It was all a hoax, probably perpetrated by lefties. Have you noticed how the right are trying to change the narrative with regard to the recent far right anti-immigration riots? Ever since a rumoured new wave of fascist protests failed to materialise the week after, with mass counter-protests instead occurring, the right, particularly the right-wing press, have been on the defensive. Their explanation for the failure of the violent thugs to turn up was that the supposed list of protest locations seen on social media and publicised by them was, in fact, a hoax. At first, they left it like that, but then it became a ‘left-wing hoax’, apparently designed to rally support for the anti-fascist cause. Plus, those counter demonstrators – at first grudgingly lauded by the right-wing press, have now become ‘far left protestors’. (Apparently, opposing fascism and violent thuggery makes you ‘far left’ in their eyes). It’s clearly part of an attempt to divert attention away from violence of the far right and the culpability of the likes of Nigel Farage for helping to encourage it with their inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric. Instead, they want to somehow discredit those who opposed this thuggery and turn them into the villains. It goes hand in glove with the attempts of all those idiots they keep wheeling onto GB News to somehow place the blame for the riots at the feet of Keir Starmer and the Labour government – in the process somehow sidestepping the fact that they’ve only been in power for a couple of months, whereas we’ve had fourteen years of austerity, race-baiting and immigrant bashing xenophobia from the Tories.

Not that re-writing recent history is the sole preserve of Britain’s right-wing press. Right now, the BBC are writing Huw Edwards out of their history – there is currently a Dr Who episode unavailable, for instance, while they edit out his appearance as a newsreader. It’s part of a disturbing trend in media nowadays to try and expunge from existence anyone who is deemed to have crossed certain boundaries. In Edwards’ case, the fact that he is facing well-publicised child pornography charges might seem to justify such actions, but the fact is that Edwards was employed by the BBC as a presenter and newsreader and was the face of the corporation for several major events, most recently the death of Queen Elizabeth II. It seems perverse to try and deny this fact. But it isn’t an isolated thing: there are a large number of episodes of Top of the Pops you can’t see anymore because they were fronted by Jimmy Savile and apparently It’s a Knockout never happened as it was presented by Stuart Hall. As for Cartoon Time With Rolf Harris, well, I’m afraid that you must have imagined that. But it isn’t just the BBC that does this sort of thing- remember how Kevin Spacey was edited out of that film and replaced by Christopher Plummer? It happened in order to try and protect the box office after Spacey was accused of various instances of sexual misconduct after filming had been completed – the producers felt they couldn’t risk keeping Spacey in if he was charged or went down before the film was released. Understandable in a way, but also drastic, not to mention more than slightly sinister.

I could, of course, describe this sort of thing as being ‘Orwellian’ and reference his novel ‘1984’, but the rewriting of history to omit historical figures deemed inconvenient long predates George Orwell. Most totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have indulged in such practices. But this current mania for writing the inconvenient out of history just feels far creepier, motivated, I suspect, by the fact that people feel uncomfortable knowing that, for years, they had accepted these media figures at face value, that they had failed to see through them. Because, apparently, we should know what perverts and abusers look like – they aren’t supposed to be respectable, middle class newsreaders or wealthy TV personalities, they’re supposed to be slavering scumbags living on council estates, or foreign sex predators coming ashore in rubber boats at dead of might. People don’t like to feel that they’ve been duped and that these dangerous sex offenders could be someone who looks just like us, with a good job, kids and a mortgage. So, rather than confront these facts, we erase them from history and pretend that they never existed. I remember seeing this Robin Williams film once, set in a near future where people are fitted from birth with chips which record their life experiences – when you die, your relatives can have it edited down into ‘tribute’, that includes only the ‘good’ bits. I can’t help but fear that’s what is going on now: the selective editing of history, eliminating all the troubling bits, in order to render it nice and ‘safe’.

But to get back to my original point, a major factor in the right-wing press’ attempts to change the narrative with regard to the riots is their annoyance and embarrassment at having had to run headlines after the extreme right no show praising the counter protestors for protecting democracy. Whereas, in reality, they really wanted to run headlines along the lines of ‘Hurrah for the blackshirts!’. It’s the quandary they find themselves in: in truth, many of their columnists, not to mention owners, actually sympathise with the aims of these violent mobs and support those politicians who encourage them, yet they also have to pay lip service to the idea that they support democracy and the rule of law and deplore political violence. The evidence for this is clear: just look at the front pages of the Daily Mail and Daily Express for the past fourteen years – non-stop lies and disinformation designed to incite hatred against immigrants, legal or illegal. But will they take responsibility for the tidal wave of hate they’ve whipped up? Of course not – it’s all somebody else’s fault. Most specifically, it’s the left’s fault.

But we shouldn’t expect anything else from the right. After all, we’ve already had the abominable Nigel Farage t trying to claim that he’s absolutely shocked and appalled by the riots and that he can’t be blamed for inciting them. As ever, an utterly cowardly bastard. To be fair, though, he at least stayed in the UK while it all kicked off, unlike ‘Tommy Robinson’, convicted football hooligan and mortgage fraudster, who has been hiding out in Cyprus, on the run from an arrest warrant, stirring the shit on social media. Then there’s the role played by techno jerk Elon Musk – but it’s probably best that I don’t get started on that weasel. Just don’t fall for this new narrative that the right is trying to spin – this is their mess and they need to start taking responsibility for it all.

Doc Sleaze