The

The Hello and welcome to politics theory other.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Nezrean Malik.

On the 30th of July, a week of Islamophobic and racist violence

broke out in England and Northern Ireland, following a mass-stabbing event in the seaside town

of Southport, in which three children were murdered and eight other children and two adults were

injured. The subsequent attacks were fuelled by misinformation, spread by far-right groups,

that the perpetrator

was a Muslim and an asylum seeker. I spoke to Nezrean Malik about how best to characterize

the weak of violence and intimidation, the degree of culpability of Britain's main political

parties in fostering racism and Islamophobia, and we also talked about the network of new

right-wing media organisations, think tanks and

influencers, and how they synergize with the old and established conservative press.

Nezrin Malik is the author of We Need New Stories, Challenging the toxic myths behind

our age of discontent and a Guardian columnist.

So I wanted to first just touch on how the week of racist and Islamophobic attacks

have been described by the media and the political class.

Notoriously, many of the racist on the streets were referred to as protesters, including by the BBC,

one of whose reporters referred to a far-right rally in Bolton as a pro-British march.

But the term race riots is also potentially misleading, since it has historically been used

both to describe outbreaks of fascist street violence, but also with reference to instances of subalton

populations protesting against police violence and structural oppression, as was the case in places

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