When Brexit goes on Tour

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By Jason Michael

Mad dogs and Englishmen: Once again Spain has been given a painful reminder that Brexit not only means Brexit. It means that the violent anti-European sentiment being whipped up by the British government and media is being directed at Spain.

Watching a few hundred Leicester City supporters smashing up Madrid’s breath-taking late sixteenth century Plaza Mayor is so quintessentially Brexit. In scenes reminiscent of Taliban fighters dynamiting the fourth and fifth century stone-carved Buddhas of Bamiyan and Islamic State militants taking pickaxes and mattocks to the monuments of Palmyra, these semi-literate, drunken louts rioted; trashing one of the most cultured and beautiful locations in Europe – while calling passers-by “Spanish bastards” and singing about German bombers and owning Gibraltar. Today Spain got its first real taste of what Brexit is all about.

Almost a quarter of the East Midlands’ non-UK born residents lives in the city of Leicester, but that ethnic diversity was completely absent in the centre of the Spanish capital. This was a mob of hooligans made up entirely of angry white little Britons, determined to let Spain and the whole of Europe know that their glorious leader, Mrs May, is right: “Brexit means Brexit.” As far as the English football firms are concerned war has been declared and they have become the self-appointed foot soldiers of Empire 2.0 – the advance guard of a new era of British arrogance and supremacy.

Of course, if this story even makes it into the right-wing UK media tomorrow we can be damn near sure there will be editorial gymnastics performed to keep politics out of it. This, we will be told, was the antics of a few bad apples; typical boozed up “British” – not English – thugs giving the country a bad name. The truth – not that that gets much mileage now in the mainstream media – as we know, is quite different. National politics is always acted out on the streets, and the rhetoric of the Brexiteers in Westminster has given permission to its underclasses to go forth and stamp the Brexit for which they voted into the heads of “Remoaners,” migrants, and Europeans alike.

Leicestershire, sitting half way between Sheffield and London – smack bang in the middle of England – voted overwhelmingly in favour of leaving the European Union in June last year, with the Leave vote reaching as high as 60.7 per cent in the northwest of the county. While here in Scotland we are forever being reminded of the dangers of our “narrow nationalism” after one Edinburgh pensioner was assaulted – for daring to suggest he’d vote Yes in the 2014 referendum, nothing is being said about the shockwave of violence presently coursing through middle England. No one in government or the media cares about this precisely because this is the anger they are busy trying to tap into to keep the wheels of resurgent British nationalism turning. This is their baby.

What we have seen unfold in the heart of Madrid was not mere football hooliganism. It was the same articulation of the street politics, albeit initially in the guise of hooliganism in the mid-90s, which gave rise to the ultra-nationalists; Britain First and the BNP – the working-class precursors of a slightly more literate and middle-class UKIP. Europe has been given a tough lesson in what is really driving Britain’s narrow nationalistic Brexit, the politics of right-wing populism – the anger of England’s frustrated and long-ignored white working-class. This is an anger that is being harnessed and fed by a hard-line Tory Brexiteer faction with its blood soaked hands on the reins of government.

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…and the RAF “from England” Shot them Down”

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