcome back to the bunker your morning news and politics explainers five days a week. I'm Andrew Harrison.

It's been a traumatic couple of weeks of unprecedented civil disturbances in

England and Northern Ireland, the first mass riots of the modern era to be fully driven by the extreme right in the UK.

The huge turnout of anti-racist counter demonstrations in Waltham Stowe, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol,

and Brighton this week, and also the failure of threatened

far-right attacks on migration lawyers offices to materialise have been some cause for optimism,

but it's hard not to conclude that we might have crossed some kind of Rubicon with openly racist

mass violence seen on British streets and key commentators and politicians either excusing the attacks

or encouraging them.

Have we just witnessed a passing space of riots as we sometimes do?

Or have we entered a deeper crisis? And how can we combat the far right,

stop an anti-democratic culture of racist violence from taking root and defend the stability of British society.

Journalist Paul Mason writes for the New European and is the former economics editor at News

Knights and Channel 4. He's a man of the left who describes

his politics as complicated and he's deeply concerned about what's been going

on in the past couple of weeks. His book How to Stop Fascism is out now.

There's a link in the show notes and he wrote this week that we can defeat

the fascists, not just with tough law enforcement and community solidarity, but by making

Britain a militant democracy, a democracy armed in its own self-defense.

Welcome to the bunker, Paul. Thanks for coming in.

Thanks for inviting me.

It's great to have you here.

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