The Fake History of the 2024 Riots

Alan Lester takes to task right-wing historian Robert Tomb's distorted view of the recent racist violence on Britain's streets

It was inevitable that, in the aftermath of the recent racist riots, someone from the right wing lobby group History Reclaimed would pen a putatively historically-informed analysis in the Telegraph. Sure enough, it was one of their regular contributors, Robert Tombs. Along with two or three colleagues, this retired Brexiteering historian of France has fuelled the newspaper’s longstanding disinformation campaign about the British Empire. I missed his explanation of the riots when it first appeared but helpfully, History Reclaimed have reprinted a version of it. It is enormously revealing of the not-so-subtle techniques that the newspaper and its allies use to manipulate historical narratives in line with their contemporary politics.

It will be of no surprise that Tombs adopts the line that the indefensible attacks on black and brown people, Muslims and people seeking asylum of July 2024 were ultimately the consequence of liberal challenges to the social order and the “arrival year after year of large numbers of strangers”.

Tombs identifies a pre-twentieth century “tradition” of violent disorder, a lull in the later nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century when society settled, and a resurgence in the post WWII period as liberal permissiveness and mass immigration undermined established values.

What is really telling though, is that he misses the most glaringly obvious comparator to the 2024 race riots.